After Tania Branigan moved to Beijing in 2008 as China correspondent for the Guardian, she observed the scars left by the country’s decade-long Cultural Revolution, even though it was rarely talked about. Masterminded by Mao Zedong in 1966, its goal was to rid the country of dissenters, silence his political rivals and distract from his own often disastrous policies. The Maoist ideology led students to denounce their teachers, children to report their parents and neighbours to turn on neighbours. Millions were tortured or banished to rural farms and “re-education” camps, and up to 2 million people were killed.
In Red Memory, which has won the 2023 Cundill History prize, Branigan gathers the stories of those who lived through it; her interviewees include both victims of persecution and the perpetrators who took it on themselves to root out enemies of the state. She meets a lawyer and former teenage Red Guard who reported his mother for privately denouncing Mao, in the process condemning her to death, and the daughter of a Communist party official who joined in the beating of her school vice principal, based on the latter’s assertion that, while fleeing the school in an emergency, students shouldn’t rescue the portraits of Mao from their classrooms.
