In the 1990s, something odd happened in Beijing’s burgeoning fine dining scene. Among the chic eateries, restaurants emerged with very simple dishes: meat and vegetables cooked in plain style with few frills. The diners were not there just for the cuisine, but to relive the experience of a period generally considered a disaster: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The plain dishes were meant to invoke a time of restrained, austere living, when people thought of the collective rather than the individual. Only the sky-high prices reminded diners that they were living in a time of Chinese capitalism.
This recasting of the Cultural Revolution as a period deserving of nostalgia began in the 1990s, but it is still in full swing, and it shapes a struggle for ownership of history in today’s China. In Red Memory, Tania Branigan tells a dark, gripping tale of battles between Chinese whose views of the period – violent nightmare or socialist utopia? – still divide family and friends. Branigan was the Guardian’s China correspondent between 2008 and 2015, and during those years interviewed people whose lives were formed, for good or ill, by the Cultural Revolution. This book is not primarily about what happened, but the way that memories of that time shape, and distort, the very different China of today.
