China should be a reporter’s dream: more than one billion people, a rich history, and extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. And yet China-reporting these days resists the profile. Rarely do journalists based there get enough material to write up convincingly full-bodied portraits.
There are obvious obstacles to reporting that humanizes, such as the constant surveillance and the threat of state retaliation taken against foreign and Chinese reporters. The state often intimidates sources for speaking to journalists as well, and a nervous interviewee will not divulge enough detail to create an intimate rendering of a person’s life.
But I found people with weighty stories were still willing to talk in China. The problem was they themselves had yet to sort through and make sense of China’s turbulent past, and they struggled to articulate it in full to an outsider.
These conundrums — the slipperiness of memory and the intractability of talking about trauma — are at the heart of what makes Tania Branigan’s book Red Memory: Living, Remembering, and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution so compelling.
“I wanted to understand not only what the Cultural Revolution had done to China but how it was still shaping it,” Branigan writes, about a decade beginning in 1966 of extreme political violence and, frequently, physical violence against anyone deemed bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. Chairman Mao Zedong instigated the movement to distract from his massive political blunders earlier (including a famine that killed tens of millions) and to depose his political rivals.
The state turned a blind eye as personal grudges were amplified by political campaigns. During its worst, most fevered years, students beat teachers to death, marauding gangs of student Red Guards fought…
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