China's Cultural Revolution: shockwaves still felt, yet it's largely unknown
CBC Radio | Posted: June 4, 2024 8:32 PM | Last Updated: June 4
'It's impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,' says Tania Branigan
Before 1989, there was 1966
Tiananmen Square is best remembered today for the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations that were eventually crushed by the government.
But in 1966, Tiananmen Square was ground zero for an event that was the ideological negative of 1989: it was a pro-government gathering, which marked the start of the Cultural Revolution. The movement lasted a decade, claiming the lives of up to two million people, and derailing the lives of up to 36 million more.
"It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution," said Tania Branigan, whose book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution won the 2023 Cundill History Prize.
"It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution," said Tania Branigan, whose book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution won the 2023 Cundill History Prize.
Yet given the Communist Party's internal intrigues, and the shifting alliances as well as the conflicting motives within it, Tania Branigan also believes that the Cultural Revolution is in many ways incomprehensible.
"It takes in everybody," she told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed. "It goes right across the country geographically. It goes from Beijing's top leaders — both of Mao's heirs apparent would die within this decade… also people in remote provinces, farmers, infants even — who were killed simply because they were part of a landlord family," said Branigan.
Origin story of Red Memory
Branigan went to China in 2008. It was then that her interest in the Cultural Revolution began.
"I went for lunch one day with an analyst I knew… he started telling me about a trip that he'd made a few years before to a village where his wife's father had been held by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. And they had gone looking for his body."
Local farmers remembered the father-in-law, but couldn't understand why anyone would go looking for his remains, because there were so many buried bodies that it was impossible to identify any one of them.
"And so that was the moment when I really realized how present it was, the fact that the Cultural Revolution wasn't in fact history, but something that people were living with."
Why a Cultural Revolution?
Mao wanted to force China into what he believed would be its political utopia. That was the justification for what he called the Great Leap Forward.
It began in 1958 and ended four years later, and as Branigan says, "was this extraordinarily hubristic attempt to overhaul the economy, to industrialize China, to collectivize agriculture… but that was driven through with such zealotry and went so disastrously wrong that it resulted in the deaths of probably 40 million people in the Great Famine, maybe more."
The failure of the Great Leap Forward threatened Mao's authority. He blamed the population, believing that people weren't Communist enough.
"He wanted to transform China, not only in its political or economic structures, but I think he believed that to do that, you also had to reform people's souls," Branigan said.
And to reform the soul of the nation, Mao turned to younger people, who formed the core of the Red Guards, often called the shock troops of the Cultural Revolution.
Mao viewed the family unit with suspicion, as counter-revolutionary, so disrupting the structures of family, traditionally the backbone of Chinese society, was merely the sociological means to his ideological ends.
The political and personal were identical
Political purity was absolutely paramount, but arbitrarily judged, at times weaponized cynically to settle old scores; while at others, accusations of class betrayal were levelled just for amusement. Neighbours turned on neighbours. Employees on bosses. Students on teachers. In fact, the first victim of the Cultural Revolution was a teacher, beaten to death publicly by girls at her school.
Branigan recounts a heartbreaking conversation she had with one man, Zhang Hongbing, who lost his mother to the Cultural Revolution. But it was Zhang himself who was responsible for her death.
As he recounted to Branigan, his mother had criticized Chairman Mao.
Zhang warned her to stop, but she persisted. He then threatened to kill her.
"I felt it wasn't my mother — it wasn't a person. She suddenly became a monster." He and his father reported her to the authorities. Two weeks later, she was executed.
"And so he has spent the following decades carrying that guilt and trying to come to terms with it," said Branigan.
Impact on Xi Jinping
As Tania Branigan asserts, China's present leader [Xi Jinping] "had a very hard Cultural Revolution." His father had fallen out of favour with Mao, and Red Guards ordered his mother to publicly denounce him.
"At one stage, the family was under such pressure that his half sister would later kill herself," she said.
Then came Mao's directive to have young, urban people go to the countryside and work on farms and rural communities. Seventeen million left home, including Xi.
"They went to labour in these really brutal circumstances," Branigan explained. "It was not just going hundreds of miles away from their families at a very young age, but also really going back a century. So they were going to places without electricity or running water. They were struggling to scrape a living… And for many, it was an incredible struggle for years on end, not knowing if they'd ever return home."
Like Mao, Xi knows the value of recasting of national history to suit present political needs.
"And what's fascinating," Branigan elaborates, "is that this has now become the one part of the Cultural Revolution that's not just accepted as a matter of discussion in China, but is even celebrated in official propaganda."
Yet it's celebrated in a highly selective way, with little meaningful discussion of the social or historical context of the Cultural Revolution itself.
"It's become repackaged as the sort of creation myth, which is the story of how he [Xi] found his way to manhood, how he found his purpose in life, the fact he was tough, resilient, that he understands how ordinary people live at the bottom of society," said Branigan.
Unknowability
Tania Branigan doesn't try to resolve the paradox that lies at the heart of Red Memory: that the Cultural Revolution is both central to understanding China, yet impossible to comprehend fully. Instead, she looks towards the future, and to within China itself.
"I hope we can get closer [to a fuller understanding]. It's really important to say that there have been extraordinary Chinese scholars working on this… who have in some cases published their work outside China. In other cases, I think sort of publishing underground, or perhaps even sitting on it — in the hopes that one day, it will come to light."
Listen to the full conversation with Nahlah Ayed by downloading the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.
*This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.