China’s Rewritten Past

For the past 20 years or so, I have taught Chinese politics at the University of Michigan. A familiar scene unfolds most semesters: students with Chinese roots come to my office and talk about their families. These stories often begin with their decision to ask their elders about the Cultural Revolution—to unearth memories of unfathomable violence and upheaval from beneath layers of secrecy, confusion, and sometimes shame. For many, it is the first time their parents have spoken openly about politics, and it does not always go well. Others are emboldened to ask more, to begin connecting family stories to their research and fitting them along the broad arc of modern Chinese history with all its heroes and its villains.

These students, now members of China’s Gen Z, are grappling with horrors that in truth lie much closer than their current lives of relative privilege and stability suggest. In this, they recall the women and men at the center of Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution. Branigan’s subjects, too, are struggling to make sense of a partially known past. As its title signals, the book’s concern is not the Cultural Revolution—China’s decade of political unrest and violence from 1966 to 1976—but the way that period lives on today as trauma, as nostalgia, and as state-sponsored amnesia.

Branigan expertly documents both the power and the frailty of memory in the face of an unrelenting campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to bend and twist people’s recollections into whatever shapes best suit the CCP in the present. Chinese President Xi Jinping is himself a master of the craft, having refashioned his family’s suffering and his own victimization during the Cultural Revolution into an uplifting tale of struggle and resilience. Even Branigan’s insightful analysis never quite overcomes the strictures of that self-serving narrative. Her accounts of individual brutality paint a familiar picture of the Cultural Revolution: that of a society eating itself from the inside. The state and its part in the violence—initially as instigator and later as active perpetrator—rarely enter the frame.

TEN YEARS OF CHAOS

By the time the Chinese leader Mao Zedong set off what he called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the spring of 1966, he was in his early 70s. He had spent the best part of three decades at the helm of the CCP, including 16 years as China’s ruler. His feelings about the party’s power had remained ambivalent throughout. Mao continually struggled to balance his desire for political control—a prerequisite for implementing his communist vision from the top down—with his suspicion that the revolution would be undone by the functionaries and bureaucrats he relied on. He needed the party but didn’t trust it.

Mao’s own failures did nothing to allay his paranoia. The Great Leap Forward, his four-year experiment with agricultural collectivization, had ended in catastrophe. More than 30 million people had perished in the resulting famine. In its aftermath, Mao allowed other senior CCP members to step in and manage the country’s economic recovery, but he quickly grew suspicious of their attempts to revive household farming and rural markets, institutions in which he saw the shoots of capitalist exploitation. The Cultural Revolution would be his revenge on these wayward party leaders.

While sometimes referred to as “the decade of chaos,” the Cultural Revolution is by now understood to have progressed in successive stages that differed widely in the type of chaos they unleashed. It began in the cities, where Mao and a small circle of radical supporters called on students to mobilize and to attack those in positions of authority. The Red Guards, as those who heeded this call were known, were front and center in the first outburst of violence. They set about targeting local party officials, teachers, school and university administrators, and representatives of the pre-communist era, such as industrialists and landlords. What looked like random and chaotic violence was in fact directed from the highest levels of government, and different factions within the Red Guards soon took to denouncing and fighting one another as they vied for the approval of Mao and other political elites.

By the end of 1966, workers were allowed to join the movement, and the violence spread from universities to workplaces across China’s cities. So began the second stage: the collapse of local political order as local party leaders were ousted in favor of revolutionary committees made up of Red Guards and workers. Initial attempts to stabilize the situation by inserting the military into these new structures achieved the exact opposite. Different parts of the People’s Liberation Army sided with different warring factions of Red Guards, with some parts of the country descending into near civil war. By the end of 1968, however, the mayhem had given way to the final, longest, and deadliest stage: a unified military dictatorship led by Mao’s second-in-command, Lin Biao, that forced an end to the infighting, returned factories to production, and sent students, intellectuals, and white-collar workers to the countryside en masse for “reeducation” and hard labor. These purges were accompanied by intense investigations to ferret out “class enemies” or those with foreign connections. Many remember the Cultural Revolution as a time of Red Guard excess—of the people terrorizing the votaries of the party. Few realize that for more than half that decade, the party terrorized the people.

NO SUCH THING AS A SETBACK

The terror had long since subsided when Branigan came to China as a journalist for The Guardian in 2008, but the search for its meaning had not. Branigan’s seven years in the country coincided not only with Xi’s ascent to power but also with his progressive sanitizing of the Cultural Revolution’s legacy. In this, Xi differs starkly from his predecessors, especially from Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s de facto successor and the country’s ruler from the late 1970s to 1997. It was Deng who in 1981 presided over the CCP’s first official assessment of the Cultural Revolution. Its verdict at the time was harsh and unequivocal. The Cultural Revolution had brought about “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” It had set China back while Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—authoritarian like China but not communist—sprang ahead. In condemning Maoist radicalism, the party granted Deng the space to experiment with market reforms and loosen social controls.

Like Deng, Xi suffered personally during the Cultural Revolution: his father, a veteran party leader, fell from power and was publicly humiliated and imprisoned; his half sister died in what is believed to have been a suicide. As a teenager, Xi was subject to reprisals by the Red Guards; eventually, he was sent to the countryside for six years of hard labor. Unlike Deng, however, Xi has turned his time in Shaanxi Province into a cheerful founding myth: the hardscrabble origins of a tough, resilient servant to party and people. In interviews before he came to power, Xi spoke fondly of life in the mountain village of Liangjiahe, where he slept in a spartan cave dwelling. The hardship he suffered was edifying, an education in manhood that Xi wishes for today’s youth. In recent speeches, he has worried that younger generations are too soft, full of effeminate “sissy boys” who prefer “lying flat” to hard work. Gone is the party’s frank criticism of Maoist excesses. A lengthy resolution marking the CCP’s 100th anniversary in 2021 offers only a brief and watered-down summary of the late Mao era, finding, in essence, that mistakes were made.

When given the chance to speak freely, not all Chinese share Xi’s nostalgia. Red Memory aptly captures another moment of relative candor and penance, starting just before Xi’s rise to power and extending into the early years of his rule. After decades of silence, elderly citizens who as students had beaten their teachers to death and warred against one another spoke out. Among them was Song Binbin, who had taken part in one of the Red Guards’ first murders in 1966. Song rose to national fame not long after, when a photographer captured her tying a Red Guard armband around Mao’s sleeve at an immense rally in Tiananmen Square. Her public apology in 2014 for her involvement in the murder of one of her teachers was one of the most high-profile expressions of contrition by a former Red Guard. Coming just two years ahead of the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution, Song’s public atonement, and that of others like her, raised hopes of a greater reckoning with those years of strife and carnage—and even the prospect of a kind of national catharsis.

But those hopes were short-lived. The case of Yu Xiangzhen, a former classmate of Song’s whose life Branigan retraces, is instructive. In retirement, Yu attempts to recover and make sense of herself as a young witness to horrific violence by writing a blog. In the blog’s early years, Yu’s online writings are censored only occasionally. By the time she leaves China in 2016, authorities have shut down the site altogether.

The fate of Yu’s blog is emblematic of the narrowing of civic space under Xi. Upon taking office in 2012, Xi presided over crackdowns on lawyers, labor activists, left-wing students demanding better protection for workers, and feminists protesting domestic violence. In a speech one year into his rule, Xi blamed the collapse of the Soviet Union on “historical nihilism”—its leaders’ tendency to repudiate parts of Soviet history, which in the end undermined their own legitimacy. The CCP would not make that mistake. The 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution came and went without much fanfare. To the extent the party allowed itself to remember, it would elide the worst transgressions and instead generate “positive energy.” There was “no such thing as a setback,” Branigan writes of the muted anniversary. “In absorbing and interpreting the calamity, the Party had actually propelled the nation along the path to its future; history was always moving forward. Even this terse and misleading account was itself pushing China towards its destiny.”

Try as it may, the party cannot wipe away the memories of those who lived through the Cultural Revolution and into the reform period. Branigan’s subjects eke out their own ways of understanding, remembering, and processing. In the southwestern city of Chongqing, they gather to sing “red songs” from the 1950s and 1960s that express their nostalgia for a bygone era without dramatic socioeconomic inequality. Others face the past by writing or through psychoanalysis. Literature on the Cultural Revolution is a saturated market, but only rarely does it convey as Branigan does the continuing hold of that decade on a people otherwise transformed by economic development, technological progress, and newfound social and physical mobility.

Branigan’s profiles are at their most vivid when plumbing the depths of personal and lethal betrayal. Sixteen-year-old Zhang Hongbing denounced his own mother as a counterrevolutionary, which led to her execution. Students at an elite Beijing high school beat a teacher to a pulp and left her to die in the street. The brutality unleashed by mere children never ceases to leave one aghast. No less searing is Branigan’s dissection of their sometimes flawed attempts at personal absolution. More than 40 years after he sent his mother to her death, Zhang, now in his 50s, finds enough blame to go around. “My mother, father and I were all devoured by the Cultural Revolution,” he tells Branigan. “Society should take society’s responsibility; families should take the family’s responsibility; people should take their own responsibility. In particular, the responsibility also includes my mother’s, because she hadn’t told us that as a person you should have independent thinking. She should take responsibility too.” Branigan wryly notes in conclusion that although “exonerated from the charges of counter-revolutionary thinking,” Zhang’s mother “was now being held to account for the leftist excesses that killed her by the son who had denounced her.”

BLAME GAME

Something is lost in these accounts of personal cruelty, chilling though they may be. It is notable that Zhang blames his mother for her own execution but never so much as mentions the CCP. “Society” and “people” are the ones who visited these horrible acts on one another. Although historical narratives such as Branigan’s continue to serve up lurid tales of intimate betrayal and collective violence, much of the recent academic research on the Cultural Revolution has set its sights elsewhere. Scholars such as Andrew Walder, Dong Guoqiang, and James Chu have pointed instead to the pivotal role of political elites who skillfully manipulated students and workers such that no one felt safe enough to give anybody else the benefit of the doubt. Piecing together personal accounts, local archives, and statistical data, they find that even in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, party elites manipulated student leaders and actively directed the violence. They reveal, for instance, that Mao’s wife and other stewards of the upheaval dispatched hundreds of state media reporters to university campuses to act as monitors and agitators, keeping tabs on the Red Guards while feeding them information about potential targets for condemnation and public humiliation. Research by the Sinologists Michael Schoenhals and Roderick MacFarquhar details how central leadership also instigated the brutal investigations of lower party officials and then delegated those investigations to the revolutionary forces on the ground.

It is now known that the most significant bloodletting happened not when students and workers were at each other’s throats but in later years, when the party declared martial law and instituted its own reign of terror. Tens of millions suffered reprisals, and more than half of the Cultural Revolution’s one million to 1.5 million deaths occurred during this latter period. For what it is worth, as Walder has pointed out, even Mao’s extensive purges were far less deadly than those under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union or under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The huge outpouring of memories, and at times even nostalgia, captured in Branigan’s book reflects that fact. People lived to remember.

Emphasizing the party’s culpability is hard to do in narrative accounts of the Cultural Revolution under normal circumstances, but it is harder than ever in the Xi era, when those brave enough to talk to a foreign journalist about this painful past risk being tarred as “historical nihilists” or worse. But Xi’s vision of himself and of his nation as destined for greatness makes this all but inevitable, offering neither the space nor the means to make sense of self-inflicted catastrophe. His coming of age during the Cultural Revolution, although rooted in the tragedy of his father’s downfall, made him into the man he is today. That path now serves as both a lesson and an inspiration, sometimes quite literally: with youth unemployment at almost 20 percent, one of the government’s solutions has been to send young men from the cities to the countryside, where they can work the fields as their leader once did.

It is a tragedy unto itself that the CCP’s selective history blames the people while largely exonerating the party. The message, of course, is also one for the present: Chinese people are so unruly that they can never rule themselves.