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An indelible exploration of the invisible scar that runs through the heart of Chinese society and the souls of its citizens.
"It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution," Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia.
Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?
PROLOGUE
These two matters are not finished, and their legacy must be handed down to the next generation. How to do this? If not in peace, then in turmoil ...
Mao Zedong, in his last months,
on the Cultural Revolution and forcing the
Kuomintang to retreat to Taiwan
Ice sealed the lakes at the heart of the city and colour had leached from the streets and skies, smog dissolving into cloud: the horizon was just a memory. The ginkgos in the park were ink tracings now. Pet dogs wore thick jumpers this morning, and had scuttered past with a stony resolve I recognised. Though I was indoors again, still swathed in layer on layer of wool, the cold continued to insinuate itself. Soon it was bone-deep. These industrial buildings to the north of Beijing, once used to manufacture armaments, were beloved by artists for their bare concrete walls, lofty ceilings and expanses of glass, all of which contributed to the studio's mortuary chill.
I'd heard that the paintings were large, but that hadn't prepared me. Each was two and a half metres high and, hung on the walls, dwarfed me further, so that I was the one under scrutiny. At this scale, and monochrome, even smiles were somehow sombre. On first sight, the images were almost photographic. These faces had the same fated quality as pictures of missing children, as if they too anticipated what I knew awaited them. Step closer and the clear lines scattered into a flurry of brushstrokes; smeary blotches and swipes of ash and charcoal. The pictures both dominated and eluded. The paint was thick, encrusted on the canvas and stuck here and there with bristles. I stepped back again and recognised some of the faces inspecting me. A celebrated author, behind heavy glasses. A glowering actress. Communist heroes. Others were unfamiliar. Famous, infamous or unknown, all were painted in precisely the same way, at the same immense scale. There was tragedy here, and villainy too, but the painter drew no distinctions: 'Even if they are bad people, they are still people,' he said.
He was an unassuming man, bundled in a fat black vinyl jacket and marmalade-coloured sweater – an outfit a student half his age might have worn, but which he carried off easily. He drew on cotton gloves to hunt through the stacks for the canvas I'd requested, then pulled out a frame and bore it to an easel before untaping the cover. A face emerged, unyielding, though with a trace of a smile: benign? Triumphant? Chairman Mao gazed out, and I gazed upon him. I was used to him in grand dimensions, from the giant portrait that still hung on Tiananmen, the great red gate in the capital's heart. It was startling that the others matched him as I looked around. There were over a hundred pictures in all, but one was missing, Xu Weixin told me: the very first portrait he had drawn, as a child. He had grown up in China's far north-west. He had liked his gentle teacher, Miss Liu, so was shocked and shamed when it all erupted and he learned of his naivety – she was, they warned him, a class enemy: the daughter of a landlord. Outraged at the discovery, he steeled his heart and did the right thing, used his pen, pinned the hideous caricature to the blackboard, and still remembered, as if it were this morning, the moment she walked in and saw it, and how the blood drained from her face. She understood already what it might mean, what might follow. He was too young, but grew up fast. Soon he would see them burning pictures and breaking Buddhas, beating people with sticks and metal bars. He would hear the screams, and listen to the silences that followed.
He didn't dwell upon his tale, though his memories were 'very, very vivid'; he outlined it efficiently. 'You were eight ...' I began. I was only checking the details, but he took it for a different kind of question, about his culpability, or perhaps a reassurance he hadn't wanted.
'Of course, I was responsible. It's only a question of how big or small my responsibility was.'
...
Excerpted from Red Memory by Tania Branigan. Copyright © 2023 by Tania Branigan. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Tania Branigan's Red Memory is an astounding and often harrowing study of Mao's China. A lead writer for The Guardian, Branigan spent seven years in China as a foreign correspondent. Her experiences there led her to embark on a project recording people's memories from the time of the Cultural Revolution, a dark period in the country's history when the nation turned on itself. Despite the devastating impact of the events of this era and their outsized importance in understanding the political and social psychology of China today, memories of the Cultural Revolution remain taboo. Contemporary Communist Party officials have repressed mention of it in museums and history books, reforming the historical narrative into "a gentler, happier tale of historical inevitability under the Party's benign leadership." Many citizens are equally reluctant to relive the era, as acknowledging and processing the trauma they experienced can also mean facing up to their own participation in the horrors that unfolded.
What Branigan has achieved is no mean feat. Through a series of interviews with people who experienced the Cultural Revolution first-hand, she preserves the reality of one of the darkest and yet most elusive chapters in China's recent past. Branigan combines the interviews with scholarly analysis, tying individual memories to the larger movements of history that enfold them. She also reflects on how the figure of Mao continues to cast a shadow over the present-day Communist Party. Overall, it's a fascinating portrayal of a nation at war with its own history. The events of the Cultural Revolution continue to divide Chinese society; fear, nostalgia, and guilt are felt in equal parts. Branigan captures this complex psychology with a narrative voice that is clear, poetic, and urgent.
The interview sections of the book are personal and intimate. Rather than big-picture history, it's history from the ground. Her subjects are varied; some were attracted to the Chinese Communist Party via parental lineage, others by their own youthful idealism. Most were teenagers during the 1960s, when the events of the Cultural Revolution took place. As each recounts their memories, the line between victim and perpetrator shifts and blurs – those initially drawn to the Red Guards by genuine belief in their cause find themselves witnessing beatings, or being beaten themselves. One thing that struck me was the naivety that comes through in many of their early memories of Party membership; there's a sense of individuals swept up in larger forces of history, over which they could have no foresight or control. This is a credit to Branigan's narrative style, which humanizes its subjects without denying their responsibility. The book is flinty-eyed about China's leadership, both old and new. But its attitude towards the people is different – though there's no absolution, it reflects the deep confusion and dystopian horror of what they went through.
Branigan's analysis of current political leadership in China is equally compelling. As she recounts, the present-day Communist Party can't criticize Mao without destabilizing its own mythology. The Road to Rejuvenation exhibition at the National Museum in Beijing presents a grand historical narrative in which the Communist Party liberated China from its imperial past and foreign oppressors, restoring its former glory and turning it into a global superpower. A recognition of the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution would upend this narrative, and so it must be repressed. As Branigan writes, "The truth is what the Party says, it is what the Party chooses to remember." This legacy of censorship continues under the leadership of current President Xi Jinping, who, despite serving seven years of hard labor in exile following his father's purge from the Party during Mao's reign, maintains Mao's portrait in Tiananmen Square.
As Branigan is careful to point out, China is not unique in whitewashing undesirable aspects of its history. Western nations routinely downplay the centuries of imperialism, slavery and exploitation that are the foundations of their modern wealth and security. Yet, as Branigan also poignantly notes, Western forgetfulness comes easier. Citizens of Western nations often have the luxury of being somewhere far away from the source of their most shameful barbarities, which were carried out abroad (though of course there are exceptions). As fewer people witnessed or participated in the atrocities first-hand, they are more easily swept under the rug. The enforced repression of the past in China is in part due to the impossibility of such ignorance. The victims of the Cultural Revolution weren't strangers, but neighbors and family. The perpetrators were too. Everyone was caught up in the violence – there is no way of minimizing it, or of pretending that it was somehow ultimately a force for good (in the way that the British, sometimes, think of the empire in terms of railroads, Shakespeare and cricket). As Branigan writes, "We had chosen not to look, but the Chinese had to pretend they had not seen, a far harder task."
Reviewed by Grace Graham-Taylor
Though Chairman Mao Zedong's legacy is a contentious subject in China, his portrait still presides over the gates of Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heartland of the nation. The enormous oil painting, measuring 6.4 by 5 meters and weighing 1.5 tons, was first put in place in 1949, shortly after Mao's Communist Party wrested power from the Kuomintang. Now, decades later, Mao's portrait maintains its prestigious position, though the painting has changed somewhat since the original was created. There have been eight official renditions of Mao's portrait between the 1940s and the present day. Even when no changes are made, the painting is copied and replaced annually to ensure that the image doesn't degrade. Over the decades, the portrait has taken on a life of its own, becoming less a clear-cut endorsement of Maoist leadership than a totemic national artifact. For the government, it symbolizes the unity and strength of the Communist Party; for some people, it symbolizes China itself.
Mao's likeness has shapeshifted in subtle ways, as the painting has been continuously worked on and replaced. The first artist commissioned to lead the creative team behind Mao's portrait was Dong Xiwen. Xiwen is significant as he was one of the early adopters of a Western style of oil painting in China. Though oil painting had existed in China since the sixteenth century, traditional Chinese art incorporated a range of media, including charcoal and ink. Oil paint, however, was eventually recognized as particularly suitable for creating realistic depictions, which naturally suited Mao's interest in socialist realism as a style of art. The more widespread adoption of a Western style of oil painting also coincided with changing attitudes in China towards "Western knowledge", which had previously been referred to as "yixue" (barbarian learning).
Xiwen's portrait was completed and hung on February 12, 1949. Since then, various other artists have helmed the committee that recreates the portrait, sometimes making small alterations. The painting occasionally changes in emotional tone. In some versions, Mao's expression is stern and patriarchal; in others, warmer and more enigmatic. The most obvious alterations involve the ears. In the eight different renditions that exist so far, the perspective on Mao's pose has shifted slightly. The first portrait is full-frontal, showing both ears (to show that he is "listening to the people"); the second shows Mao from the left, with only one ear; the fourth from the right, with one ear; the fifth again from the left; the sixth with two ears again; the seventh from the left; and the current, final portrait, with both ears again. These metamorphoses give the painting a curious animation, as if the man is still alive. A new copy of the portrait is installed each September, with each previous canvas being painted over in white and held in storage.
Due to its political and cultural significance, Mao's portrait has occasionally been the target of expressive vandalism. During the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which resulted in potentially thousands of deaths and hundreds of imprisonments, the portrait was vandalized in a display of anger towards the corruption and oppressive policies of the Chinese Communist Party, then under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Yu Dongyue, along with Yu Zhijan and Lu Deching, threw black and red paint on the portrait during the violent upheaval. Each served more than a decade in prison for the act. In 2007, a man was arrested for allegedly throwing a burning object at the portrait, though the reasons for this are less clear. In 2010, a man identified by police as "Mr. Chen" was detained for allegedly throwing ink on the portrait. Most recently, in 2014, Sun Bing was sentenced to 14 months in prison, also for throwing ink on the portrait.
Despite its contentious subject matter, Mao's portrait remains an important piece of cultural iconography for China. Varying sentiments towards the image reflect Mao's legacy, which, as reported in Tania Branigan's Red Memory, is remembered by some with nostalgia, others with fear and horror. Professor Wu Hung, who grew up in Beijing and has written a book on Tiananmen Square as a political space, believes that the portrait is "a very complex image." However, it is also, he claims, "the most important painting in China."
A photograph of Mao's portrait hanging in Tiananmen Square, courtesy of Canva
Filed under Music and the Arts
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