Red Memory. Dread Trauma

On a recent history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Tania Branigan, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (2023) is an account of the trauma of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and how it is remembered by people and state in China today.

Trauma is a place where memory, history and forgetting mingle uncomfortably.

Our responses to the experience of trauma responds to different needs.

Whether we respond by remembering, by forgetting, or by telling the fact-laden fables we know as history, is moment by moment uncertain as fragmentary images and torrential emotions pass through our minds. Am I back there again? Please, let me forget. Who hurt me so? Speak, Memory. Can I escape and live to tell my tale of overcoming the monster. Time to pen some history.

Negotiating these erratic surges of emotion and response can consume a life time, and overwhelm a life’s meaning. They are not easily negotiated. Finding peace in a therapeutic relationship may take years, and still fail. Years of drinking or drug misuse or traps of the mind’s making may quieten the demons, and still fail. Outward success may smother the pain in sunshine, and still fail. And for some people and for some traumas, no compromise is ever found. There are connections between suicide and complex trauma.

I have experienced the devil’s dance of trauma in my life and in my work. From 2013 to 2015, I worked on issues related to the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Childhood Sexual Abuse. Its great success was to provide a public language and an emotional regime for many Australians who had been victims of childhood sexual abuse to find a new settlement between memory, history and forgetting. I wrote about how the Royal Commission transfigured flashbacks into testimony in chapter five of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat.

If individuals find it difficult to find peace between their warring impulses to remember, and forget and narrate their trauma, how much harder is it for China, a society of 1.4 billion people and a civilization of millennia. We have known since the foundation of social psychology that crowds can respond unpredictably and in blood-curdling ways to the witness of trauma.. Whole nations have struggled with more or less success processing their stories and images of war guilt, defeat in war, and complicity in the horrors of war. China is more than a nation; it is a civilization; and the Chinese Cultural Revolution was in part a war of Red Utopias against that cultural legacy. When you tour the Summer Palace in Beijing today, you can see the statues and artworks defaced by both the Red Guards in the 1960s and the British in a looting phase in the 1850s.

China is not the only nation, people or civilization to experience such trauma, and to respond with memory, history and forgetting in complex, varied ways. America had its Civil War that still today they fight over the memory. Russia had the dual traumas of revolutionary socialism from 1917 and oligarchical capitalism in the 1990s. The traumas of both periods define the Russia soul more today than a Tolstoyan peasant dream. The Jewish people and civilization suffered the Holocaust or Shoah. How that great trauma was witnessed, resisted and represented is the subject of Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (1989). These essays by the late, great Australian, indeed Melbourne, writer and scholar won numerous awards, including being named a New York Times, Best Book of the Year. To my mind, Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust is among the best meditations of collective remembrance of great trauma. Clifford Geertz, the great anthropologist, thought so too.

Tania Branigan, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (2023) has also won praise and was awarded the Cundill History Prize. But though it works similar themes, it does so with less insight, less scholarship and less empathy. Branigan’s book is simply not in the same league despite the praise by fellow journalists of this “haunting” masterpiece.

Red Memory sets out in vignettes the history, experiences and impaired memories of the Chinese cultural revolution. In her years as a British journalist in China, Branigan interviewed a group of Chinese people about their memories of the Chinese cultural revolution, and how those memories interact with the public history told by official institutions and the desire of many Chinese to forgive and to forget. Branigan suspects forgetting, and is unwilling to forgive. She sheets the blame onto the Chinese Communist Party, and presents Xi Jinping as a new reincarnation of the Red Terror. At times the book does not get beyond the standards of inquiry into China that we have come to expect from the Murdoch press.

There are moments of poignancy and passages of great beauty. At times the book seems to want to break through to a deeper humanistic inquiry “about the worst that can happen and how we face it” (Branigan, p. 20). The haunting worst that Branigan most skilfully describes is how intimates, friends and family members betrayed each other in the wild denunciations and affirmations of the Chinese cultural revolution.

The cultural revolution showed that one thing was more terrifying than a stranger: someone close to you. To know a person was no longer the kernel of trust but of suspicion (Branigan, p. 230)

Red Memory provides sometimes intimate portraits of a dozen or so Chinese people Branigan met in her years reporting for the Guardian. We see into their apartments. We hear their often conflicted feelings about whether to remember or whether to forget. We glimpse fragments of a cruel record of history in photographs, denunciations and murders. But do we ever really hear their voices.

Branigan writes in the form she knows best. Red Memory is a collection of feature stories presenting well-known tropes and sometimes unfamiliar details about the lives of these individuals. In some ways this manner of writing my be the book’s strength. Feature journalism is a well-loved style among some, although I wonder if it is fading. It can bring this extraordinary story of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to a broad public in an engaging way in its simple humanity, ordinary virtues and ordinary vices.

But I found the fault of the feature writer also made its way into Branigan’s book. The feature writer is the story. She writes herself into the story far too much, and in a way that crowds out the Chinese voices or any real inquiry into the history. We read not the subtleties of what the victims of this great trauma feel today, but how Branigan responds to them. She is not happy about how some of them want to let go of these events from 60 years ago. She records honestly the resistance she encounters. Some interviewees say she is trading in stereotypes, and that she neither knows nor understands their history. The feature writer tags these characters as true party hard-liners.

Her book is weak on history, and most of its political history of the Cultural Revolution and China every since is pretty much the lines we read in the Murdoch press every weekend, as the Atlantic drums of war beat louder about its strategic competitor in the Western Pacific. Her sources are slight and Anglophone. There are better books on the Cultural Revolution, and some of the better ones are sparsely used by Branigan.

On the Chinese cultural revolution I would personally recommend Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976 that does a far better job of presenting the complex voices of Chinese trauma than Red Memory. I also discovered Yang Jisheng, The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (2016; trans. 2021), which does so from a Chinese perspective critical of the Chinese state; but I am yet to make my way through it.

On the broader question of how we process a complex collective trauma in memory, history and forgetting I would recommend both Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, and the great French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (some book trivia, French President Emmanuel Macron helped to research and to edit this book).

I would encourage readers to learn about this great trauma and complex decade of events, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and what it tells us not just about the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping (who Branigan refers to every 10 pages or so in Red Memory), but about human responses to trauma through history.

One way to do so is to watch the great film, Farewell My Concubine, directed by Chen Kaige. Oddly, although Branigan refers to Chen Kaige as a director who emerged in the ‘liberal’ cultural times of the 80s and 90s, she never once refers to this masterpiece in her book. I learned more from Farewell My Concubine than from Red Memory.

Some Final Notes

Quickly on some final notes, I hope you enjoyed the next iteration of my newsletter.

Thank you to readers who liked, commented or shared my last post on “Letting Go of Politics.” I would like to reassure readers that I remain engaged with the world. Though I will not be writing on politics for a while, I will remain intellectually engaged with our changing world. However, I want to write about the deeper influences on our lives, rather than the spectacle of politics or speculation about geopolitical events which many other writers and channels do well (and of course legacy media does very poorly). I hope this newsletter is a model of how that disengagement can in practice be a reengagement. The stories we tell ourselves about China, after all, could bring us to war, or deliver us to a symphony of civilizations.

Having asked readers their preferences on timing, I will be publishing a short essay or commentary every Saturday morning.

I will publish my World History View fortnightly on Wednesday, and a more ‘behind-the-scenes’ or ‘work-in-progress’ video message on alternate weeks. There may be a couple of hiccups settling that routine in because of the Australian summer holidays.

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Life of the Mind Tip: Keep a daybook

I keep various journals and notebooks, and constantly experiment with different ways of recording fragments of thoughts, notes on reading, reflections and passing feelings. I no longer use fixed format diaries because I like this way of trying out different ways to become the writer I am.