Compelling ... The Cultural Revolution is a subject that is doubly hard to humanize: Branigan attempts to profile people shaped by a still-sensitive political disaster, and one that occurred more than four decades ago, with memories that have inevitably warped with time and self-censorship. The people she decides to profile are now well into their 60s and 70s — and some are recalcitrant subjects, preferring to forget the past rather than recount it ... Some of the profiles in the book thus feel a little thin, the key players in certain events either unwilling to share more and admit their culpability or suspiciously made unavailable at the last moment, almost certainly under state coercion. One gets the sense reading Red Memory that Branigan is racing against time as much of the public record is erased or roped off ... An exercise in attempting the impossible, of trying to reconstruct what it was like to live through and then live with one of the most brutal periods of modern Chinese history. Branigan comes closer to doing so than anyone else has in the English language.
The stories the author relates are not, strictly speaking, secrets—most of the people Ms. Branigan interviews are already looking for listeners; they want to be heard, to perform, to share, to connect—and she gives them the opportunity to do that for a foreign audience. This is a book about their search for meaning, even when the search comes up short ... Ms. Branigan is a sympathetic narrator, but not a naive one ... Evocative.
Red Memory creates an incisive exploration of the interplay between memory and politics, personal truth and political imperatives by detailing stories from victims and perpetrators — some willing, others coerced. Their narratives are told with sensitivity, interspersed with eloquent ruminations on memory and political erasure ... Stunning, profound and gorgeously written, "Red Memory" is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding China today. It's also a warning about fragility — cultural, political and personal — as well as a call to those of us in the West to look within.
A narrative account of the period that also doubles as a meditation on how suppressed memories and trauma can haunt a society that has never had a proper reckoning with the horrors of its past ... Branigan documents all this with her unsentimental, unforgiving narrative ... This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking book, and I would have had no hesitation in recommending it were it not for a series of gratuitous comparisons that made me doubt whether Branigan understood her subject at all ... Did she make these parochial comparisons because she wanted to write a book that would be compelling for people who wouldn’t normally pick up books on China? Or was it partly the modern writer’s obsessive quest for that elusive substance, 'contemporary relevance'? On the outskirts of Beijing, whole families were buried alive by their neighbours. In Guanxi, officials ate the barbecued flesh of class enemies they had killed. You cannot compare the Cultural Revolution to the Tory government or the Brexit campaign or Trump with any decency, you really can’t.
At the heart of Branigan’s book is a series of remarkable interviews which she says would not be possible to conduct under the more restrictive environment for reporters in Xi Jinping’s China today ... Branigan tells her subjects’ stories well and she is an excellent listener, so that they speak frankly about how they felt then and now as well as describing what they experienced.
A dark, gripping tale ... Branigan ends with an excellent analysis of how contemporary Chinese politicians seek to mimic the Cultural Revolution while following very different paths ... Wang’s account of what happened during one of China’s darkest moments is a powerful companion to Branigan’s compelling account of why it still haunts the very different country of today.
Branigan’s book is investigative journalism at its best, its hard-won access eliciting deep insight. The result is a survey of China’s invisible scars that makes essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand the nation today.
Branigan... writes in an elegiac, humane, and sympathetic tone ... Branigan’s book is mostly reportage but also meditation. She wants to know what it all means, not just for the political future of China but also for understanding human nature and the place of memory in society.
Branigan doesn’t make clear whether she speaks any of the several Chinese languages or has instead relied on interpreters, but her book displays the virtues of first-hand experience: it’s built on the testimony of a wide range of ordinary citizens and a determination to see beyond the clichés and prejudices that hobble unmodulated ideological positions. She is as interested in the psychology of perpetrators as she is in that of the victims ... It’s hard to come away from Red Memory without a feeling that China is doomed to more of the same.
Compelling ... Her deep insight into a nation’s painted-over trauma explains how mass hysteria, rampant betrayal, and even cannibalism have shattered a society for generations afterwards. This communal trauma is where the simultaneous aggression and insecurity that shape Chinese policy come from; it’s the malaise driving this powerful nation. Particularly valuable is the author’s perception of the absence of clearly demarcated good and evil ... [A] priceless work of oral history.
Visceral ... Drawing on fascinating and often wrenching interviews with victims and perpetrators, Branigan reveals the speed with which 'beatings and deaths became commonplace' and makes a persuasive case that the period is an unresolved national trauma lying just beneath the surface of modern China. This is essential reading for China watchers.
