Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution

(Hardback, Main)

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'Took my breath away.' BARBARA DEMICK'Haunting.' OLIVER BURKEMAN
'A masterpiece.' JULIA LOVELL

A 13-year-old Red Guard revels in the great adventure, and struggles with her doubts. A silenced composer, facing death, determines to capture the turmoil. An idealistic student becomes the 'corpse master' . . .

More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.

Red Memory explores the stories of those who are driven to confront the era, fearing or yearning its return. What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you What happens to the present when the pastis buried, exploited or redrawn And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over

Author Bio

Tania Branigan is the Guardian's foreign leader writer. Having spent seven years as the Guardian's China correspondent, her writing has also appeared in the Washington Post and the Australian. Red Memory is her first book.@taniabranigan