The decade that cannot be deleted

It would seem impossible to forget or minimize the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, resulted in an estimated 1.6 million to two million deaths and scarred a generation and its descendants. The movement, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership sought to purge Chinese society of all remaining non-Communist elements, upended nearly every hallowed institution and custom. Teachers and schools long held in esteem were denounced. Books were burned and banned, museums ransacked, private art collections destroyed. Intellectuals were tortured.

But in China, a country where information is often suppressed and history is constantly rewritten — witness recent government censorship of Covid research and the obscuring of Hong Kong’s British colonial past in new school textbooks — the memory of the Cultural Revolution risks being forgotten, sanitized and abused, to the detriment of the nation’s future.

The Chinese government has never been particularly eager to preserve the memory of that sordid decade. When I spent six weeks travelling in China in 1994 — a slightly more open time in the country — I encountered few public acknowledgements of the Cultural Revolution. Museum placards and catalogues often simply skipped a decade in their timelines or provided brief references in the passive voice along the lines of “historical events that took place.”

But in her new book, “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution,” the journalist Tania Branigan notes that under Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, efforts to suppress this history have intensified — with troubling implications for the political health of the country at a time when it looms larger than ever on the world stage. “When you’ve had a collective trauma, you really need a collective response,” she told me recently. “I can see why the Communist Party wants to avoid the rancour and bitterness, but when you don’t have that kind of acknowledgment, you can move on — but you can’t really recover.”

Though Xi himself was a victim of the Cultural Revolution — reportedly betrayed by his own mother, exiled into rural poverty — he “is more conscious of the uses and disadvantages of history than any leader before him, bar perhaps Mao himself,” Branigan writes in the book. In 2021, Xi warned the Communist Party against “historical nihilism” — any unflattering portrayal of the party’s past — an existential threat as great, in his estimation, as Western democracy.

High school textbooks in China now reduce the Cultural Revolution to just a few short paragraphs. The only national heritage spot devoted to it was closed to visitors when Branigan, who reported from Beijing for The Guardian from 2008 to 2015, tried to enter. Those who had lived through the Cultural Revolution were often reluctant to speak with her. Some of her excursions to research the movement were monitored, and relevant sites were closed off. “The party and those it rules have conspired in amnesia,” she writes. “A decade has disappeared.”

In the absence of real history, a small nostalgia industry has arisen in China around the Cultural Revolution, which includes themed restaurants, re-enactments, costumes and associated kitsch that bear a distinct resemblance to our own country’s Civil War re-enactments, Confederate statues and wedding-venue Southern plantations.