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Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution

byTania Branigan

Journalist Tania Branigan investigates how China's Cultural Revolution continues to live in private memory despite official pressure toward silence and simplified history. Former Red Guards, victims, witnesses, and families describe violence, betrayal, shame, idealism, and unresolved grief decades after Mao's campaign ended. The book travels through memorials, homes, schools, and public controversies to show how trauma passes between generations. Branigan does not treat memory as fixed evidence; she examines how people revise, suppress, or defend the past and why a society's inability to reckon openly with it shapes present politics.

Publisher

Norton & Company Limited, W. W.

Publication date

2023

Format

Print edition

Pages

—

ISBN

9781324051954