Spectator Books

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the reporter Tania Branigan, whose experience as a correspondent in China led her to believe that the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was the story behind the story that made sense of modern China. In her new book Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution, she explores how the memory of that bloody decade, and the drive to forget or ignore it, shapes the high politics and daily lives of the Chinese nation. She tells me why official amnesia on the subject is a surprisingly recent development, how 1989's Tiananmen Square protests changed the course of the country, and why so many ordinary Chinese people still, extraordinarily, pine for the days of Mao.