Red Memory Quotes

“Harsh truths can breed pain and division. But so do half-truths. Healing is impossible without an honest reckoning”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“We think of remembering as retrieval, but in fact it is an act of creation. Our memories grow and change as we do.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“The Cultural Revolution was a national trauma as well as a mass of personal ones: collective traumatization demands collective meaning and a common attempt to work through all the loss and humiliation.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“Allowing people to judge their history acknowledges their right to judge things in general. Permit them to repudiate Mao, and they may repudiate you. Let them write history and they will write the story that they know best: their own.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“We [the West] had chosen not to look, but the Chinese had to pretend they had not seen, a far harder task. In Britain, convenience, implicit bias and power differentials were enough to produce the distortions and erasures. In China, explicit orders and self-censorship did the work.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“Mao sought to remake the world by remaking people: transforming not just power structures but perceptions and inclinations. The arts were both the target of and the medium for such radical shifts.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“To this day, China refers to one of the greatest human-made catastrophes in history ["The Great Leap Forward"] - when it talks about it at all - as the Three Years of Difficulty.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“For a nation, as for the people who comprise it, identity is memory - a partial accumulation of events and the stories we tell about them. But memory, of course, is a work in progress.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“Some people still talk of democracy as if it were pregnancy – there is no such thing as a little bit; it’s either there or not – even while we watch it being chipped away, or dynamited, by concerted, systematic attacks and lurching, instinctive cunning, or eroded by our own indifference or laziness. It is not so much about rules on paper, or conventions established over years, as about our own commitments – our own instincts and practices; what we are willing to accept, and what we are willing to do.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

“The Party adopted unwritten rules to ensure that no one outstayed their welcome, limiting top leaders to two five-year terms and setting a retirement age. Even misdemeanours were handled in line with an unofficial code: members of the politburo might be purged for corruption, but the most senior figures of all – the Politburo Standing Committee – were untouchable, as were their families. You survived and thrived by cultivating patrons and your wider networks. The Party became safer, stabler, calmer and duller.

For years, it worked. China prospered. People who might have eaten meat once a year dropped unctuous pork into their bowls each week. People who might never have left their county journeyed to Shanghai, Bangkok or Paris for shopping and sightseeing. They got their hair permed, wore bright sweaters and Nikes, tried red wine and McDonald’s, took up hobbies. It was attractive enough for foreigners to speak of the ‘Beijing model’. But there was a price. Corruption was endemic. To get your child into a decent school, or pass your driving test, or push through a business deal, or dodge prosecution, took cash: a few thousand yuan to a teacher, tens of millions to a senior leader. In cities such as Chongqing, gangs flourished, sheltered by officials they had bought off. Inequality was soaring. The more the economy grew and mutated, the more static politics seemed.”
― Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution