History is more important to Xi Jinping than to any leader since Mao. So argues the Guardian’s Tania Branigan, author of an acclaimed new book Red Memory. She tells Michael Safi that there’s one era of China’s history that looms over Xi more than any other: the Cultural Revolution.
It’s a period that transformed Xi’s own life: a decade of unbelievable turmoil in China. Hierarchies that held the country together were turned on their heads. At the direction of Mao Zedong, children turned on their parents, husbands denounced their wives. More than 2 million people died. Tens of millions of lives were torn apart.
Branigan argues that understanding China without coming to grips with the Cultural Revolution is like trying to understand Britain without its empire, or the US without its civil war. And as she explains, though it happened decades ago, the fight for how the Cultural Revolution is remembered is still playing out in China today.
Photograph: Zhang Peng/LightRocket/Getty Images
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