A review by nincrony1
Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan

dark informative sad medium-paced

4.5

A stirring and evocative book from Tania Brannigan; I read an extract in The Guardian Long Read and knew I had to read it in full. Partly a piece about the Cultural Revolution and how its fallout birthed modern China, Brannigan also considers memory; how the Cultural Revolution formed a collective traumatic memory for those that lived through it and how memory becomes distorted, faded, passed on and appropriated for other ends. Deftly written in cutting prose, each tale from Brannigan’s interviewees is chilling in many unexpected ways. Not exactly a fun read but it is an incredibly informative one that has helped me to understand the foundations of which 20th and 21st Century China  built itself.