How do memories of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution shape modern China? And why does Xi Jinping seek to control the ways people remember? Tania Branigan—a Guardian leader writer and author of Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution—and Isabel Hilton, who is a contributing editor at Prospect and founder of China Dialogue, join Ellen Halliday to discuss China's relationship with its own history.
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Ellen Halliday: Hello and welcome back to the Prospect Podcast where we speak to the brightest minds and talk about the ideas that matter in politics, arts, and society.
Today we’re talking about China and specifically China’s relationship with its own history. A history that, as we will learn, has been rewritten several times by those in power, often to serve the ends of the Chinese Communist Party. To discuss this, I’m joined by Tania Branigan, a Guardian leader writer and author whose excellent book Red Memory: Living, Remembering, and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution is out now, and Isabel Hilton, who is a contributing editor here at Prospect, but more importantly, founder of China Dialogue and a writer and broadcaster closely attuned to modern day China. So let’s start by looking back. Tania, your book, which Isabel has covered in the current issue of Prospect, focuses on a very specific moment in China’s history: the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. I think many people have some idea of the events of those years, but can you briefly explain why that moment was so important in China’s history and why you made it the focus of your book?
Tania Branigan: It’s really the pivotal moment in modern China, the point at which it moves away from Maoism and towards this much more individualistic and market-focused society. So it really is the turning point. It’s also just a vast trauma and clearly, while China had been through many of those over the last century or so, it’s such a potent one, one which has shaped its leaders and its citizens, and one which in many ways seemed to me to be everywhere and yet at the same time nowhere. Because it’s really not spoken of very much through both official repression and also through personal trauma.
So it’s this very strange moment and because it’s universal, in a way that some of the other traumas perhaps were not, because it touches every family in the land and it stretches from the most powerful political leaders right down to families in the countryside -infants even in some cases being killed- this political movement becomes something that really transforms the whole of Chinese society and changes the way that people think about their personal relationships, tears away at that trust people have as husbands turn on wives and colleagues and friends turn upon each other. And for all those reasons, I think it’s incredibly potent and it really is impossible to understand China today without understanding it.
Halliday: Isabel, is that a sentiment that matches with your experience?
Isabel Hilton: I think they’re hugely important. When I first went to China as a student, the Cultural Revolution was still on and the violent phase was over but the people who had led the Cultural Revolution, the gang of four, so Jiang Qing -Mao’s wife- and three political colleagues, were very much in charge of the Party, and the Party had been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt as a sort of tool of Mao Zedong.
So there were Cultural Revolution committees in charge of tertiary education, which was just beginning to open up again. All universities had been closed, there was a suspension of pretty much everything in that sector. It was just beginning to open up again but under new management, as it were.
And the ideology of the Cultural Revolution, which by then was at the very kind of narrow, authoritarian vision which affected culture, it affected speech, it affected what you could write in your university essays, for example. It affected your perspective on pretty much everything. That was very, very strong then. And it wasn’t until Mao died that the Party then had to think about what this period had meant. And when Deng Xiaoping, who was one of the chief victims, if you like, he was attacked in the Cultural Revolution by Mao as one of the people in the Party bent on taking the “capitalist road” in that felicitous expression.
It turned out, actually, a fair point. He did want to take the capitalist road but Mao didn’t. But when he came back, there was an extraordinary moment, a decade really, of suppressed ideas all breaking surface. But the Party itself had to grapple with the meaning of this without dethroning Mao and that remains a call to what Tania’s writing about, which is the manipulation of history, the suppression of history at an individual and a collective level. And what happens then? What’s the relationship of the individual to the state, to the Party, to the individual’s own past?
Halliday: In your essay in Prospect, you mentioned something that you call scar literature. You describe as sort of unhappy reminiscing-
Hilton: Just after the Cultural Revolution. It was a kind of collective group therapy where people did have this period of writing about ‘how I suffered in the Cultural Revolution’.What you didn’t get was ‘how guilty I was in the Cultural Revolution’, which again comes out in Tania’s book because this involved everybody. People were victims, yes, but they were also perpetrators. And the perpetrators carry their own trauma and this breakdown of trust. So yes, there was a period of scar literature.
There was also a period of very open debate around Democracy Wall in Beijing, in the late seventies, that got closed down eventually by Deng Xiaoping. But it was a kind of reflowering of the ‘Big-character poster’, which was one of the big features of the Cultural Revolution, so people would paste these enormous essays up on walls and crowds would gather, they would debate them.
And on Democracy Wall, that was one of the very interesting moments when people looked back at what had happened and tried to look forward to a different future.
Halliday: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And I’d love to know, Tania, from you about the kind of sources that you drew on for your book. So, you’re talking to people who are now middle-aged but were young at the time and discussing their memories of this period. But there’s also these kinds of physical monuments to the time, whether it’s any of these walls – I don’t know if any of them are still there, I imagine not – or the kind of institutional memories and museums and monuments and that kind of thing. Could you tell us a little bit more about the sources that you drew on to discuss memories of this time?
Branigan: There are very few physical traces, precisely because the authorities really don’t want to dwell on this time. And in fact, even though Deng Xiaoping insisted that it was addressed -there was an official verdict which called it a catastrophe- even at the point that he was asking for that document to be drafted, he stressed that it was all about looking forward, uniting people, and looking to the future.
In other words, it wasn’t about sitting around saying, ‘this terrible thing’s happened and we’ve got to remember it so it doesn’t happen again’. It was serving a function of allowing the Party to move on, to retain Mao, as Isabel has said, and to go in a different direction, clearly, towards the market, but at the same time, politically, for the Party to remain very clearly in charge.
So the Party has always policed very carefully what can be remembered, and that’s particularly the case with the Cultural Revolution. It’s become increasingly the case under Xi Jinping. He has talked about historical nihilism and very soon, actually, after taking power, he really portrayed that as being an existential threat to the Party on a par with things like Western constitutional democracy. There’s now also a hotline, for example, for people to call up and denounce examples of historical nihilism, should they wish to.
So, it has been difficult to remember the Cultural Revolution and it’s become much more so. The Cultural Revolution Museum that I visit in the book, initially, had a bit more leeway and eventually as it became popular, it was sort of erased from Chinese media and then they had to take their signposts down, and then most recently it was basically shut down.
Where the Cultural Revolution has lived has been through the remarkable research done by many Chinese scholars, both within and without the country, increasingly outside, and certainly being published outside as time has gone on, and the subject has become more sensitive in many ways.
And also I think it’s there often in ways that people can’t quite define. And this was one of the things that I found so extraordinary and so challenging that it’s there just below the surface and that’s really why I wrote this book because it kept coming up every time I did a topic. If you wanted to understand why a tycoon had become an entrepreneur, it really kind of went back to the Cultural Revolution and this feeling that individual struggle was the only way to survive and prosper and that you shouldn’t think about political values anymore, because that was essentially meaningless. Or you spoke to a family and those fractured family relationships that were really rooted in their experiences of the Cultural Revolution were there very vividly.
So I think quite often as well in China, it’s there in ways that people can’t quite define or put their finger on and may only address obliquely. But it’s very deeply written into society, and people’s experience, and people’s psychology.
Halliday: I mean, as we’ve said, this is still recent history. The people who experience this are still middle-aged members of society. Do you think that the presence of that memory will endure in decades to come? Or, does that die with the people who experienced it firsthand?
Branigan: I don’t think we know yet, actually. I think what’s striking is that so many people who lived through that time have wanted to leave a testament. First of all, in the scar literature, as Isabel says. And then in the research and the extraordinary histories that have been written by people, like [inaudible] for example. And then in the people who wanted in the period where I was researching this book- to talk about what had happened, to apologise, to take responsibility for their roles in some cases. And I think that was partly a function of age, of reaching the age of their victims, of looking at their children and grandchildren, and a sense that this needed to be recorded.
And then also I think more recently, we’ve seen people becoming concerned that the echoes of the Cultural Revolution are growing louder in some ways. Not that we are seeing a repetition, but that we can certainly see growing parallels between China today and those Cultural Revolution instincts. And that’s something that came less from my interviewees but certainly from other people within Chinese society, from scholars, and even in the most recent covid zero protests, where we had people holding up signs saying, “reform not the Cultural Revolution”.
Halliday: Isabel, what are your thoughts on the parallels that we see today, as Tania mentioned?
Hilton: Well, as Tania explained, Xi Jinping’s politics are very different from Deng Xiaoping’s politics. And we’ve seen a re-politicisation of many aspects of Chinese society, including education, including culture, including bureaucracy, if you like, where people are once again having to attend political meetings which essentially sing the praise of the leader.
You know, we’ve got the leaders’ thought embedded in the constitution. Speeches have to refer to the leader, private entrepreneurs- there was an interesting piece in the Economist, some time back, which was counting the number of references to the great leader Xi Jinping, which were made by private entrepreneurs. And they’d gone up by several hundred percent and people just, you know, in China, people can smell the wind. They know what’s required of them when there is a moment of- or a passage of high ideology and they conform, and there’s a level of performative politics in China that you learn to recognise.
I was very, very familiar with it from my first time around, and it went away as people could be themselves. They had much more personal liberty. Politics was in retreat. Essentially, Deng Xiaoping said to people: if you stay out of politics, you can just do business, get rich, all that kind of thing, life will get better.
That has really gone into reverse. Politics is back in a major way. And the other, I think, important thing to note from the history perspective, is that I think it was pretty much the practice that people regarded the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China, which included, you know, the Anti-Rightist movement, it included the Hundred Flowers movement, it included the Great Leap Forward with tens of millions of deaths of from starvation, and the Cultural Revolution, as not the greatest time in Chinese history. And from the death of Mao, there was a recognition that there began China’s kind of moment of recovery, of rising to greatness, claiming its role in the world and so on.
What Xi Jinping has done is to say, ‘these are not separate periods. These are seamless periods in which the Party was always right’ and you think, ‘okay this is problematic’. If the Party can’t acknowledge mistakes, even a mistake as egregious as the Cultural Revolution, very qualified acknowledgement, [with] Mao, who was the instigator of it, not really suffering in reputational terms. You know, that’s where we are sort of heading back….It’s not the Cultural Revolution, but there are very, very familiar elements now which had just been absent.
Halliday: And what do we know about the importance of the Cultural Revolution in Xi Jiping’s own story, and his route to power, and where he is now?
Hilton: Well he’s turned his own story, and of course his father was persecuted in the Culture Revolution. He was accused, funnily enough, of being a spy for Russia, which at the time was an enemy. Now his son and Putin are best friends and being a spy for Russia might not be such a bad thing.
But the family- his father was sent off and Xi Jingping himself as a young teenager was sent to a particularly difficult part of China in theLoess Plateau, where essentially it’s sort of cave dwelling villages in perfectly, as it were, comfortable caves. But this is not the most prosperous, or the easiest part, of China.
And he’s managed to turn this into a founding myth of himself as being at one with the people, able to enjoy hardships, rising above them to get into the Party and become the great leader. So that involves a lot of suppression of detail too, I have to say. So he’s turned the Cultural Revolution into his personal story quite effectively. It’s now a place where people can visit. One of the few Cultural Revolution sites which are okay to visit is the place where Xi Jinping served his time as a sent down youth.
Branigan: I mean, it is fascinating that, as you say, it’s the one part of the Cultural Revolution that the state is, not only willing to talk about, but has actively embraced by depoliticising it in this rather weird way. But what’s also striking about that, I think, is that it partly came from the grassroots.
So there was already this sort of nostalgia movement of these 17 million teenagers who’d been sent down into rural exile -utterly miserable lives, I mean, many of them didn’t come back- there was already a sort of nostalgic embrace of that by quite a lot of them. And when you speak to them, it’s fascinating because they say, ‘oh, it was terrible, it was miserable’, you know, ‘I’m not sure there was anything good about that time’. But they’ve also embraced that and found a sort of meaning, a sense of purity, of values, of equality.
And I think that really points to the fact that history everywhere is always as much, or the way people feel about the past, is always as much about what’s happening today, what’s going on, as it is about what the past was actually like.
And so there are many people in China who, despite all its horrors, actually feel intensely nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution and see it as being a time of greater equality, of greater meaning, despite the fact that the political meanings were, of course, constantly shifting at that point… perhaps sort of greater solidarity.
It’s hard for us to understand, but I think it reflects those frustrations with the way that breakneck growth, while it had brought so many benefits, and in many ways so much personal freedom, also came at a real cost in terms of glaring inequality, the huge corruption that people saw. The fact that there were so many migrant workers who were, yes, raising their family’s fortunes, but were only doing it by working hundreds or thousands of miles away, and perhaps not seeing their family for a year or two at a time. Although it’s definitely curated and encouraged by the state, there’s also a real, genuine, widespread nostalgia there as well.
Hilton: I think that’s a really important point. Some of the manifestations that I noticed, which are also in Tania’s book, are the role of collective song. You get in the parks in Beijing, over many years, you would notice middle-aged groups getting together to sing. And the songs they were singing were the songs of their youth, which were Cultural Revolution songs. And they found a kind of- you know that was an act of memory, an act of solidarity, an act of trying to recapture the feelings that they had then, which I think what Tania said about the idea of purity and of purpose was very important.
Because after the eighties, shall we say, when there was a lot of discussion about the meaning of politics, and the meaning of the Cultural Revolution, it pretty much got shut down in favour of money. And then you have people really looking for meaning. They had committed themselves to something which was overwhelming—the Cultural Revolution—then they’d been told, ‘no, not that’, then they’d been told, ‘okay, you can think about other things’ and then, ‘no, you can’t’. So, people were kind of trying to fill their lives with something which gave a purpose to life. So, you get things like Falun Gong, for example, which is a rather odd religious movement, which became hugely popular, a hundred million followers, more than members of the Party, that was suppressed. You get a revival of many kinds of religion.
And now the Party is trying to fill that void with a new ideology, a repurposed Marxism Leninism mounted in and Xi Jinping thought, which is substantially based on truculent nationalism. So, the most passionate feelings that you encounter in China today, politically, tend to be complaints about how everything bad that happened in China is the fault of the West and we must stand up to the west and we must hunt out the traitors within and the non-compliant, usually non-Han, people.
So that action, reaction, and further reaction is still playing out. And it’s a really key moment, I think, to understand the Cultural Revolution through that lens.
Halliday: One of the issues that we have heard an increasing amount in recent years in that regard is the treatment of Uyghur and other minority groups within the Xinjiang region. What was the experience for them in the Cultural Revolution?
Hilton: There were Red Guards amongst the minorities, but largely it was roaming Red Guards going to Xinjiang, going to Tibet and attacking, I mean, any old beliefs, anything religious, was subject to attack. So, on the mainland but also in the minority areas where they were, perhaps, deeply rooted in people’s lives and in people’s beliefs.
Branigan: Yes and just to add to that: in many cases it was minorities who particularly suffered, for example, in Inner Mongolia saw really brutal purges there in pursuit of a political Party which no longer existed, in fact, but many, many people were killed and persecuted in that period.
Halliday: And in the intervening years how did these minorities handle that process of memory- we’ve talked about this, the scar literature, were they part of that?
Hilton: Well, in Tibet there was a lot of rebuilding. So one of the figures who was released at the end of the Culture Revolution was the second most important figure in the Gelugpa, a group of Tibetan Buddhists. And he was the Panchen Lama. He was, sort of, number two, as it were, to the Dalai Lama. And he’d been imprisoned for complaining to the leadership about starvation and the Great Leap Forward. So he’d been, you know, locked away a long time.
When he was let out, it hit that moment at the beginning of the eighties of liberalism and he made a huge effort to help rebuild the enormous religious establishment in Tibet, which had been reduced largely to rubble. So a lot of rebuilding of monasteries and temples. I think similar things happened in Xinjiang, certainly mosques that had been closed were reopened, so there was that period of tolerance that decade, which was very important.
But now what you have is just a fundamental change of policy towards assimilation. Whereas previously it was much more of a Soviet style kind of policy where minority cultures and languages were allowed a certain degree of autonomy, though it was always rather limited, now it’s straightforward assimilation.
Halliday: And Tania, so when we think about the parallels now with the Cultural Revolution, it feels from over here that Xi Jinping’s attempt to promote a new ideology again, based on his own thinking, based on the thinking of previous communist leaders- how effective would you say that his attempt to rewrite history is- how is it going for a man with extreme technological capacities, with the arms of now a 21st century state to observe what people are saying and indeed control it?
Branigan: Yes. I mean, it’s building on a long tradition, you might say, in the Communist Party of monitoring history and wanting people to recall the history in certain terms.
And then the ideal of nationalism of China being a story of the Communist Party freeing the people from foreign humiliation is one that then gets a real boost after 1989. And the bloody, brutal crackdown on the democracy protestors, then the massacre of so many people, that’s the point at which the Party starts promoting, very strongly, this nationalist tale of the Communist Party saving the people. Because it no longer has the old ideal of serving the people, really. The Cultural Revolution and the 1989 experience combined saw that off.
So it turned to a story of both economic success and nationalism. And then, of course, as the years of untrammelled growth have gone, nationalism has become more and more central, as Isabel said, and particularly under Xi Jinping. And there’s this sort of smoothing out of history in which things aren’t necessarily removed, but you sort of gloss over certain parts. You certainly shut down alternative sources of information, so we’ve seen archives being shuttered. We’ve seen popular discussions of history on the internet or, history, publications being taken over, closed down. So yes, I mean, I think it has been effective in many ways. And there were already many young people who really don’t have a clue what happened in the Cultural Revolution, except in the most general terms.
Often people having a vague idea of it as being turmoil, and therefore bad, which is actually something that the Party, when it has allowed people to talk about it, has found quite useful - this idea that it shows you that you can’t have young people running wild expressing their views, I suppose. It’s used as a sort of bogeyman. And in a way, precisely because people don’t really know what happened, it becomes a rather amorphous thing, and the Party can just say, ‘well, of course, if you let everybody speak freely, this is the kind of thing that happens’ but without letting people go in any detail about just what it was that did happen.
I think what’s interesting in some ways is that that narrative then becomes harder to sustain if you are not talking about it and it’s not within so many people’s memories. And so there are now younger people who really don’t even have much idea of it at all, perhaps see it much as many people in the west might actually - they sort of know vaguely it was a bit violent and they think it was a bit kitschy because they’ve seen extracts from the model operas of the time, and so forth. But they really don’t have much understanding beyond that.
But I will say that memory also kind of comes through the cracks, in some ways. So there are many people who will say, ‘I know something terrible happened to my family, but I don’t know what it was’ or, ‘I know my grandfather suffered, but he won’t talk about it’. So for some people there is an awareness through personal history and family history that there is something there that doesn’t fit with the official narrative.
Halliday: And what kind of space is there for anyone in China to take hold of those moments, and kind of create more of a discussion, is there any possibility of that at all within China itself?
Branigan: I think it’s very limited now. I mean, one of the interesting things to me when I sort of started working on the book, there was a university professor, for example, who was told that he could not teach a course called ‘the Cultural Revolution’ but he was then allowed to teach a course, which was called ‘Chinese Culture 1966-76’, which of course are the dates of the Cultural Revolution. Anybody within China would know that, so there was a sort of tolerance.
Again, there were publications like Annals of the Yellow Emperor, which although it sounds rather antiquated, was actually publishing these very bold pieces on modern Chinese history. Really, all done by people who had been within the system, former state media editors and writers, and so forth, who’d then wanted to tell more of the true story. And there was a space for that. That space has just shrunk and shrunk, really, in recent years, and so it only appears in the most tangential ways now. But I think the work that’s done by the diaspora and the work that’s published abroad will be really important in keeping those memories alive.
Halliday: Isabel, do you think it’s easier or more challenging now for Xi Jinping to rewrite history compared to his predecessors?
Hilton: Well, first of all, you have to want to do it and he certainly has accumulated the power to do it. There’s a price to pay but he can do it. He can, as Tania said, he can close archives. He can, you know…Mao Zedong once boasted of the number of scholars that the Party had killed. Xi Jinping isn’t killing scholars, but he’s silencing them and people lose their jobs if they take the wrong line.
So yes, you can do it for a while but, as we see from Tania’s book, memory hides in lots of places and it’s quite difficult to erase memory entirely when- for an event that involved the entire nation. And it comes out in- I was reading a novel recently, in which the story was that something terrible had happened to a young man in the sixties and this had affected the entire family history from then. And you think, ‘well of course this is a Cultural Revolution analogy’, it’s a Cultural Revolution story. So it’s still- people are still trying to explore it because it left so many scars.
And actually, you know, if you think about the Chinese political leadership, anyone Xi Jinping’s age went through the Cultural Revolution. That meant that they had a very interrupted education. It meant that they were living through prolonged periods of fear, and violence, and worry about what was happening to their parents when they were still young. It meant it must have left a legacy of mistrust which goes very deep.
You know, it’s worse than being at a Tudor court being a senior member of the Communist Party. You never know what might happen to you tomorrow. And I think that those scars, which I very much doubt have ever been addressed or remedied or discussed, are very much present in the political leadership.
Branigan: And I think that’s what’s most fascinating in some ways, isn’t it? That Xi, who’d been through this very painful period himself, who’d seen his family persecuted, his half sister killed herself, we believe, under political pressure. His father and other senior Party leaders, when they were rehabilitated, went to great lengths to try and cage power and institutionalise, especially collectivise, power and prevent there being any future strong man who might be capable of doing these things again.
Xi’s response has really been to tear down those safeguards. I mean, he’s now a leader, indefinitely. The idea of collective leadership is for the birds. So, his experience of the Cultural Revolution appears to have been really one that has taught him not to control power, in the sense of caging power, but to ensure, simply, that you are the one with the power and hoard it, rather jealousy.
Halliday: Which perhaps suggests an element of circularity about where China will go in the next decade, in the next 20 years, and how those who are currently oppressed will view the actions of Xi’s government now?
Branigan: I think it’s always very hard for us to know what judgments the future is going to pass on the present. But I think there are certainly people now, who, as I said, have drawn comparisons. So we’ve seen a very bold scholar, for example, talk about personality cult re-emerging a few years ago, for which he lost his job, unsurprisingly. And then we’ve seen, as I said, protestors drawing parallels or seeing comparisons [with the Cultural Revolution] there.
So I was struck again with COVID that people in China seem to have seen the real reintroduction, reinsertion of the state into these parts of personal life that it had retreated from. Suddenly people feel as if the state is not just on your doorstep, but is sort of right there in your home with you in a way that people hadn’t seen before. So I think there is a little bit of a reassessment now, but it’s very hard to know which narratives will be strongest, which narratives will take hold and thrive in the future.
Hilton: I think it’s important to see the distinction between today’s situation and the Cultural Revolution. You know, the Cultural Revolution began because Mao had been marginalised and he was mobilising elements outside the Party to attack the Party in order to get control again. So, and that was the long, painful, violent process that he went through. Xi Jingping came to power in the Party through the usual channels. He also had a rectification campaign, which in some ways still continues, which took the form of an anti-corruption drive. And that meant that he could identify and purge pretty much all opposition within the Party to him. He could break up rival power centres and all of that kind of thing.
But this also involved remaking the Party’s image for the people, because I think it was true that at the end of the Hu-Wen era, the immediate predecessors of Xi Jinping, it was a pretty liberal time but it was also a pretty corrupt time. So, you know, launching an anti-corruption drive resonated with people and he presents it as the Party getting back to its true purpose of serving the people, beating the wicked foreigner, making China great again, all of that. So, he’s recreated the notion of the Party serving the people for the present day, and himself as the supreme leader directing that.
So he’s using some of the tools -the political rectification, the elevation of his thought to holy writ, all of that- those are definitely elements that we all remember from the Cultural Revolution. But the process isn’t a parallel, so we can’t look at the Cultural Revolution and say, ‘oh, well this is the way it’s going to go’. These are different times.
Brangian: Absolutely. And, in terms of that love of disruption that Mao had, you’d have to say that a figure like Trump was a much more Maoist figure in that sense than Xi Jinping is.
Halliday: That’s an interesting idea to almost round off on. Just one more thought before we do: this idea of rewriting history and authoritarian states going through that process to silence critics, shut down archives, is something that we’ve seen in other authoritarian states. We’ve seen it in Russia, of course, unfolding in recent years as well. Is this something that Authoritarian states always do and always will do?
Hilton: I think, particularly, you know, Marxist authoritarian state states. Because the function of history, if you’re a Marxist, is to deliver you into power because history - it has a historical inevitability if you subscribe to Marx’s theory.
But history can be inconveniently perverse in not making this obvious. So you have to tell history to get into line and deliver for you. That requires a constant effort to police and patrol history of the kind that we’ve seen.
Branigan: And I think the other thing as well is, I mean, there’s a history obviously in China of using history politically that goes back, you know, far beyond the communists. So the previous dynasties would use history as a way of justifying their rule and why they were better than the last lot effectively. And it has a kind of moral force that perhaps it doesn’t have in other places.
But I think also there’s something quite simple about it, in a way, when it comes, for example, to why China still embraces Mao. I mean it’s partly, people always say, it’s the Lenin and the Stalin problem that you can’t differentiate, you only have Mao, so you, if you jettison him, what are you left with? But it seems to me even simpler than that, in a sense, which is that once you allow people to judge the past, and previous political leaders, you are implicitly granting them the right to judge you.
Halliday: That’s a fascinating idea. That’s probably all we’re gonna have time for today, but thank you so much Tania and Isabel for joining us. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast, then do grab a copy of the latest issue of Prospect Magazine, which includes Isabel’s excellent review of Tania’s book, as well as writing by Rosie Holt,Bill McKibben, and many more.
Goodbye and listen out for the next episode of The Prospect Podcast next week.
