1/8: Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution Hardcover – May 9, 2023 by Tania Branigan (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Memory-Afterlives-Cultural-Revolution/dp/1324051957
Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?
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1966 Cultural Revolution
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World with John Bachelor. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:13.1 | The Red Guards, the Cultural Revolution, 20th Century, Nightmares, and yet, Red Memory, |
| 0:20.4 | the new book The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution by Tanya Bronigan, takes us back |
| 0:26.6 | to that time of the People's Republic of China. And then brings us forward again. We begin |
| 0:33.8 | with an event, however, that is Tanya's reporting as a representative of the Guardian newspaper. |
| 0:40.8 | And it is the Hushin Tao era. This is the first decade of the 21st Century. And we visit |
| 0:49.0 | the Pagoda Museum. What is significant about this is that there's a museum that appears |
| 0:55.9 | to be remembering the Red Guards, remembering the Cultural Revolution. And yet, Tanya, congratulations, |
| 1:03.5 | and I'm very good evening to you. Your book is a delight only because all of this is new to me. |
| 1:10.1 | At the same time, I remember what I was doing in 1966, 1970, 1979, with no knowledge of these |
| 1:19.0 | terrible events. You go to a museum, and the museum is the product of One Man's Genius, |
| 1:27.2 | Pang Chian. What is the museum represent? What was it meant to represent as you visited? Good |
| 1:34.4 | evening to you. Good evening, and thank you for having me on your show. The museum in Shanto is |
| 1:42.2 | really the only place in China that records the history of the Cultural Revolution, unless |
| 1:48.8 | of course, was a decade that really tore China apart. We saw extraordinary violence chaos |
| 1:55.4 | than a long period of stagnation in which China was really shut off from the outside world. |
| 2:01.7 | Two million people, we think, died tens of millions hounded. And yet, it's one that's largely |
| 2:08.4 | been erased from official history, certainly. And the museum in Shanto was the attempt of an |
| 2:14.8 | official called Pang Chian, as you say, really to try and grasp that history, to keep that memory |
| 2:21.3 | alive, because he, like a small, but very dedicated number of people in China, felt that it was |
| 2:27.6 | essential to remember what had happened, to not allow those memories to be lost completely. |
| 2:33.5 | And so, in fact, partly because he was somebody inside the system, he used his sheer determination, |
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