Lying to themselves: Secrets of China’s Cultural Revolution

The Bunker

Podmasters

News, Politics, Society & Culture, Government

4.6 • 984 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

During China’s Cultural Revolution, pupils murdered their teachers, children betrayed their parents and society was torn apart in the name of progress. Decades on, it inspires both horror and nostalgia — but is rarely mentioned in public. Tania Branigan, author of Red Memory, tells Ros Taylor how China’s citizens deal with the Revolution’s violent legacy – and what it can teach us about China today. “There was a kind of idealism there, the inevitable joy and excitement that young people would feel in an upheaval of that kind”. “Many people in China regard the Cultural Revolution with a certain nostalgia, a time when people were somehow purer and there was more meaning.” “I certainly don’t know how I would have behaved if I lived through that era, and I don’t think many of us can.” www.patreon.com/bunkercast Written and presented by Ros Taylor. Producer Jet Gerbertson. Assistant producer Kasia Tomasiewicz. Lead producer Jacob Jarvis. Bunker music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. Group Editor Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:55.3	look after theirs with dental life. Pick up dental life in the pet food aisle. Hello and welcome to the bunker I'm Ros Taylor. For three years China has been largely cut off from the world as it
1:14.5	pursued a zero COVID policy. Now the country is opening up again but in many ways
1:19.0	we struggle to understand it. One person who has tried is Tanya Branigan, the Guardian's
1:24.0	foreign leader writer who's just published a book about the Cultural Revolution
1:27.7	called Red Memory. Welcome to the bunker, Tanya. Hello. For those people who are unfamiliar with it, what was the
1:35.4	Cultural Revolution? Why did it come about? It is incredibly complicated, but I will try and
1:41.4	boil it down to the absolute basics. It's a movement that lasts around 10 years.
1:47.0	It costs around 2 million lives, tens of millions of people are hounded,
1:52.0	and in its simplest form it's really a reassertion of Mao's political authority.
1:58.4	So he felt in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, which was this sort of hubristic attempt by him to overhaul
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