This is John Batcher. This is from a much longer conversation with Tanya Branigan, her new book is Red Memory, the after-lives of China's Cultural Revolution.

These are the Red Guards in Maturity in their 60s and 70s, remembering how it was for

them when they were teenagers or barely teenagers, told to make their teachers and their

authority figures and their parents better communists by tormenting

them, by stealing from them, by plundering them.

It was all quite illogical, but as explains it was a fever swept over the country

and these were tweeners or teenagers and had no resistance they were very much pointed by Mao himself to purge the authority in the country.

And they did. And this is Tanya explaining what she learned from one of these Red Guards who's

remembering her time as a Red Guard 40, 50 years later. There's Tanya. There's much more of this in our conversation later in the show.

Well, she certainly concluded that in that case, those items, those treasures were probably not being taken to the

revolutionary cause but perhaps were being taken by those girls for their own private

use. But of course like so many Red Guards at the time, she was also very zealous

herself in a sense. She had a very idealistic view. It's very hard for us to imagine, think how it must have been in that moment growing up in a country where you were constantly told that the People's Republic was under threat which of course was true in a sense.

Trankei Shek certainly was still hoping to come and reclaim the mainland at some point.

You had a country that felt profoundly threatened at the same time had been brought up with this ideal of revolutionary struggle and sacrifice.

Their parents in many cases had sacrificed immensely to bring about the Communist Revolution.

They've been brought up to worship Mao. So there is this very intense atmosphere and these very young people,

children really, who are being told that they should go out and destroy,

that they should force people to become better communists in a sense.

And so you herself, while she was disturbed by some of the things she saw, she also genuinely believed

that the Cultural Revolution was a cause that was right and was just, And her own hesitation in beating people, for example,

she sometimes wondered if that was really her being perhaps too weak,

...