This is John Batchel. This is from a much longer conversation with Tanya Branigan. Her new book is Red Memory,

the afterlifes 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 Tanya 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. Here'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, I 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.

Chankai Shecks 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, not being pure enough, not really believing

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