I'm John Bachelor with Tanya Bronigan. Her new book is Red Memory, the after lives of China's Cultural Revolution.

Remembering all these decades later is a fresh way of participating in history when you were too young or weren't even alive to remember these events,

they can sometimes feel like the English Revolution of the 17th century. And we still speak of

events that happened in 1605, the gunpowder plot, and Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans riding

across the land.

America comes out of that period.

So when we recreate our history, that's what we're doing.

We're living through it as if it informs us today.

It's sentimental, but at the same time it can be stirring.

In this instance, however, people who were too young to understand what was happening

around them as grown-ups have clubs or groups or friendship across the internet. And sometimes

they meet in person. And entertaining this group or entertaining everybody in Beijing and Shanghai wherever he travels

is an impersonator of the most famous villain of the gang of, well, the man who was

chief rival to Mautzy Tong.

This flabbergasted me, Tanya, the man who looks like, his name was Lou? Is that, that was the man

he's... Lin Biao. Lin Biao. Yes, Lin Biao. Yes, I mean, Lin Biao, I have to say, I was fairly

flabbergasted to discover a Lin Biao impersonator as well. I mean, there are plenty of Mao impersonators,

other key figures like

Joe and Ly and so forth. Lin Bia was much more surprising precisely because he's been

vilified for so long as the sort of the greatest enemy of the people, really. Even though he died

before the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was actually given a posthumous show trial for his responsibilities for the era.

And he had this extraordinary trajectory in which he went from being something of a military hero through to being really Mao's chief sycophant, essentially, the person who was doing the most,

...