This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with Tanya Bronican, who was eight years reporting

for The Guardian in China. In that time, she pursued and captured thoughts about the Red Guard of

1966 to 76. There's an irony here, many of whom participants are now

senior and are not necessarily going to be with us long. So this is the memory of that period,

but Tanya also spends time with psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, and a meeting in Shanghai.

And I'm struck by how they regard this as, I wrote down from Dr. Yang. He calls it Maoist hysteria. What does he mean,

Tanya? I think that may have been my phrase rather than his, but it was a time of, it was a convulsion.

I mean, there was something about the cultural revolution itself that was a sort of collective hysteria or collective delusion, you might say.

As I said, there were very, there were motives that we would definitely recognise that will come into any kind of big

campaign or movement, I suppose. People always have their personal interests, grudges, ambition,

all of those things. But there was also a level of real belief, of fear for the revolution, of zealotry that really did transfix

and grip the country. People really believed.

Now we come to Dr. Chen, who talks about eating bitterness. What does that mean?

It's a very common idiom in China. You come across it a lot. And it really means sort of suffering and getting on with suffering, just getting on with it. It's something you'll see in job adverts, for example, that people will talk about sort of saying, you know, we want a worker who can eat bitterness. It means we want somebody who's not going to moan and is kind of going to buckle down. But it's also something that people will quite often talk about

with a certain kind of pride. But it's also, of course, quite fatalistic because it's the

sort of the power of the powerless in a sense. It's what you do when you can't do anything

else. I think at one point you report there 20,000

psychiatrists or psychologists. I wasn't sure what. Psychiatrists, I believe.

In a country of more than one billion people. Is psychiatry disregarded? It's medicalized.

It's quite limited, I would say. Certainly psychology in Mao's time was shunned as a sort of bourgeois pseudoscience. It wasn't really tolerated. I suppose mental health care is in a sense being seen as something of a luxury, simply put. And so historically, there

hasn't been a great deal of investment or interest in it. And it's only relatively recently,

particularly within the sort of the last 10 years or so, that psychotherapy, for example,

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