S8 Ep296: A SON'S BETRAYAL Colleague Tanya Branigan. This file recounts the tragic story of Zhang Hongbing, who, as a teenager in 1970, denounced his own mother to the authorities. His mother, Fang Zhongmou, was executed after Zhang and his father reported her for

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 11 January 2026

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

A SON'S BETRAYAL Colleague Tanya Branigan. This file recounts the tragic story of Zhang Hongbing, who, as a teenager in 1970, denounced his own mother to the authorities. His mother, Fang Zhongmou, was executed after Zhangand his father reported her for criticizing Mao at home. Decades later, Zhang lives with profound guilt, feeling that his mother "never answers" his attempts to communicate. He took Branigan to his mother's grave, located in a construction site and under threat of removal. The story illustrates how the era's political zealotry destroyed family bonds and left survivors with unmanageable burdens of guilt. TANYA BRANIGAN NUMBER 7
1965 SHANGHAI

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm John Batchewitt, the author Tanya Brannigan, read memory, the afterlife, the
0:11.7	afterlife of China's cultural revolution.
0:14.7	Tanya was eight years in the People's Republic of China between the first decade and the second
0:19.7	decade of the 21st century and the stories
0:23.7	of the teenagers ranging across the country or of the young men born into peasant families in the
0:32.4	countryside who find the People's Liberation Army a ladder up until they run into the Cultural Revolution
0:38.7	and are brutalized. We now turn to a story of a man who's made himself, remade himself into a
0:45.1	lawyer after many years of struggle, but his memory is horror. It's 1970. His name is Zhang.
0:54.0	Zhang and his father live with their mother, who's an educated and sophisticated woman, who has severe doubts about Mao and what's going on. Tanya, introduce us to the woman at the center. You, Shang, her name is, it's Fangzma.
1:12.3	Fang Zhongmo. Yeah, Fang Chungmo. Who is she at the time? What is she representing about the
1:18.9	Cultural Revolution? Why is she speaking truth? She was another very committed member of the party,
1:26.1	like as I've said, so many victims of the Cultural Revolution.
1:29.6	She'd met her husband when they were both training as medical staff working for the party.
1:37.7	And she'd been in that sense a great believer.
1:39.9	But she and her family had also been through immense suffering.
1:44.9	So at the beginning of the cultural revolution, her mother was forced to leave the family home,
1:49.5	essentially was forced to go back to her hometown.
1:52.5	Her daughter, Zhang Hong Bing's eldest sister, became a very passionate Red Guard,
1:58.1	was one of the many who traveled to Beijing for the rallies.
2:01.8	But tragically, that great movement of the young people across the country contributed to a
2:08.0	huge outbreak of meningitis. And Zhang Hong's Bing's sister was one of those who died shortly
2:13.3	after returning. So she'd lost her mother in a sense. She'd very clearly lost her daughter.
	...

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