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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator. This week, my guest is the journalist Tanya Branigan, whose new book deals with China's Cultural Revolution, Red Memory, Living, Remembering, and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution.

Tanya, welcome. As I understand it from the way you described in this book, you said you spent several years in China as a correspondent, and this book sort of comes out of what you started

to become aware was the story that was sort of behind every other story you were writing.

Is that a reasonable way of expressing it? Yes. So of course, I knew about the cultural

revolution. I knew it had happened. It had been devastating. But I also

felt when I went out there, it was something that seemed to be so far behind in China's past

because the country had just been on this sort of extraordinary path of transformation,

obviously, that we'd all seen. And it was only really when I was there that it began to seem

as if it emerged in almost every story I covered, whether that be about the economy, whether

it be about family relationships, whether it be about politics, that it was always there

just under the surface, something that wasn't really referred to in official discourse,

except very rarely, and which ordinary people didn't talk about that much. And yet, as soon as

you sort of peeled away, just the slightest layer, it was sort of the explanation for everything,

the country's pivot point. And it really just underlays so much and was clearly so raw to so many people as

well. Yeah, I mean, it's very much living memory, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. And that's really sort of

the heart of the book is not so much what happened then as why it matters now and why people

remember it and how people remember it because it's a very tangled and painful

and confusing subject, even for people who want to recall it.

I mean, the one thing that sort of really unites the people in my book, that they are all

people who are unusual in having chosen to address this.

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