This is CBS I on the World with John Bachelor.

Here's John Bachelor.

The Red Guards, the Cultural Revolution,

20th century nightmares.

And yet, Red Memory, the new book,

The After Lives of China's Cultural Revolution by Tanya Bronaghan

takes us back to that time of the People's Republic of China and then brings us forward again. We begin with an event however that is

Tanya's reporting as a representative of the Guardian newspaper and it is the

Hoosien Tao era this is the first decade of the 21st century.

And we visit the Pagoda Museum.

What is significant about this is that there's a museum that appears to be

remembering the Red Guards, remembering the Cultural Revolution, and yet Tanya congratulations and a very good evening to you, your book is a delight

only because all of this is new to me.

At the same time I remember what I was doing in 1966, 1970, 1979, with no knowledge of these terrible

events.

You go to a museum and the museum is the product of one man's genius,

Pang Chiaan. What is the museum represent? What was it meant to represent as you visited? Good evening to you.

Good evening and thank you for having me on your show.

The museum in Chanto is really the only place in China that records the history of the

Cultural Revolution and this of course was a decade that really tore China apart.

We saw extraordinary violence, chaos, then a long period of stagnation

in which China was really shut off from the outside world. Two million people, we think, died, tens of millions

...