This is the Guardian.

Today, why you need to understand the cultural revolution, to understand China now.

There's a particular phrase that sometimes comes up in speeches by China's president Xi Jinping.

He talks about the threat of what he calls historical nihilism.

He's warned about it as being the sort of existential peril for the party.

On a par with Western democracy, for example, he sees the need to control the story

as being really central to what the party does and how it remains in power.

He has put history right at the centre of his mission.

Tania Branigan is a journalist with the Guardian. She used to be based in China.

As she says, this fixation on the past isn't always appreciated about Xi.

I think history is more important to Xi Jinping than to any leader really since Mao.

And there's one era of China's history that looms over Xi more than any other.

It's an event that transformed his own life, the cultural revolution, a decade of unbelievable

turmoil in China when all the hierarchies that held the country together were turned on their heads.

Nobody is untouched by this and it's felt at the most intimate level we see children

turning upon parents, husbands turning upon wives. It's an extremely brutal, volatile time of

incredible insecurity they seek. Nobody ever knows where they stand.

We see two million people die killed or hounded to their deaths and tens of millions of lives

really torn apart.

Tania argues that understanding China without coming to grips with the cultural revolution

is like trying to understand Britain without its empire or the US without its civil war.

And as she writes in her new book, though it happened decades ago, the fight for how it's

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