Breaking the silence

First-hand stories from both the victims and perpetrators of China's brutal Cultural Revolution make for a gripping history.

- JEREMY REES

RED MEMORY: Living, remembering and forgetting China's Cultural Revolution, by Tania Branigan (Faber, $36.99)

What would people do if all the norms of society were broken? And how would you live with what you had done? It's these questions that make China's Cultural Revolution so fascinating to outsiders, and also lie at the heart of a new book that's an early contender for book of the year on China.

It was an era, roughly 1966 to 1975, when an erratic Mao ordered people to smash the "old China", then stood back as Red Guards and the populace created egalitarian chaos, beating and torturing people in his name. Families and friends denounced one another for being insufficiently Maoist and millions were killed.

Red Memory by Tania Branigan interviews both victims and perpetrators to ask why they did what they did and what they remember now. A correspondent for the Guardian from 2008 to 2015, she became aware of what she calls the silences around the Cultural Revolution. Her book of remembering and forgetting unfolds as a series of people's stories, each casting a different light on part of the revolution.