RECOMMENDED READ: Culture Wars

Our recommended read reveals the harrowing impact of Chairman Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in China

IN 1966, CHAIRMAN MAO ZEDONG launched the "Cultural Revolution" to rid China of all lingering "rightist" elements after 17 years of his Communist rule. The shock troops who initially carried it out were mainly teenagers including girls as young as 13-known as the Red Guards. They burned religious symbols, confiscated "bourgeois" possessions (basically any nice things) and in many cases beat their own supposedly treacherous teachers with clubs, sometimes to death.

People accused of unsound views were forced to make public confessions while painfully tied up, wearing dunces' caps and with heavy placards around their necks held by wire which slowly cut into the skin. Not that this saved them. By the time the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao's death in 1976, two million people had been killed and 36 million hounded out of jobs and homes, often into forced labour in the countryside.

In this brilliant, unsettling book, Tania Branigan speaks to many of those involved, perpetrators as well as victims. She also explores the Cultural Revolution's continuing effects in a country whose economic fortunes have since been transformed but whose people, she argues, have never got over the trauma of seeing neighbours and family members turn on each other so readily: a trauma made worse by the fact that the terror of those years isn't properly acknowledged (a huge portrait of Mao still dominates Beijing's Tiananmen Square). The result is a book that compellingly illuminates both China's past and present, especially now that freedom of expression is under renewed assault.

One of Branigan's interviewees is Zhang Hongbing, who as a teenager denounced his own mother, Fang, not long after Liu Shaoqi, a former ally of Mao's, was purged in 1969...