Mao’s legacy

In 1958, the People’s Republic of China launched an ambitious program designed to transform the country from an agrarian to an industrial society. Called the ‘Great Leap Forward,’ the campaign was a disaster: between 35 and 55 million people died of starvation and deprivation. By the time it ended in 1962, Mao Zedong’s position within the Communist Party had been undermined.

The dispute with Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, which reached its peak in the early 1960s, only reinforced the atmosphere of suspicion and isolation. To silence his critics and regain his former power, Mao conceived a campaign of ‘ideological purification’ of the Party and society, known as the Cultural Revolution. In the summer of 1966, he swam over the Yangtze River, symbolically announcing his return to the political scene. A wave of brutal persecution followed, with the youngest cadres doing most of the dirty work.

Mao encouraged Communist youth, organized into ‘Red Guards,’ to crack down on ‘reactionary elements’ within the Party and remove ‘remnants of the feudal and imperialist past.’ The campaign of mass terror and violence, which claimed at least a quarter of a million lives (although some estimates put the number much higher), lasted until Mao’s death in 1976.

 In 2023, Tania Branigan, a British journalist and a long-time China correspondent for The Guardian, published her book Red Memory, in which she explored how the legacy of this traumatic period still marks contemporary China. Razpotja talked to her after the publication of the Italian translation of her book in 2025.

Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Razpotja

If we try to grasp today’s China while neglecting the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, what are we missing from the picture?

I think it leaves a huge hole. The odd thing is that this is the way in which most people approach China. The Cultural Revolution has been treated as one historical episode among many, and people don’t look at the role it played in shaping contemporary China. It is often overlooked how it completely shaped the Chinese economy – ironically, it turned the tide away from orthodox Maoism and towards the market. You also don’t see its huge social impact in the way people relate to each other, its psychological impact, and its cultural impact – partly because that is expressed in the absence of aspects of Chinese culture which have been destroyed. Also, you don’t see its impact on politics: the Cultural Revolution has shaped a whole generation of leaders, including Xi Jinping, whose family suffered considerably during the Cultural Revolution.

Let’s begin with the latter. You end your book with a reflection on Xi Jinping’s China: you see parallels with his personalist rule and Mao’s legacy, but also important discontinuities. It seems that the main lesson that the Chinese leadership learned from the Cultural Revolution is that the best cure for totalitarianism is authoritarianism.

It’s a very curious paradox that the Communist Party managed to use the Cultural Revolution to shore up its position in Chinese society. It has created a story about the Cultural Revolution which is all about people being out of control. It’s a narrative about what happens when you don’t have order, discipline, hierarchy, and a tight grip on what’s happening. The Party is able to promote this narrative because it erases the politics of the Cultural Revolution: it doesn’t admit it was Mao’s way to reassert control and get rid of rivals.

There was another lesson that the Party took from the Cultural Revolution. When the leadership who suffered during the Cultural Revolution reasserted its role after Mao’s death in 1976, it came to the conclusion that it should avoid the situation where too much power rests in the hands of one person.

This is being lost during Xi Jinping’s rule, right?

Exactly, Xi Jinping has removed a lot of those guardrails that were put in place to guarantee a more collective style of leadership, and it’s very much back to being a one-man show. In some ways, it is a very different type of rule from Mao’s. Xi is not someone who relishes disorder and chaos in the way that Mao did or, indeed, that Donald Trump does. He is someone who likes to work through structures and therefore he has reshaped the Party and works through the Party.

Nonetheless, it’s striking that many people in China have seen parallels with Mao’s era. There are no term limits for the leader; the leader is there indefinitely. You have a burgeoning personality cult, and although Xi Jinping is far from having the God-like status that Mao had, he is being presented in personalized terms, as a grandfatherly figure who isn’t just a strong national leader but also someone who loves you, like a family member. The images of personalized, patriarchal power that are being presented in textbooks and the media are very evocative of Mao’s rule.

Before Covid, there were spheres from which the party had quietly retreated – your personal preferences and personal relationships. During the pandemic, we saw a return to times in which the Party was present in every aspect of life and could get involved into your personal life in a very direct, brutal way. Not just dissidents but entirely apolitical people were being spied on in their personal movements, government officials could enter their homes at will: that brought back very strong memories from Mao’s times.

In your book, you stress the traumatic impact of the whole 20^th century history of China. The fall of the empire, the warlord period and the Kuomintang’s takeover, the Japanese occupation, the Chinese Civil war, the Communist takeover, the Great Leap Forward – it seems like a never-ending series of extremely traumatic events. What makes the Cultural Revolution stand out? Why do you think it left deeper scars?

Firstly, it went right across the country, no part was left untouched, and no part of society. Its victims go from the very top of the social hierarchy to the very bottom: both of Mao’s heirs apparent died during this decade, while at the other end of the spectrum, babies were being killed because they were born into a landlord family. There was this enormous geographical and social span, but also time span, because it lasts for ten years.

Another aspect is that the Revolution created a very uncertain line between victims and perpetrators; often people were both. For example, many of the Red Guards came from powerful political families. Then, very quickly, their families entered the firing line, and many of them then ended up either in prison camps or in jail. You never knew where you stood, and that uncertainty was deeply traumatizing.

The sense of complicity was universal. You couldn’t just stand back: if your friend was accused of being a black element and you said nothing, your silence made you suspect, and not only you, but your family, too. It was impossible not to be involved. A victim whom I interviewed remembered how a friend of his didn’t denounce him at a rally, and he felt that showed his friend’s courage and loyalty: that was the maximum you could do in those circumstances.

The Cultural Revolution was very much about turning people against their closest ones. In that sense, you can see a parallel with the Stalinist purges or the genocides of the 20^th century. However, the Cultural Revolution was carried through by the people, it was universal and very intimate. That level of complicity was the most scarring, particularly because you not only had people turning upon their classmates, friends, work colleagues and comrades, but even upon their closest family members.

In the book, I write about a 17-year-old who denounced his mother for criticizing Chairman Mao and called for her execution. And she was executed. You had husbands and wives turning upon each other. This was not just spontaneous, but often under pressure: family members were told to draw a line and cut off their family members. We are told that when Xi Jinping was brought to trial, he was criticized by his own mother at the denunciation rally. Many people thought they had to carry out these acts of betrayal for the sake of other family members. The level and sheer number of these very intimate betrayals and the traumas they caused continue to resonate throughout society.

As I mentioned, it lasted for a decade, it went on and on. The widow of a renowned Chinese scholar who died during the Cultural Revolution said to me: we saw the dark cloud that was gathering but we didn’t know it would be hanging over the country for the next ten years.

The episode that you mention of the 17-year-old youth and his father who ask for their mother and wife to be executed is one of the most striking in the book. But you also show his attempts to cultivate her memory and, by doing so, to somehow atone for himself and do her justice. However, you write that such attempts to cultivate the memory of the victims is quite rare.

There is a large number of people who have a vaguely nostalgic memory of the era, then there is a majority that tries to put that time behind it and not address it at all. Those who talk about the horrors of that time are very few. It takes a lot of bravery to go against the current, not only on the political level, but also the social: most people simply don’t want these things to be brought up.

I think there’s a very human aspect to that. It struck me only recently when I realized how quickly we have forgotten about the Covid pandemics. People simply don’t want to be reminded of the bad times. When we understand how much more traumatic the Cultural Revolution was, we should not be too surprised that there is a great amnesia.

The memory of the Cultural Revolution has its own history. How was the Cultural Revolution treated immediately after Mao’s death in 1976, and how did the authorities deal with its legacy in the decades afterwards?

Immediately after the Cultural Revolution, there was an outburst of ‘scar literature’, as it was known: memoirs and poems about the suffering of the time. This was tolerated by the authorities. There was a double element to this. On the one hand, there was a desire for catharsis, to let people have their say. On the other hand, the people who came to power after the Cultural Revolution were all people who themselves were purged – notably Deng Xiaoping – and who needed to justify and to consolidate their return and rehabilitation. In other words, they needed to reassure the people that they really were the good guys.

Also, those leaders were aware that things could flip again. It wasn’t certain that the move away from Maoism was going to succeed, so the fear of a return of something similar must have been immense. The scar literature and the popular outpouring were very much tolerated for that reason, too. However, it’s important to remember that there were limits: no books were published that blamed Mao for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

In the same period, Deng asked Party historians to draw up an official verdict of the era. The idea was not to memorialize what had happened, to describe accurately what had happened and to say, ‘Never Again!’ Rather, it was rather about saying, ‘Let’s get this over with, we need to move on.’ The blame was put on the leftists who were purged from the party. From then on, the Party had an odd position. The Cultural Revolution was quite handy in showing people what could happen if there wasn’t top-down control and the masses were allowed to roam free. This fear was often invoked when mass popular threats against the Party emerged, as with the 1989 demonstrations on Tiananmen and the protest movement in Hong Kong.

Over the years, there was a gradual closing down of memory. The Party didn’t want people to dwell upon it. Over the years, more restrictions on publications were enforced. This became particularly obvious after Xi Jinping came to power. Over the past decade, we have seen archives closing and popular history accounts being censored online. There used to be a groundbreaking history magazine that investigated the more sensitive elements of modern Chinese history, mostly ran by octogenarian former officials, and that too got shut down.

It’s quite striking that Xi Jinping’s first public act after taking power was to take the Chinese leadership to visit the National History Museum to see an exhibition about how the Communist Party had saved China. Within months, he gave a speech warning the country faced Seven Great dangers. One of them was ‘historical nihilism’, which essentially means every version of history that is not the Party’s version. He put ‘historical nihilism’ on par with western democracy and the free press as dangers to the Party.

We can see a sense of urgency about controlling the past. The small Museum of the Cultural Revolution, which was always a niche institution that kept a low profile, was closed down entirely. There is a new law against slandering China’s heroes and martyrs. There is no doubt that the space for memory has become much smaller.

One of the reasons that I wrote the book is that between 2010 and 2012 there was a brief moment when Party media were willing to discuss the Cultural Revolution. We saw more people coming out to talk about it. It seemed as if there might be an opening up. But when Xi took over it was suppressed and led to an even more controlled and censored public sphere.

An immediate parallel comes to mind between the Cultural Revolution and the Stalinist terror. However, in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s death was followed by de-Stalinization, which at least on the symbolic level was taken quite seriously: Stalin’s corpse was removed from Lenin’s Mausoleum, his images were removed, the cities named after him were renamed, including Stalingrad, itself. Nothing of the sort happened in China. Mao’s images are still ubiquitous. The system, however, underwent a dramatic reform, unparalleled by anything attempted in the Soviet Union. In your book, this schizophrenic duality is captured by the scene of a local politician who was removed by internal Party purge: when he was arrested, they also seized an enormous statue of Mao from his home, made of pure gold…  This ‘golden Mao’ was a great symbol of the contradictions in contemporary Chinese memory politics.

Yes, in a way they raised Mao to the level of pure symbol so they could move away from him. This is epitomized by the fact that Mao suddenly started appearing on banknotes – imagine the paradox! This symbolic embrace of Mao allowed the system to move away from his policies, which was the reverse of what happened in the Soviet Union. There was a crucial difference between the Soviet Union and Communist China. In the former, the Party could claim that Stalin had moved away from Lenin: it all started well and then Stalin came along. The problem with the Chinese Communist Party is that Mao was there from the very beginning …

He was both its Lenin and Stalin…

Exactly. If you destroy Mao’s image, you carry down the whole thing. But I think there’s also something even more fundamental: once you give people the right to criticize historical leaders, then why shouldn’t they judge their current ones?

How far was the Cultural Revolution’s radical disruption of the basic structures of society, the abolishing of all ties of solidarity, instrumental in creating the conditions for the Chinese type of capitalism?

The Cultural Revolution caused a setback to the Chinese economy, although the discussion on how to quantify its damage is still ongoing. The bad shape of the Chinese economy in 1976 encouraged the turn to the market. You had a very large pool of young people with no education and no jobs, so encouraging entrepreneurship was a way of dealing with that problem.

Alongside those pragmatic aspects, though, the Cultural Revolution prepared people psychologically for the individualism of capitalism: the sense that you can only rely on yourself and need to constantly adapt, because your status was constantly changing. It is striking that many businesspeople claim that the Cultural Revolution prepared them for the sort of resilience and adaptability needed for success in a capitalist system. In the book Mao and Markets, by Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qian, I found a quote by a Chinese tycoon who suggests that the Cultural Revolution taught people like him to act like wolves to survive.

This is an overlooked aspect of the Cultural Revolution in the West. We tend to associate the Cultural Revolution with youths waving Mao’s Little Red Book and assaulting their teachers and elders, but by 1968 Mao had already lost patience with the Red Guards and sent them to work in the countryside. In your book, you describe the terrible stories of these young people who faced immense hardships in the deep countryside. Can you tell us more about this?

Their life in the countryside was absolutely punishing. The city kids were particularly ill-prepared for the backwardness of country life. Most peasants could hardly sustain their own families, so the masses of youngsters pouring into the countryside were even less able to feed themselves. Although they initially enjoyed some privileges, these soon disappeared, and they faced a very crude awakening.

Curiously, this is one aspect of the Cultural Revolution that the Party now likes to talk about, because it relates to Xi Jinping’s biography. He likes to tell the story how this experience turned him into a man. Because of his father’s connections, he had a better time than many young people in the countryside, but it was extremely brutal for even for privileged youths: a level of hardship, privation but also loneliness that must have forged him very deeply, and probably has given him a level of resilience that few other leaders could match.

Of course, in the Party’s recount of his story, there is no discussion about why he had to go to the countryside and no recognition of the fact that he was one among seventeen million other young people sent there. However, many other people who shared that experience have similar feelings: it was brutal, and although they don’t wipe out the brutality of their experience, they insist that it gave them a special resilience.

Once you start describing the fate most of the Red Guards experienced in the second phase of the Cultural Revolution, you get a very tangible sense that the Cultural Revolution erased, as you said, the line between victim and perpetrator. Would we say that was its purpose, like other totalitarianisms?

We have to keep in mind is that the perpetrators were very young: often, they were 13 or 14 year-olds. They were brought up in a pervasive culture of cultural struggle and glorification of revolutionary violence and were taught to revere Mao as a god. Their parents had also been through very tough times, so they often had very difficult relationships with their parents because of all the trauma. Sometimes criticizing someone else seemed like the best way of protecting yourself. They were put into situations where it was unclear what was right and what was wrong: if they acted in a way that we might now consider as morally right, they might endanger their families and even cause the death of loved ones. The question of how much responsibility they had is difficult to answer.

Recently, there have been comparisons about the Cultural Revolution and the leftist campus protests that have swept across Europe and the US. You are very critical about these comparisons. Why do you think that the comparisons between Maoism and student radicalism in the West are misplaced?

The presentation of the Cultural Revolution as being about young people being zealous and blinkered is fundamentally misleading. In reality, it was instigated from the top. This is something that the Chinese Communist Party avoids discussing.

On the other hand, you do draw parallels between Maoist strategies and the contemporary far right in the West. Where do you see the similarities?

What has struck me about today’s far right movements is that their fundamental strategy is to use mass emotions – and specifically mass hatred – against a dangerous Other who is accused of being an internal enemy or an inherent danger to society; and that they do so in order to overturn existing institutions, in which they themselves are operating, in order to enhance their power. To me, this is a much more important parallel to the Cultural Revolution in the West.

How much Mao is there in Donald Trump?

The similarities are amazing! Chinese people are always invoking the comparison. The personality cult around Trump, the fact that he has his devoted core supporters around him, whom he plays off against each other, the direct appeal to his supporters to bypass traditional power structures, and particularly his love of disruption and disorientation.

But there are clearly important differences. Mao did in fact believe in revolution. Although the Cultural Revolution was primarily about his power, he was also genuinely zealous and thought his revolution had lost its way, that the Party had become impure, and that he had to root that out and create a more perfect Communist society. Trump clearly doesn’t believe in any sort of social revolution. So I’m certainly not saying you can map then directly on to another. But there are some very compelling parallels, particularly the way in which they use hatred in order to forge a powerful political force.