Memory and identity

Lessons from an earlier horror

I came across the following this morning.

“For a nation, as for the people who comprise it, identity is memory—a partial accumulation of events and the stories we tell about them. But memory, of course, is a work in progress: ‘What we need in the present is constructed selectively by our reading of the past’, wrote Few Xiaotong. We try to smooth these facts and instincts into some kind of coherence, tangling over the inevitable questions of what we remember, and when, and why, and who gets to decide. What happens reverberates into our pasts as well as into our future. To change our understanding of what has gone before, as events often do, is to change ourselves.”

The author, Tania Branigan, penned this in Red Memory: The Afterlives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Originally arriving in the Middle Kingdom in 2007 as a reporter for the Guardian, Branigan could not avoid the profound influence the Great Cultural Proletariat Revolution continued exerting on this rapidly changing country fully four decades after end of the socio-political rampage. Most historians date the CR from 1966 to 1976 when the Great Helmsman (mercifully, in my mind) died, with the most intensely disruptive period in the initial five years.

Branigan stresses the fanaticism too many embraced in the PRC during this period. Certainly the Red Guards, those passionate youth Mao empowered to attack anyone he found threatened to his ideas or legacy. They ultimately subsided when the PLA retook control over the society.

But fanaticism manifests itself in multiple ways. Those unwilling to discuss their horrible experiences when sent to the rice paddies for the crime of learning English or for having parents who subtly reflected their frustration with the period can be fanatical about silence, brushing away any queries.

Xi Jinping, most relevantly, is a product of this period. His father was one of the PLA’s vaunted “Eight Immortals” who led to success in the civil war yet the elder Xi Zhongxun became one more of Mao’s many victims a generation later. What were the crimes that Party loyalists faced? They questioned—or were feared would protest—whether Mao’s actions during the late 1950s, a diabolical time when the Chairman allowed famine under the auspices of the Great Leap Forward, were bad for the Chinese people. The younger Xi spent months in the interior doing the menial labor required as part of “patriotic reeducation”, much as did those former landowners who faced the Revolution in the late 1940s and 50s. During the CR, merely having studied English became a crime, a measure of the depth of anxiety Maoists harbored. One might have expected Xi to pursue a different path.

Xi Jinping today, however, seeks to rejuvenate a Party towards its past orientation as ultimate arbiter in so many parts of citizens’s lives. He advocates Chinese nationalism and self-sufficiency to assure the Party remains in Zhongnanhai in control for the foreseeable future while he attacks foreigners seeking to “keep down” the Chinese people. He stokes what is at times fanaticism, particularly when the “feelings of the Chinese people” are “wounded” by Japan or the United States, but he can smile like a Cheshire Cat on those occasions he courts foreign leaders from elsewhere—or the two same “offending” countries. Xi rewrites memories where it suits him because he shuts down dissent or alternate visions.

Australian Ambassador to the United States and former Prime Minister Dr. Kevin Rudd, a scholar of the Middle Kingdom in his own right, gave powerful remarks on Xi’s aspirations, along with China’s context, earlier this week at the National War College. Rudd’s argument nests with Branigan’s reminders of memory, fanaticism, and the views of the Chinese people: they can be lead to change or remain silent where necessary as Xi moves to reverse what he views as harm to his nation.

Our interpretation of actions viz a viz China are often quite different yet some voices try overwriting our memories as well. Nothing new here but hardly the way we consider the topic, isn’t it?

As Branigan notes, memory for any people is a work in progress. How it appears for any individual certainly can evolve rather than remain set in stone as “truth”. I wonder how many other fanatical portions of other nations run similar risks? It is easy to say the CR was uniquely Chinese but the desire to rewrite events, to punish apostates from orthodoxy, and to ignore implications for the future are much more common than merely in Asia.

Again, it comes down to who gets to decide for memories and indemnity. Actions and consequences at work.

I welcome your thoughts and rebuttals. Please feel free to circulate if you find this of value. I appreciate your time, and I laud the subscribers who support me financially with their commitments.

It is a beautiful sunny day in September with autumnal colors in full bloom. May yours be similar.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. New York: W. W. Norton, 2023.

Kevin Rudd, PhD, “The Interrelationship Between CCP Ideology, Strategy and Deterrence: China’s Ideological Framework for Strategic Decision-Making, Different American and Chinese Concepts of Deterrence and the Impact on Strategic Stability in the Taiwan Strait”. Remarks at the National War College, 4 September 2024.