Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

If you want to understand China, there is one piece of its history that you must understand, and that’s the Cultural Revolution. Nothing about the present makes sense without it. As the late Roderick Macfarquhar explained in his interview with us, more than 100 million people were affected and yet, unlike Rwanda, South Africa or Germany post-World War II, China has yet to come to terms with what happened during those ten years of chaos. Red Memory is by journalist and China expert Tania Branigan, and has already been flagged by historian Jeff Wasserstrom, who recommends our China books each year, as likely to be among the best of 2023.