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This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Batchelor
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with Tanya Bronegan, who was eight years reporting for The
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Guardian in China. And in that time, she pursued and
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captured thoughts about the Red Guard of 1966 to 76.
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There's an irony here. Many of whom participants are now
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senior and are not necessarily going to be with us long.
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So this is a memory of that period. But Tanya
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also spends time with psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists in a meeting
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in Shanghai. And I'm struck by how they regard this as...
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I wrote down from Dr. Yang. He calls it Maoist hysteria.
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What does he mean, Tanya?
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I think that may have been my phrase rather than his,
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but it was a time of.
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It was a convulsion. I mean, there was something about
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the Cultural Revolution itself that was a sort of collective
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hysteria or collective delusion, you might say. As I said,
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there were motives that we would definitely recognize that will
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come into any kind of big campaign or movement, I suppose.
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People always have their personal interests, grudges, ambition, all of
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those things. But there was also a level of real belief,
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of fear for the revolution, of zealotry that really did
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transfix and grip the country. People really believed.
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Now we come to Dr. Chen, who talks about eating bitterness.
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What does that mean?
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It's a very common idiom in China. You come across
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it a lot. And it really means sort of suffering
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and getting on with suffering. just getting on with it.
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So it's something you'll see in job adverts, for example,
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that people will talk about sort of saying, you know,
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we want a worker who can eat bitterness. It means
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we want somebody who's not going to moan and is
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kind of going to buckle down. But it's also something
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that people will quite often talk about with a certain
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kind of pride. But it's also, of course, quite fatalistic
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because it's the sort of
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the power of the powerless
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in a sense. It's what you do when you can't
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do anything else.
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I think at one point you report there are 20,000
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psychiatrists or psychologists, I wasn't sure.
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Psychiatrists, I believe.
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Psychiatrists in a country of more than one billion people.
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Is psychiatry disregarded?
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It's medicalized. It's quite limited, I would say. Certainly psychology
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in Mao's time was shunned as a sort of bourgeois pseudoscience.
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It wasn't really tolerated. I suppose mental health care is
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in a sense being seen as something of a luxury,
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simply put. And so historically, there hasn't been a great
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deal of investment or interest in it. And it's only
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relatively recently, particularly within sort of the last 10 years
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or so, that psychotherapy, for example, has come to be
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recognized and sort of incorporated into mainstream health care, I
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would say.
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There's an irony here of when was the Cultural Revolution?
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You meet a novelist, I believe, and you are talking
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about how long did the Cultural Revolution last? And she
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makes an ironic remark, it ended last April when my
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father died. What was she conveying?
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Yeah, well, I thought I'd simply misunderstood her at first
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because I was so taken aback by that remark. But
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in fact... I'm not sure it was even ironic as
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much as heartfelt, which was simply that her father had
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never recovered from the breakdown he experienced in 1966 at
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the height of the Cultural Revolution when he had been
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persecuted by Red Guards. And so she said that right
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up to his death, the year before we spoke... He
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was still having delusions, I suppose, or psychotic episodes, where
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he was arguing with the Red Guards of the time
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as he saw it. It was as if they were
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still there. He was still living with this in a
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very real sense for him.
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The story is not complete because the generation,
the children
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and the grandchildren, have to play out their memories of
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what they learned from their grandparents. But again, it's critical
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to understand that Xi Jinping is influenced by all these contradictions.
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He is now called Xi Dada. That means Uncle Xi.
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Is that what that means? Xi Dada? Yes.
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This was very popular at the time I was there,
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sort of Uncle Xi. So a very... Intimate phrase again,
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I suppose, in a sense, which again takes us back
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to that sort of idea of Mao as being sort
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of close to you and always present and sort of
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understanding the people, being rather avuncular, even as he was
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also this sort of godlike figure. increasingly we're seeing Xi
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Jinping talked about as Chairman Xi, for example. So there's
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a real feeling of him having clearly not the sort
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of deified status that Mao had, but certainly a kind
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of glorification of him, which hasn't occurred with previous leaders,
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certainly since Deng Xiaoping, but even really since Mao.
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In these last years. China has turned into a completely
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different state than I remember in the first decade. Well,
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your experience climbing the steps of that museum, being followed
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by men in golfing clothes, is now commonplace, but more
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to that, it's done electronically and digitally. And there's a
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sense of the surveillance state and repression or suppression or
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banning of certain topics. Is the Cultural Revolution banned in
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modern China, to your understanding? I know you're not there now,
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but is it talked about the way that it was
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possible to talk about it from 2008 to 2015?
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No, it's steadily become a more sensitive subject, but it's
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not banned. It's important to say that. As I said,
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the party verdict was and is that it was a catastrophe,
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that Mao was misled into it by the Gang of Four. So,
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It's not something that is utterly taboo in the way that, say,
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the events of 1989 with the very bloody, brutal crackdown
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on the pro-democracy protests would be. But it is a
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very sensitive topic that the state would rather people did
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not discuss where possible or only discussed very briefly or
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obliquely or euphemistically. And I mean, I think the other
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sort of aspect of that, of course, that became very
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clear to me, and this is where the psychotherapists come in,
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is that perhaps when I started working on this area,
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I really thought it was the state repression that had
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created this silenced But I realized increasingly that a lot
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of it was about personal trauma as well. And it's
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those two forces together that have really conspired in this
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national amnesia around the Cultural Revolution. So while some people
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will look back at it, particularly the ones who sort
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of view it rather nostalgically, a lot of people just
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don't address it at all.
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Yes, you note that when you hear stories, they're true
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and false, and there's somewhere in between true and false.
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There's a turning that leaves things out that would be helpful.
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Is that your memory of compiling these things? You're never
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quite sure what they're leaving out. Yes.
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And I think everything that we know about memory generally
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is that memory is very fallible. It's a creative process
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in a sense. So when we remember something, we're not
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actually pulling out a whole scene that exists within our memory.
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We're essentially reassembling that memory from component pieces, um, And
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so memory is not consistent. It's very fallible. That's particularly
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the case where people have been traumatized because trauma really
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fractures memory. And then memory is also something that we
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use quite actively. We're trying to understand ourselves. It's about
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identity and about making meaning. And so for all those reasons,
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even when people are doing their sort of heartfelt best
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to give an honest account of events, It will be
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partial and it will be fragile and it will be fallible.
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Red Memory is the book. The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution.
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Tanya Bronegan is the author. I'm John Batchelor. You're listening
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to CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.