TRANSKRIP 🔗
WEBVTT
1
00:00:05.169 --> 00:00:07.030
This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Batchelor
2
00:00:07.049 --> 00:00:10.109
with Tanya Bronegan, who was eight years reporting for The
3
00:00:10.169 --> 00:00:14.890
Guardian in China. And in that time, she pursued and
4
00:00:15.289 --> 00:00:20.199
captured thoughts about the Red Guard of 1966 to 76.
5
00:00:20.199 --> 00:00:24.839
There's an irony here. Many of whom participants are now
6
00:00:24.980 --> 00:00:28.230
senior and are not necessarily going to be with us long.
7
00:00:28.300 --> 00:00:31.390
So this is a memory of that period. But Tanya
8
00:00:31.449 --> 00:00:36.039
also spends time with psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists in a meeting
9
00:00:36.100 --> 00:00:42.200
in Shanghai. And I'm struck by how they regard this as...
10
00:00:42.579 --> 00:00:46.670
I wrote down from Dr. Yang. He calls it Maoist hysteria.
11
00:00:46.710 --> 00:00:47.770
What does he mean, Tanya?
12
00:00:49.750 --> 00:00:51.840
I think that may have been my phrase rather than his,
13
00:00:51.880 --> 00:00:53.780
but it was a time of.
14
00:00:56.210 --> 00:00:58.630
It was a convulsion. I mean, there was something about
15
00:00:58.649 --> 00:01:01.530
the Cultural Revolution itself that was a sort of collective
16
00:01:01.570 --> 00:01:05.659
hysteria or collective delusion, you might say. As I said,
17
00:01:05.680 --> 00:01:11.200
there were motives that we would definitely recognize that will
18
00:01:11.239 --> 00:01:16.349
come into any kind of big campaign or movement, I suppose.
19
00:01:16.390 --> 00:01:20.030
People always have their personal interests, grudges, ambition, all of
20
00:01:20.090 --> 00:01:25.780
those things. But there was also a level of real belief,
21
00:01:27.340 --> 00:01:31.920
of fear for the revolution, of zealotry that really did
22
00:01:32.060 --> 00:01:34.959
transfix and grip the country. People really believed.
23
00:01:35.480 --> 00:01:38.920
Now we come to Dr. Chen, who talks about eating bitterness.
24
00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:39.579
What does that mean?
25
00:01:39.959 --> 00:01:42.799
It's a very common idiom in China. You come across
26
00:01:42.819 --> 00:01:45.719
it a lot. And it really means sort of suffering
27
00:01:45.760 --> 00:01:48.590
and getting on with suffering. just getting on with it.
28
00:01:48.599 --> 00:01:51.040
So it's something you'll see in job adverts, for example,
29
00:01:51.099 --> 00:01:56.480
that people will talk about sort of saying, you know,
30
00:01:56.500 --> 00:01:58.420
we want a worker who can eat bitterness. It means
31
00:01:58.459 --> 00:02:00.319
we want somebody who's not going to moan and is
32
00:02:00.340 --> 00:02:02.359
kind of going to buckle down. But it's also something
33
00:02:02.400 --> 00:02:05.239
that people will quite often talk about with a certain
34
00:02:05.319 --> 00:02:09.860
kind of pride. But it's also, of course, quite fatalistic
35
00:02:09.960 --> 00:02:12.460
because it's the sort of
Load full transcript
the power of the powerless
36
00:02:12.500 --> 00:02:14.740
in a sense. It's what you do when you can't
37
00:02:14.780 --> 00:02:15.520
do anything else.
38
00:02:16.159 --> 00:02:19.139
I think at one point you report there are 20,000
39
00:02:19.139 --> 00:02:21.580
psychiatrists or psychologists, I wasn't sure.
40
00:02:21.599 --> 00:02:22.620
Psychiatrists, I believe.
41
00:02:22.639 --> 00:02:25.400
Psychiatrists in a country of more than one billion people.
42
00:02:25.939 --> 00:02:27.599
Is psychiatry disregarded?
43
00:02:28.319 --> 00:02:35.550
It's medicalized. It's quite limited, I would say. Certainly psychology
44
00:02:35.610 --> 00:02:40.210
in Mao's time was shunned as a sort of bourgeois pseudoscience.
45
00:02:41.449 --> 00:02:47.150
It wasn't really tolerated. I suppose mental health care is
46
00:02:47.189 --> 00:02:49.349
in a sense being seen as something of a luxury,
47
00:02:50.189 --> 00:02:55.509
simply put. And so historically, there hasn't been a great
48
00:02:55.550 --> 00:02:58.099
deal of investment or interest in it. And it's only
49
00:02:58.180 --> 00:03:00.979
relatively recently, particularly within sort of the last 10 years
50
00:03:01.039 --> 00:03:05.240
or so, that psychotherapy, for example, has come to be
51
00:03:05.360 --> 00:03:09.979
recognized and sort of incorporated into mainstream health care, I
52
00:03:10.020 --> 00:03:10.379
would say.
53
00:03:10.560 --> 00:03:13.409
There's an irony here of when was the Cultural Revolution?
54
00:03:14.050 --> 00:03:18.289
You meet a novelist, I believe, and you are talking
55
00:03:18.349 --> 00:03:22.819
about how long did the Cultural Revolution last? And she
56
00:03:22.879 --> 00:03:25.919
makes an ironic remark, it ended last April when my
57
00:03:25.979 --> 00:03:27.539
father died. What was she conveying?
58
00:03:28.180 --> 00:03:30.500
Yeah, well, I thought I'd simply misunderstood her at first
59
00:03:30.520 --> 00:03:32.449
because I was so taken aback by that remark. But
60
00:03:32.490 --> 00:03:35.449
in fact... I'm not sure it was even ironic as
61
00:03:35.490 --> 00:03:38.620
much as heartfelt, which was simply that her father had
62
00:03:38.780 --> 00:03:43.460
never recovered from the breakdown he experienced in 1966 at
63
00:03:43.479 --> 00:03:46.340
the height of the Cultural Revolution when he had been
64
00:03:46.400 --> 00:03:51.919
persecuted by Red Guards. And so she said that right
65
00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:55.289
up to his death, the year before we spoke... He
66
00:03:55.370 --> 00:04:00.389
was still having delusions, I suppose, or psychotic episodes, where
67
00:04:00.430 --> 00:04:04.189
he was arguing with the Red Guards of the time
68
00:04:04.250 --> 00:04:05.810
as he saw it. It was as if they were
69
00:04:05.830 --> 00:04:09.110
still there. He was still living with this in a
70
00:04:09.129 --> 00:04:10.150
very real sense for him.
71
00:04:11.150 --> 00:04:16.449
The story is not complete because the generation,
the children
72
00:04:16.649 --> 00:04:20.360
and the grandchildren, have to play out their memories of
73
00:04:20.420 --> 00:04:24.050
what they learned from their grandparents. But again, it's critical
74
00:04:24.089 --> 00:04:27.879
to understand that Xi Jinping is influenced by all these contradictions.
75
00:04:28.759 --> 00:04:32.459
He is now called Xi Dada. That means Uncle Xi.
76
00:04:32.920 --> 00:04:35.610
Is that what that means? Xi Dada? Yes.
77
00:04:35.949 --> 00:04:37.990
This was very popular at the time I was there,
78
00:04:38.029 --> 00:04:41.579
sort of Uncle Xi. So a very... Intimate phrase again,
79
00:04:41.620 --> 00:04:43.750
I suppose, in a sense, which again takes us back
80
00:04:43.790 --> 00:04:45.670
to that sort of idea of Mao as being sort
81
00:04:45.689 --> 00:04:48.569
of close to you and always present and sort of
82
00:04:48.649 --> 00:04:53.040
understanding the people, being rather avuncular, even as he was
83
00:04:53.139 --> 00:04:57.290
also this sort of godlike figure. increasingly we're seeing Xi
84
00:04:57.310 --> 00:05:01.680
Jinping talked about as Chairman Xi, for example. So there's
85
00:05:01.689 --> 00:05:05.779
a real feeling of him having clearly not the sort
86
00:05:05.839 --> 00:05:10.560
of deified status that Mao had, but certainly a kind
87
00:05:10.600 --> 00:05:14.860
of glorification of him, which hasn't occurred with previous leaders,
88
00:05:15.490 --> 00:05:18.149
certainly since Deng Xiaoping, but even really since Mao.
89
00:05:19.170 --> 00:05:22.870
In these last years. China has turned into a completely
90
00:05:22.910 --> 00:05:26.509
different state than I remember in the first decade. Well,
91
00:05:26.529 --> 00:05:29.360
your experience climbing the steps of that museum, being followed
92
00:05:29.399 --> 00:05:32.879
by men in golfing clothes, is now commonplace, but more
93
00:05:32.899 --> 00:05:36.800
to that, it's done electronically and digitally. And there's a
94
00:05:36.879 --> 00:05:42.829
sense of the surveillance state and repression or suppression or
95
00:05:42.949 --> 00:05:48.029
banning of certain topics. Is the Cultural Revolution banned in
96
00:05:48.089 --> 00:05:50.709
modern China, to your understanding? I know you're not there now,
97
00:05:50.769 --> 00:05:54.060
but is it talked about the way that it was
98
00:05:54.160 --> 00:05:57.120
possible to talk about it from 2008 to 2015?
99
00:05:57.120 --> 00:06:02.660
No, it's steadily become a more sensitive subject, but it's
100
00:06:02.699 --> 00:06:05.899
not banned. It's important to say that. As I said,
101
00:06:05.920 --> 00:06:09.220
the party verdict was and is that it was a catastrophe,
102
00:06:09.300 --> 00:06:12.350
that Mao was misled into it by the Gang of Four. So,
103
00:06:13.240 --> 00:06:18.000
It's not something that is utterly taboo in the way that, say,
104
00:06:18.040 --> 00:06:22.519
the events of 1989 with the very bloody, brutal crackdown
105
00:06:22.579 --> 00:06:28.319
on the pro-democracy protests would be. But it is a
106
00:06:28.339 --> 00:06:33.360
very sensitive topic that the state would rather people did
107
00:06:33.399 --> 00:06:37.060
not discuss where possible or only discussed very briefly or
108
00:06:37.879 --> 00:06:42.149
obliquely or euphemistically. And I mean, I think the other
109
00:06:42.170 --> 00:06:44.009
sort of aspect of that, of course, that became very
110
00:06:44.050 --> 00:06:46.000
clear to me, and this is where the psychotherapists come in,
111
00:06:46.060 --> 00:06:49.360
is that perhaps when I started working on this area,
112
00:06:49.500 --> 00:06:51.990
I really thought it was the state repression that had
113
00:06:52.019 --> 00:06:55.910
created this silenced But I realized increasingly that a lot
114
00:06:55.930 --> 00:06:58.810
of it was about personal trauma as well. And it's
115
00:06:58.889 --> 00:07:02.449
those two forces together that have really conspired in this
116
00:07:02.490 --> 00:07:06.290
national amnesia around the Cultural Revolution. So while some people
117
00:07:06.350 --> 00:07:09.069
will look back at it, particularly the ones who sort
118
00:07:09.100 --> 00:07:12.620
of view it rather nostalgically, a lot of people just
119
00:07:12.639 --> 00:07:13.579
don't address it at all.
120
00:07:14.199 --> 00:07:17.660
Yes, you note that when you hear stories, they're true
121
00:07:17.740 --> 00:07:20.439
and false, and there's somewhere in between true and false.
122
00:07:21.199 --> 00:07:26.019
There's a turning that leaves things out that would be helpful.
123
00:07:26.050 --> 00:07:28.910
Is that your memory of compiling these things? You're never
124
00:07:28.949 --> 00:07:30.850
quite sure what they're leaving out. Yes.
125
00:07:30.970 --> 00:07:34.889
And I think everything that we know about memory generally
126
00:07:35.149 --> 00:07:38.509
is that memory is very fallible. It's a creative process
127
00:07:38.529 --> 00:07:40.689
in a sense. So when we remember something, we're not
128
00:07:41.470 --> 00:07:46.420
actually pulling out a whole scene that exists within our memory.
129
00:07:46.759 --> 00:07:52.720
We're essentially reassembling that memory from component pieces, um, And
130
00:07:52.819 --> 00:07:57.000
so memory is not consistent. It's very fallible. That's particularly
131
00:07:57.040 --> 00:07:59.839
the case where people have been traumatized because trauma really
132
00:07:59.879 --> 00:08:05.550
fractures memory. And then memory is also something that we
133
00:08:05.670 --> 00:08:08.790
use quite actively. We're trying to understand ourselves. It's about
134
00:08:08.870 --> 00:08:13.569
identity and about making meaning. And so for all those reasons,
135
00:08:14.689 --> 00:08:18.569
even when people are doing their sort of heartfelt best
136
00:08:18.709 --> 00:08:23.050
to give an honest account of events, It will be
137
00:08:23.079 --> 00:08:27.269
partial and it will be fragile and it will be fallible.
138
00:08:27.930 --> 00:08:31.870
Red Memory is the book. The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution.
139
00:08:32.230 --> 00:08:37.159
Tanya Bronegan is the author. I'm John Batchelor. You're listening
140
00:08:37.240 --> 00:08:40.600
to CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.