Review
Books
Culture
4 min read

Remembering red on red

The cultural revolution's factions have a disconcertingly contemporary feel.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A Chinese stamp depicts a map of the country from which people march holding a little red book
Long Live the Overall Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, stamp, 1968.
Public domain, via Wikimedia.

Modern era China has suffered human loss on an unimaginable scale.  The Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century cost over 20 million lives, more or less the global total from the Great War of 1914-18.  The vicious Japanese occupation in the 1930s led to 15 million Chinese deaths.  The famine begun in 1958, precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, caused around 40 million deaths.   

For one nation, however large, these are appalling losses.  By contrast, the fatalities in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) amounted to one million or more.  But the impact of this communist insurgency within a communist state is profoundly felt today, for its generation is still alive.  The trauma of those years has wounded the bodies and minds of millions; people who are unsure how to come to terms with it because of the uncertainty of what can be safely talked about.   

Mao’s incitement to younger people to turn on their teachers and elders in vitriolic criticism and violent attack, including torture and murder, was an attempt to re-boot the revolution by exterminating elements of western capitalism and traditional Chinese authority – the so-called Four Olds of ideas, culture, customs and habits.  The humiliation of teachers and parents was profoundly at odds with the Confucian culture of respect for elders, and it was embedded in young minds whose frontal lobes had not fully developed and where empathy was unformed.  The ensuing violence, pain and hardship was sickening, encompassing millions. 

Many of the bereaved and injured, the perpetrators and the victims, are still alive.  Some bury their memories as a way of coping; others search for meaning, but run up against an authoritarian government with new digital tools that make totalitarianism possible.  In her book Red Memory (Faber and Faber, 2024), Tania Branigan has produced a masterpiece of literature.  Interviewing survivors, bystanders and instigators of the violence, she has produced a history of their guilt and trauma, while reflecting on the uses of memory.   

The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.   

The word remember is coded with meaning.  When we piece together our memories of the past, we re-member them and the members are frequently not put back together again in the way an event happened.  This becomes more pronounced with the passage of time and the known tendency for people to make themselves more central to a story than they were at the time.  We also narrate the past in ways that burnish our reputation and preserve our conscience.  The Cultural Revolution has been reassembled in fragments; there is, and there will be, no initiative like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  People can make of it what they want; but without justice, the losses fester. 

The lack of a shared public memory also means the Cultural Revolution can be made to service any goal.  Detached from the moorings of truth, it becomes a malleable symbol.  Xi Jinping suffered himself.  His father was purged, denounced as a counter-revolutionary, and sent to hard work in rural Shaanxi Province.  This is his creation myth, and how it made a man out of him.  But there are other lessons to be taken from that time which he has strategically and wilfully ignored.  The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who followed Mao were determined that never again would one man develop a cult of personality like his, by ensuring limited presidential terms.  Xi Jinping has abolished this limit and introduced Xi Jinping Thought in an echo of Mao’s Little Red Book.  If there is one thing Xi has taken from his experience, it is the terror that chaos unleashes and the need to avoid it at all costs.  The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work

The cult of Mao was idolatrous, usurping Christ.  Jesus said he would divide families: ‘father against son…mother against daughter…mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law’.  This divisiveness was located in his claim to be the way, the truth and the life.  He did not seek to divide families, but knew his claims would do so.  Mao intentionally turned families against themselves - the foundation of a civil society - to ensure loyalty to him would not be compromised.          

It is easy to identify this several decades on and at the safe distance of several thousand miles.  Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work.  It is also sloppy to make links between the ideological fervour and purity of Maoism and today’s social media culture.  There is no direct link, despite some claims.  But the story of how groups coalesce righteously and are manipulated into ever more extreme forms of factional purity has a disconcertingly contemporary feel. 

Review
Art
Culture
Film & TV
War & peace
4 min read

Not for glory or galleries, capturing modern wars through art

Mary Kinmonth documents the battles women artists see.
In a bombed-out tiled room, two art works hang in the shape of a tiled jacket and shape
Second Hand 7, by Zhanna Kadyrova
Foxtrot Films.

 

When it comes to war, what do women see that men don’t? This is the question asked repeatedly throughout British filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s new documentary War Paint: Women at War. The third part of a trilogy, the film focuses on the stories of female artists who have created art in their experience of war and conflict. From British women during the London Blitz to those responding to contemporary conflicts in Iran, Ukraine and Sudan, the film takes a thoughtful look into how war has been experienced by those who have been previously excluded from the story. 

Zhanna Kadyrova is a Ukranian artist working from a progressing front line. One sequence shows a fight against time as her team attempts to remove one of her public sculptures as the front line draws closer. Kadyrova operates in recent conflict zones– one of her series involves transforming tiled walls in bombed-out rubble into clothes that appear to hang from the remaining walls. In the wake of violent destruction, Kadyrova wants you to remember the lives left behind. 

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and artist working from New York. Her work brings together the weapon, the human body, the veil, and the text of the Qu’ran to ask questions of the impacts of the Iranian war on women.  Neshat makes you look right into the eyes of these women– she puts weapons of war into their hands and thus gives them agency that the Iranian government has taken away. 

Marcelle Hanselaar’s work shows the unspoken side of war- depicting the aftermath of violence and sexual assault that many women experience when conflict rips through their homes. 

Women at War brings the audience through one female artist after another, depicting a diversity of styles, voices, and perspectives that range from official war commissions to illegal graffiti. The artists shown don’t even all agree with filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s premise - that women always see things differently from men. But what they bring together is a view of war far removed from ideas of national glory that often line the halls of national galleries. 

The filmmaker’s own art teacher, the painter Maggi Hambling, says this: 

“For men, victory and defeat marks the end of a war. For the woman, the war doesn’t end.” 

Knowing the consequences and aftermath of war– destroyed communities, post traumatic stress disorder, sexual violence, broken families, that war is more than valiance– isn’t a perspective held by women alone. 

According to a recent YouGov poll, “a third of 18-40 year olds would refuse to serve in the event of a world war – even if the UK were under imminent threat of invasion.” Among reasons listed are an unwillingness “to fight for the rich and powerful – who they see as profiteers or otherwise unfairly able to avoid the consequences of conflict themselves.”

As one respondent put it: "My life is more valuable than being wasted in a war caused by rich people’s greed."

Women have been speaking up for the last 50 years, and the young have heard them. War is not glory, but trauma. Young people see this when they look around. They don’t easily buy into nationalist rhetoric and have no pretenses about the glory of war. They know war is not a place to seek accolades upon accolades, but an evil reality that pays an inordinate toll on human society. 

Today, global tensions are high, and war seems more possible a reality for many in England than previously. Keir Starmer has said the government will increase military defence spending to 2.5 per cent of the national budget by 2027. But Brits aren’t lining up to buy their uniforms. 

If the UK government expects its young citizens to prepare for conflict, they need to be honest about what that involves. They need to be prepared to face a knowing crowd about the realities of war and show a willingness to fight for their lives during peacetime. It’s not that young people are politically disinterested or unwilling to take a stand when it matters. Students at universities rising up in pro-Palestine protests or climate activism reveal that they care greatly about the world they are living in. They want to take an active role in shaping it, and aren’t afraid to face consequences if they find a worthy fight. 

Political commentators used to think we have reached “the end of history” with liberal democracy the last man standing. But War Paint: Women at War shows us that even an end to war doesn’t bring the end of suffering. It complicates the narrative that war is a path to victory. Everyone pays the price of war, yet those in power rarely bear the burden. If leaders want young people to fight for their country, they must first prove they are fighting for them. Otherwise, no one will answer the call.

 

View stills from the film and find screening times.

Watch the trailer

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