Tania Branigan reported from Beijing for The Guardian from 2008 until 2015, so Red Memory is part of a long and varied lineage of books about China by foreign correspondents. Most such volumes are of merely transitory interest. A small percentage have enduring value, such as the New Yorker writer Emily Hahn’s publications of the 1930s and Louisa Lim’s The People’s Republic of Amnesia (2014), which focused on the 1989 massacre that followed the Tiananmen Square protests and the struggles to suppress and keep alive memories of that event.

Two articles by Branigan that ran in 2013 – the first full year of the Xi Jinping era – caught my attention at the time. One was a whimsical look at an isolated village with a disproportionately large number of centenarians. Branigan mixed deft scene-setting with comments from a range of residents who had interesting things to say about how to live for a long time – or scoffed at the notion of there being a secret to longevity. Here, I thought, was someone with a knack for evoking rural locales and getting people to talk in revealing ways.

The same qualities stood out in the other article. At its heart was a conversation in Beijing with a diehard defender of Mao who insisted that the official line on the decade of the Cultural Revolution – a ten-year stretch that began with Red Guards attacking people for allegedly being insufficiently loyal to Mao in 1966 and ended with the Chairman’s death – was all wrong. The Communist Party did not swerve off course in Mao’s final years and then correct its trajectory under the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping. Mao was taking the country in the right direction; the derailment came with the veer towards capitalism late in the 1970s. The article opens with an eerie description of a village far from the capital devoted to the Chairman. Branigan describes a place devoid of any hint of Mao’s culpability for great suffering. ‘The East is Red’, a paean to the long-dead leader, ‘blasts through the speakers and echoes down the wide, empty streets, past the blazingly white statue of Chairman Mao,’ Branigan writes.

After reading those articles, I looked forward to the day I would hold in my hands a book by Branigan about Chinese villages in a time of rapid urbanisation. The book that she has written, however, is not that one. Yes, there are elements in it that fit with what first drew me to her work. One excellent chapter opens with the rural community that has become a shrine to Mao. Other strong chapters include striking depictions of visits to isolated locales, some of them in obscure urban settings rather than rural ones. ‘Luxuriant greenery crawled over marble monuments, immense and once stark white but now lichened and grey,’ she writes, describing a graveyard in Chongqing created to honour those who died in factional fighting that turned that far-western city’s streets into battle zones in 1966. Many chapters are enlivened by memorable profiles of individuals who spent at least part of their lives in villages. One chapter, for example, is peppered with quotes from her interviews with an obstinate and opinionated elderly composer who spent his youth and young adulthood being sent to different places as he alternately adhered to and rejected calls to have music serve political ends, paying a steep price for each act of defiance.

The work Red Memory reminded me of most was The People’s Republic of Amnesia, just with the tragedies of a decade rather than a year as its focus. The book is an exploration of how the Cultural Revolution is remembered by China’s populace. Branigan shows that people in China are not all on the same page when it comes to the complex events of the Chairman’s era. Chapters look in detail at such things as competing accounts of a famous act of violence early in the Cultural Revolution, which ended in the death of a teacher at the hands of her students, and museums that either support or challenge official narratives of China’s post-1949 trajectory.

Red Memory is not just an engagingly written book but also, for two reasons, a much-needed one. It is valuable, first, because it helps clear up lingering popular misunderstandings of a major event in Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution and its legacy have generated a rich scholarly literature, which Branigan mines. But many non-specialists still have a vision of it formed by one or two moving memoirs they have read. The problem is that some of the most influential of these make it easy for readers to assume that China’s population is made up of two groups: former Cultural Revolution perpetrators and their descendants and former Cultural Revolution victims and their descendants. In fact, the twists and turns of the event were such that many people were perpetrators at one point and victims at another. Many families had members who moved between these two categories.

The second reason we need a book like this is that coming to terms with the Cultural Revolution has taken on an added timeliness since Xi, the first paramount leader to grow up in the Mao era (he was born in 1953), took power. Some Cultural Revolution events probably played formative roles in shaping Xi’s personality. Being humiliated and having members of his family pitted against each other in its earliest phase, despite (or because of) the elite status they had thanks to his father’s role as a veteran revolutionary leader, surely scarred him. In addition, mythic narratives of Xi’s experiences during that decade figure centrally in the personality cult that he and those around him have created to justify his rule. Branigan handles particularly well the way Xi’s actions after he was sent to the countryside at fifteen have been turned into a legitimising story of personal transformation – of a city boy becoming a loved and admired leader of salt-of-the-earth men and women while in the political wilderness. Branigan writes, ‘When he took the top job, his book The Governance of China – more than 13 million copies distributed in thirty-three languages, and counting – hymned his grace in austerity, his selfless dedication to the peasants and the humility with which he learned from them (like Mao, was the unstated implication).’ Tales of his life are meant to show that he suffered during the Cultural Revolution, as so many did, but that this strengthened him in the end. Xi’s ‘story’ was ‘potent in an age where the gulfs between town and country, rulers and ruled, had expanded so fast’.

Taking note of how events from the period 1966–76 are used to burnish Xi’s authority underscores just how different the treatments of that era and the year 1989 are in China today. It is routine in soundbite-driven reports on China to find ‘Tiananmen Square’ and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ called a pair of ‘taboo topics’. In reality, while references to the protests and state violence of 1989 are off limits, the events of Mao’s final decade are allowed to be discussed, albeit only in ways that conform with sometimes shifting official visions of the past. This difference is among the many complex issues Branigan handles astutely in Red Memory, which is a book not about efforts to impose ‘amnesia’, but about the various ways that memories of a problematic period are continually being ‘disinterred, revived and nurtured’ by different groups and individuals, as well as at times ‘policed, exploited and suppressed’.