Tangled Tales of a Traumatic Time

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.