Zheng and a group of writers under the joint pseudonym "T. P. Sym" translated and abridged it from the Chinese work 红色纪念碑 Hongse jinianbei (Red monument; Taipei: Huashi, 1993).

Zheng uses local government documents, eye-witness accounts and confessions to describe the factional violence and even cannibalism that occurred in the Guangxi Massacre during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

[4] His initial talks with local officials and journalists led him to center his investigation on Wuxuan County, where the most intense factional fighting had taken place.

[8] Zheng blamed the savagery and cannibalism on "class struggle" and "revolutionary revenge", since members of the losing side were accused of being landlords, "bad elements", "rightists" or supporters of opposing officials.

The reviewer Key Ray Chong said that the English version is "an entirely new book in the sense that less-substantive chapters or parts have been eliminated, to the extent that the original Chinese narratives are rendered more precise and their impact more powerful for non-Chinese readers".

Zheng Yi uses eyewitness testimony, talks with the murderers and government documents, but also other non-fiction forms such as literary interpretation, political analysis and ethnographic description.

[13] Katherine E. Palmer wrote that while Zheng showed that incidents of cannibalism did take place, he resorts to "patronizing depictions of the Zhuang ethnic group" as explanations.

[14] Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals also question Zheng's assumption that communism was the force that compelled the victors towards cannibalism, noting that similar incidents occurred under pressure from the Nationalist secret police in the Republican period.

Although Scarlet Memorial in its shortened form "does not draw an explicit connection between its writing and the aftermath of the massacre of June 4, 1989, the contemporary reference is inescapable: in crying out against the unleashing of mass slaughter and cannibalism as a political weapon in the 1960s, Zheng Yi is also decrying the incumbent regime's failure, yet again, to take anything but a despotic and adversarial stance vis-a-vis its own people".

[16] The literary critic Gang Yue devoted a section of The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China to the book.

[18] Schreiber argues against Yue's assumption: polemic is in fact expressed through ethnography and investigative journalism, as both forms were suppressed under Mao's dictatorship and Zheng Yi's use of them cannot be divorced from his political claims.