Justice After Mao
The Politics of Historical Truth in the People's Republic of China

A ground-breaking collection addressing historical justice post-Mao through issues of property, rehabilitation, reconciliation, and memory.

Daniel Leese (Edited by), Amanda Shuman (Edited by)

9781009261296, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 September 2023

334 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.3 cm, 0.63 kg

'In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, China's newly installed Party authorities found the need to create a new discursive environment to enable their modernization drive. With the reformist discourse of 'socialist rule of law' now replacing Maoist revolutionary justice, many thousands of victims of Cultural Revolution persecution were rehabilitated in the period beginning 1979 to the mid-1980s. This important collection of studies on redressing Cultural Revolution injustices sheds much needed light on this significant time in China's recent history. Its main contribution is not only that it provides, for the first time in book length form, an insight into the minutiae of the rehabilitation campaign. It also helps us to understand how the Party sought to correct its own wrongs in ways that worked to uphold - rather than undermine - the very institutional structures of power that facilitated the Cultural Revolution chaos.' Susan Trevaskes, Griffith University

How can a dictatorship cope with the legacy of injustices and atrocities committed in its own name? This was one of the pressing questions the Chinese Communist Party leadership faced after the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 and the end of the Cultural Revolution. This collection presents ground-breaking, original research to address the question of historical justice in the Party's attempt to survive politically despite rampant factionalism and widespread political persecution. The volume traces complex questions of property restitution, fostering reconciliation within local communities, and establishing new standards of truth. Contributions also investigate how various actors remember the period in the present. The post-Mao period provides a lens through which to view strategies of coping with a violent past under state socialism, highlighting how selectively applied approaches now associated with the concept of transitional justice may even serve to strengthen rather than subvert authoritarian rule.

Introduction Daniel Leese and Amanda Shuman
Part I. Property: 1. Between revolution and law: Merchant families' struggles for property rights and justice under Mao and Deng, 1949–1984 Zhaojin Zeng
2. What right to property when rebellion is justified? Revolution and restitution in Shanghai Puck Engman
3. The pursuit of transitional justice from below: A case study from Shanghai Qin Shao
Part II. The Mechanics of Rehabilitation: 4. Dealing with victims of the Cultural Revolution: The case of the Guangxi killings, 1983–1987 Guoqing Song
5. Villagers, cadres, and the politics of rehabilitation in post-Mao China, 1979–1982 Long Yang
Part III. The Politics of Truth: 6. Local reassessment versus central prestige: Tao Zhu, land reform, and the Pine Hill incident Mark Czeller
7. New verdicts on the printed page: Expurgating the ,Gang of Four, in the publishing industry, 1976–1978 Matthew Wills
Part IV. Memory: 8. Narratives and voices of Cultural Revolution ,perpetrators, Man Zhang
9. Coping with a traumatic past: Wang Bing's documentaries He Fengming and Dead Souls Flora Lichaa
10. From individual guilt to public remorse: The ,Confessions, (Chanhuilu) column in the journal Yanhuang Chunqiu Sebastian Veg
Afterword: The Chinese Communist Party's politics of historical justice in perspective Daniel Leese.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]