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Page 1 of 3

  • Afterword

  • Edited by Daniel Leese, University of Freiburg, Amanda Shuman, University of Freiburg
  • Book:
    Justice After Mao
    Published online:
    31 August 2023
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023, pp 274-288

  • Summary

    The Afterword reflects on the peculiarities of the CCP’s politics of historical justice. Placing the results of the volume in the larger context of transitional justice research, it discusses the reasons why the policies of “bringing order out of chaos” (boluan fanzheng) generated short-term cohesion but did not result in meaningful political reconciliation. The party leadership, despite a few alternative statements by high-ranking leaders in the early 1980s, did not allow for multivocal discussions of guilt and responsibility. Instead, it attempted to pacify the populace through financial subsidies, symbolic rehabilitations, and highly selective persecutions of supposed perpetrators. The core strategy under Deng Xiaoping was to overcome the legacies of the past through a focus on economic development and the depoliticization of past conflicts. An increasingly rigid truth regime was installed and enshrined in the 1981 resolution on party history. The contradictions between lived experience and these official formulae resulted in a pronounced shift toward historical amnesia in the following decades, as the legacies of the Mao era have become increasingly incorporated into a larger narrative of national rejuvenation and regaining great power status.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Daniel Leese, University of Freiburg, Amanda Shuman, University of Freiburg
  • Book:
    Justice After Mao
    Published online:
    31 August 2023
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    The Introduction broadly contextualizes how the CCP dealt with historical injustices after Mao Zedong’s death. It provides the necessary framework for understanding the processes and practices that are further explored and examined in the following sections and chapters of the book while shedding light on how selectively applied approaches today associated with the concept of transitional justice may serve to strengthen rather than subvert authoritarian rule. It also highlights the most outstanding features of the CCP’s politics of historical justice before placing these strategies against the backdrop of recent debates on crucial paradigms of transitional justice. Specifically, it introduces two key channels (“property” and “the mechanics of rehabilitation”) through which the government and public sought to concretely redress Mao-era historical injustices and efforts to construct meaningful “truths” of these injustices (“the politics of truth” and “memory”)

Justice After Mao
  • The Politics of Historical Truth in the People's Republic of China
  • Edited by Daniel Leese, Amanda Shuman
  • Published online:
    31 August 2023
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023
  • 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.

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