Cultural Revolutionary Legacies and the Question of Historical Justice

In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party initially tried to prevent agonizing debates about questions of accountability for the crimes committed during that period.  With the trials against the Gang of Four and the military leaders associated with Lin Biao, a few individuals were publicly declared to be responsible for criminal acts committed during the Cultural Revolution, seemingly rendering everyone else a victim.  Coping with the legacies of the Cultural Revolution, however, remained much more complex than this simplistic portrayal reveals.  Starting in the early 1970s, specific policy decisions or violent confrontations were reviewed repeatedly by both party committees and the reemerging judicial organs, which decided upon reprimands, sentences or rehabilitations.  The standards of adjudication changed over time in close correspondence with changes in national policy, finally resulting in the so-called “restoring of order from chaos” (boluan fanzheng) in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  In my initial remarks, I will rely on a few selected examples from different regions to reveal the complexities of the drawn-out process of selectively using judicial means to settle Cultural Revolutionary atrocities.  The examples will highlight the necessity to take local circumstances and political networks into account and demonstrate that social stability rather than historical justice remained the primary interest of Communist Party leadership in the early reform era.