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.

This chapter uncovers efforts made by village and rural cadres in the immediate post-Mao era to reverse wrongful convictions adjudicated during the Socialist Education Movement (SEM). Drawing on previously unexamined materials, including the personal dossiers of rural cadres in eastern Hebei, it traces the decision-making and policy processes behind how ordinary individuals reexamined cases involving two types of alleged wrongdoings perpetuated by cadres: corruption and extramarital relationships. The chapter highlights the two processes that constituted the reexamination: (1) the implementation of limited transitional justice as the rebuilding of political-legal institutions through the formal mechanisms of the state; and (2) the informal, social processes of interpersonal reconciliation outside the purview of the state. Both dynamics contributed to helping locals come to terms with the complicated legacies of the SEM.