Victims Perpetrators And The Role Of Law In Maoist China

The relationship between politics and law in the early People’s Republic of China was highly contentious. Periods of intentionally excessive campaign justice intersected with attempts to carve out professional standards of adjudication and to offer retroactive justice for those deemed to have been unjustly persecuted. How were victims and perpetrators defined and dealt with during different stages of the Maoist era and beyond? How was law practiced, understood, and contested in local contexts? This volume adopts a case study approach to shed light on these complex questions. By way of a close reading of original case files from the grassroots level, the contributors detail procedures and question long-held assumptions, not least about the Cultural Revolution as a period of “lawlessness.”

How can a dictatorship cope with the legacy of atrocities committed in its own name? This cutting-edge volume addresses the question of historical justice in post-Mao China through issues of property, rehabilitation, reconciliation, and memory. It provides a fresh perspective on Chinese history and politics, socialisms and transitional justice.

The rural county of Poyang, lying in northern Jiangxi Province, goes largely unmentioned in the annals of modern Chinese history. Yet records from the Public Security Bureau archive hold a treasure trove of data on the every day interactions between locals and the law. Drawing on these largely overlooked resources, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman follows four criminal cases that together uniquely illuminate the dawning years of the People's Republic. Using a unique casefile approach, Brian DeMare recounts stories of a Confucian scholar who found himself allied with bandits and secret society members; a farmer who murdered a cadre; an evil tyrant who exploited religious traditions to avoid prosecution; and a merchant accused of a crime he did not commit. Each case is a tremendous tale, complete with memorable characters, plot twists, and drama. And while all depict the enemies of New China, each also reveals details of village life during this most pivotal moment of recent Chinese history. Together, the narratives bring rural regime change to life, illustrating how the Chinese Communist Party cemented its authority through mass political campaigns, careful legal investigations, and sheer patience. Balancing storytelling with historical inquiry, this book is at once a grassroots view of rural China's legal system and its application to apparent counterrevolutionaries, and a lesson in archival research itself.

An international team of scholars explore China's transformative revolutionary decade, the 1950s, calling into question existing narratives.

This book translates and contextualizes the recollections of men and women who built, lived, and worked in some of the factory compounds relocated from China’s most cosmopolitan city—Shanghai. Small Third Line factories became oases of relatively prosperous urban life among more impoverished agricultural communities. These accounts, plus the guiding questions, contextual notes, and further readings accompanying them, show how everyday lives fit into the sweeping geopolitical changes in China and the world during the Cold War era. Furthermore, they reveal how the Chinese Communist Party’s military-industrial strategies have shaped China’s economy and society in the post-Mao era. The approachable translations and insight into areas of life rarely covered by political or diplomatic histories like sexuality and popular culture make this book highly accessible for classroom use and the general-interest reader.

In The Geography of Injustice, Barak Kushner argues that the war crimes tribunals in East Asia formed and cemented national divides that persist into the present day. In 1946 the Allies convened the Tokyo Trial to prosecute Japanese wartime atrocities and Japan's empire. At its conclusion one of the judges voiced dissent, claiming that the justice found at Tokyo was only "the sham employment of a legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge." War crimes tribunals, Kushner shows, allow for the history of the defeated to be heard. In contemporary East Asia a fierce battle between memory and history has consolidated political camps across this debate. The Tokyo Trial courtroom, as well as the thousands of other war crimes tribunals opened in about fifty venues across Asia, were legal stages where prosecution and defense curated facts and evidence to craft their story about World War Two. These narratives and counter narratives form the basis of postwar memory concerning Japan's imperial aims across the region. The archival record and the interpretation of court testimony together shape a competing set of histories for public consumption. The Geography of Injustice offers compelling evidence that despite the passage of seven decades since the end of the war, East Asia is more divided than united by history.

Usage of the political keyword 'propaganda' by the Chinese Communist Party has changed and expanded over time. These changes have been masked by strong continuities spanning periods in the history of the People's Republic of China from the Mao Zedong era (1949–76) to the new era of Xi Jinping (2012–present). Redefining Propaganda in Modern China builds on the work of earlier scholars to revisit the central issue of how propaganda has been understood within the Communist Party system. What did propaganda mean across successive eras? What were its institutions and functions? What were its main techniques and themes? What can we learn about popular consciousness as a result? In answering these questions, the contributors to this volume draw on a range of historical, cultural studies, propa­ganda studies and comparative politics approaches. Their work captures the sweep of propaganda – its appearance in everyday life, as well as during extraordinary moments of mobilization (and demobilization), and its systematic continuities and discontinuities from the perspective of policy-makers, bureaucratic function­aries and artists. More localized and granular case studies are balanced against deep readings and cross-cutting interpretive essays, which place the history of the People's Republic of China within broader temporal and comparative frames. Addressing a vital aspect of Chinese Communist Party authority, this book is meant to provide a timely and comprehensive update on what propaganda has meant ideologically, operationally, aesthetically and in terms of social experience.

This book investigates handwritten entertainment fiction (shouchaoben wenxue) which circulated clandestinely during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lena Henningsen’s analyses of exemplary stories and their variation across different manuscript copies brings to light the creativity of these readers-turned-copyists. Through copying, readers modified the stories and became secondary authors who reflected on the realities of the Cultural Revolution. Through an enquiry into actual reading practices as mapped in autobiographical accounts and into intertextual references within the stories, the book also positions manuscript fiction within the larger reading cosmos of the long 1970s. Henningsen analyzes the production, circulation and consumption of these texts, considering continuities across the alleged divide of the end of the Mao-era and the beginning of the reform period. The book further reveals how these texts achieved fruitful afterlives as re-published bestsellers or as adaptations into comic books or movies, continuing to shape the minds of their audience and the imaginations of the past. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.