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 captures and closely analyzes the multiplicity of narratives developed by designated Gang of Four followers purged from the regime following the end of the Cultural Revolution. The CCP authorities have labeled these so-called followers as “perpetrators” of the Cultural Revolution. Using oral histories, the chapter shows how those officially labeled as “perpetrators” rarely and only indirectly portray themselves as such; more often they see themselves as victims or even heroes. The chapter further illustrates how the party-state has never been able to silence alternative voices on the Cultural Revolution within society, nor can it addresses the issue of responsibility for past violence by categorizing perpetrators and victims, two categories that are often confronted with a complex reality. The chapter argues that the processes of punishing perpetrators in post-Cultural Revolution China, or the absence thereof, have continued to influence the way the past is remembered and not remembered in present Chinese society.

The return of personal belongings has the potential to anchor the lofty rhetoric of historical justice in people’s everyday material realities. However, in the case of the Chinese government’s efforts to return belongings seized by Red Guards in the house raids of 1966 it is necessary to separate the history of restitution from the politics of history to understand how one relates to the other. This chapter analyzes the structure put in place by the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, on orders of the Chinese Communist Party, to begin returning possessions less than a year after the house raids. By reassembling documents that have survived from this process, it shows that the scope of early restitution, which occurred when the Chinese Communist Party was still affirming the actions of the Red Guards, was far more important than has previously been assumed. In fact, the policy of restitution went through not one but two moments of transition: the first when the Cultural Revolution entered its corrective phase and the second when the post-Mao leadership declared the house raids illegal. Each moment saw an expansion of restitution informed by a shift in how the Chinese state defined entitlement and membership in the political community. It is important to avoid interpreting early restitution through the explanatory framework that emerged after Mao’s death not only because it distorts the facts and motivations of the earlier process, but also because the separation of the two allows for a better understanding of both, and in particular of how restitution became, in the end, concrete proof of what it meant to come to terms with the Cultural Revolution.

This chapter demonstrates how the genesis, growth, and evolution of the Sino-Pakistani nexus has impinged on India’s security interests since the early 1960s. Since then, the Sino-Pakistani strategic partnership has steadily deepened. By the late 1980s, for all practical purposes, Pakistan had emerged as a strategic surrogate for the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in South Asia. Given the PRC’s reliance on Pakistan to pursue its security interests in South Asia and Pakistan’s goal of balancing against India, the relationship is likely to persist in the foreseeable future.

The chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning historiography of the People’s Republic of China, especially of the early period between 1949 and 1978, and suggests how we might integrate this new work into narratives of the Chinese past and present. In working through the research of the past thirty years the findings not only help us identify new areas of research, bur also rephrase some of the initial questions. The chapter highlights areas in which reconsidering PRC history seems especially necessary: transnational flows, violence and social transformation.

Using the example of 1950s historiography, this chapter aims to analyze why the CCP has not succeeded in dominating China’s collective memory. In doing so, it will identify four main reasons for the party’s failure: first, the weaknesses of the resolution from 1981; second, the phase(s) of intellectual and academic freedoms in the 1980s; third, the CCP’s inability to overcome inner-party disagreements on the question of how the Party should assess its own “historical mistakes”; fourth, the fact that memories cannot be suppressed permanently. The chapter shows that the historiography is an ongoing process that is not yet completed, and that China’s current president Xi Jinping’s politics of history has led the CCP into a dead end since this political approach attempts both to suppress alternative views of post-1949 history and to finally establish official narratives on a long-term basis.

East Asia had incorporated Western music well before dodecaphony was introduced. Its foray into atonality and dodecaphony is unsurprising. Japan, as the first country to fully embrace Westernisation, played a major role. Developments of dodecaphony in China and Korea were connected to Japan through an active network of ideas, print media, and movement of people in the region. Despite their shared resources, however, wars and politics determined whether or not (and when) composers in different East Asian countries had the liberty to explore dodecaphony. China was close to developing dodecaphonic compositions before being stopped after the founding of Communist China in 1949. The post-Mao introduction of dodecaphony, led by Luo Zhongrong, was a late ‘arrival’. Japanese composers’ initial enthusiasm for dodecaphony did not gain in significance. Yoritsune Matsudaira and Joji Yuasa were representative. In Korea, led by Isang Yun and Sukhi Kang, serialism was employed thoughtfully by several generations of composers throughout their creative output.

This chapter defines serialism in terms of dodecaphonic technique, beginning with a discussion of the role of analysis in relationship to performance. Whilst Webern’s Variations op. 27 have been the subject of exhaustive analysis by other commentators, the present discussion takes a somewhat different approach, considering the interpretive insights gained by a study of sketch material. The composer’s drafts are examined in relation to the published score for their potential to enrich the performer’s perceptions. The second part of the chapter traces the movement to integral serialism in the post-war period, and the challenges of ‘pointillist’ scores with their profusion of agogic and dynamic marks, which leave seemingly little scope for interpretation in the traditional sense. The contributions of Boulez and Stockhausen to the piano repertoire are considered, and a discussion of the role of the interpreter in indeterminate scores of the period occupies the final section of the chapter.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the Sent-Down Youth Movement (1968–1980), the latter bringing millions of urban youth to the countryside, the city and the countryside converged in unprecedented ways. Focusing on the period from 1966 until the establishment of the One Child Policy in 1979, this chapter uses rare court records, medical guides, and memoirs to analyze the evolving tensions among national directives, local policy implementation, and grassroots sexual realities. Although the deployment of minimally trained “barefoot doctors” helped integrate state-led family planning into the rural healthcare system, local authorities used the court system to arbitrarily police abortions. By creating unprecedented opportunities for sex among unmarried youth with limited access to prophylactics, the state paved the way for the contemporary reliance on abortion as a primary tool for family planning.

Societies are transformed by total wars, which mobilize entire populations, penetrate society as a whole, and involve both civilian and military populations as direct targets of aggression, as well as resources for inflicting harm and destroying the enemy. Total wars bring about enormous (forced) movement of populations, as well as changes in gender roles and social class relations. Because most men are directly involved on the front lines of the war effort, new opportunities are created for women to become active in areas from which they were previously excluded. Also, because of the enormous sacrifices made by the general population and the real possibility of national defeat at the hands of the enemy, the rich also become more ready to make some sacrifices. During total wars, the rich–poor divide becomes smaller, as the rich make larger contributions toward the war effort. However, as discussed in this chapter, evidence suggests that this increase in political plasticity is only temporary. The rich–poor divide has increased enormously since World War II.

As a response to the totalitarian monstrosities of the dehumanization of hundreds of millions of people in the Cultural Revolution, human dignity was enshrined in the Chinese Constitution, not only as a foundational right but also as a basic principle. The basic rights that are necessary to implement this basic principle were all enshrined in the Constitution. China has made notable progress in protecting the nonpolitical dignity of Chinese citizens by means of civil, criminal, and administrative law. However, constitutional principles and rights in China are not justiciable, which together with other factors, such as the nonexistence of a robust tribunal of public opinion, has led to the fact that the political dignity of Chinese citizens – something that is essential to their independence and autonomy — however remains unprotected in practice. There is still a long way to go for China to transform the constitutional dream of inviolable human dignity into a reality.

One of the most influential individuals of modern history is Mao Zedong – or Chairman Mao. He lived an extraordinary life. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist ideology of communism while a student at Peking University, Mao was a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1927. He immediately led an insurrection – the Autumn Harvest Uprising – that initiated a civil war with the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party that then ruled China. It was a war that would last until 1949 (although interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945). When Mao’s CPC finally defeated the nationalists, the KMT and its followers retreated to Taiwan. This is the reason that China still does not recognise Taiwan as an independent country today.

Chapter 4 details the encroachment of the government’s silencing machine on Hong Kong citizens’ daily lives at the height of the Cold War. The period from the 1950s to the 1960s saw CCP cultural infiltration into various sectors of Hong Kong in an attempt to propagate anti-colonial patriotic ideas and communist ideologies. The CCP not only published, directly or indirectly, newspapers, books and magazines in Hong Kong, but also sponsored schools and film studios and staged theatrical performances. Together with the co-existence of KMT supporters and intelligence agents of other world powers in the colony, Hong Kong became an important ideological battleground of the Cold War in Asia. The colonial government responded by hardening its monitoring of newspapers and schools, suppressing them when necessary. It also monopolised the preparation of news bulletins for radio broadcasting and imposed political censorship on radio entertainment programmes, films and theatrical performances. Radical movements of the KMT and CCP also led to the two most violent riots in colonial Hong Kong history, in 1956 and 1967, respectively, in which a large number of political dissidents were deported, detained without trial and imprisoned for speech offences.

As reports of mass famine turned from a trickle to a flood in 1960, the leadership slowly realized that the party had made a mistake of historical proportion. According to Ministry of Public Security data, 675 counties and cities had death rates exceeding 2 percent of population in the early 1960s, compared to the normal 1 percent or so. In forty counties, mainly in Anhui, Sichuan, Henan, Guizhou, and Qinghai, the death rates exceeded 10 percent of the population (Yang et al. 2012: 395). Economists and demographers estimate that the Great Leap Forward caused sixteen to thirty million unnatural deaths in the early 1960s (Kung and Lin 2003). The policy of using confiscated grain to finance a rapid buildup of industrial capacity championed by Mao and his colleagues had led to one of the greatest man-made disasters in the twentieth century.