The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976, CR hereafter) remains one of the most turbulent and violent episodes in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During this decade-long period of social and political upheaval, mass mobilization, political purges and factional conflict resulted in widespread human suffering. Recent studies estimate that more than 20 million people were persecuted during the CR, and at least 1.6 million died, although the true extent of the violence remains contested.Footnote 1
Efforts to address the legacies of the CR began even before its formal end. After the Ninth Party Congress in 1969, the Party initiated a process later termed “policy fixing” (luoshi zhengce 落实政策), which was aimed at restoring order by selectively rehabilitating purged cadres.Footnote 2 This limited redress was expanded following the death of Lin Biao 林彪 in 1971,Footnote 3 but remained cautious and incomplete.Footnote 4 Following the death of Mao Zedong 毛泽东 and the downfall of the “Gang of Four” (sirenbang 四人帮) in 1976, the Party launched a series of redress campaigns, including criticism of the Gang of Four, the reversal of unjust verdicts and the prosecution of cliques associated with Lin Biao and Jiang Qing 江青, in an effort to reassert control and stabilize society. These efforts culminated in the 1981 “Resolution on certain historical issues of the Party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,” a document which condemned the CR’s excesses but upheld the Party’s overall legitimacy.Footnote 5
The 1981 Resolution was not sufficient in itself to resolve the contradictions stemming from the recent past, and so around this time, many provinces launched internal investigations into the CR-era violence. These inquiries aimed to clarify facts, settle disputes and strengthen organizational cohesion.Footnote 6 However, they operated within strict political parameters that avoided implicating the Party or challenging its foundational myths. In October 1982, the Party initiated a campaign to purge “three types of people” (sanzhongren 三种人), or radicals, who had risen to power during the CR.Footnote 7 Beginning in 1983, these efforts were incorporated into the nationwide Party rectification campaign (zhengdang 整党), which sought to fundamentally repudiate the CR both ideologically and organizationally. As part of this broader programme of political re-education and ideological rectification, the campaign increasingly emphasized historical investigation and reflection on the injustices committed during the CR.Footnote 8 Across China, state organs and institutions were tasked with compiling internal histories of persecution, factional violence and institutional collapse. Described as “lessons in blood” (dai xue de jiaoxun 带血的教训) by Party propaganda, these narratives sought to condemn the CR while reinforcing the Party’s control over stability, ideology and historical interpretation.Footnote 9
Recent scholarship has significantly deepened our understanding of the processes surrounding the CR and its aftermath. Many studies have highlighted the central role played by state actors in orchestrating violence during the CR,Footnote 10 while others have explored the politics of memory, amnesia, official historiography and the long-term political legacies of mass violence.Footnote 11 However, few studies have systematically examined how the Party has managed historical accountability in the wake of mass political violence. The concept of transitional justice, although rarely applied to the Chinese context, has gained relevance in recent years, particularly in the study of authoritarian transitional justice.Footnote 12 These works offer new insights into how regimes pursue historical reckoning without democratization or public participation.
This article integrates these perspectives to explore the often-overlooked case of historical redress within the Party. It focuses on Guangxi, the province that saw the worst political violence during the CR and which was notably late in addressing its aftermath.Footnote 13 The violence peaked in 1968 during a systematic crackdown against the “22 April” (si er er 四二二), a rebel faction that had persistently challenged the authority of Wei Guoqing 韦国清, the highest-ranking local leader. Justified as an effort to eliminate “counterrevolutionary elements” in line with the Central Committee’s “3 July Orders” (qi san bugao 七三布告),Footnote 14 this campaign resulted in nearly 90,000 deaths, the highest death toll of all provinces from intra-state violence conflict during the CR.Footnote 15 Much of the violence was driven by the already highly militarized local government,Footnote 16 in coordination with the pro-Wei United Command (lianzhi 联指), highlighting the deep entanglement between factional politics and repressive authority.
Unlike most other provinces, which had largely concluded their redress work by 1982, Guangxi’s reckoning only began in earnest in 1983 under new leadership with direct central supervision. This unusual situation arose because the Central Committee no longer trusted the local authorities to handle the reckoning independently and instead replaced the provincial leadership and dispatched a central work team (zhongyang gongzuozu 中央工作组)Footnote 17 to oversee the process.Footnote 18 The provincial authorities launched wide-ranging investigations, dispatching teams to revisit local events, collect testimonies and compile internal documentation. These efforts were embedded within the national rectification campaign and the broader ideological repudiation of the CR, yet stood out for their intensity and delayed implementation. As much of the country shifted towards reform and economic development, Guangxi remained preoccupied with confronting the legacy of its intra-state violence. In this sense, it was both an outlier and a belated participant in the Party’s larger project of political consolidation.
Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials, internal historiographical compilations, memoirs and oral histories, this article argues that the official inquiries conducted in Guangxi (1983–1987) represent a distinctive Party-managed historical reckoning, which was less driven by justice than by the imperative to reassert political legitimacy and unify ideological understanding within the Party ranks. While not officially termed transitional justice, these efforts resembled truth-seeking through their fact-finding, symbolic victim rehabilitation and narrative construction, yet they remained firmly under Party control.Footnote 19 Public participation was minimal, independent oversight was absent and the dissemination of findings was restricted to ensure that the historical reckoning was contained within politically safe boundaries.
While standard transitional justice models assume regime change and broad public engagement, the Guangxi case exemplifies a distinctive form of Party-led, contained transitional justice: a selective truth-seeking that neither openly represses nor fully confronts the violent past. This approach curates narratives that fold episodes of violence into the Party’s wider story of resilience, rectification and progress, reinforcing regime legitimacy while limiting public participation and independent oversight. By foregrounding this model, the article contributes to wider debates on transitional justice in authoritarian settings, challenging assumptions that meaningful redress requires openness or pluralism. It illustrates how truth inquiries can be instrumentalized to consolidate authoritarian rule while fragmenting collective memory and constraining reconciliation, thus leaving a complex legacy for victims, perpetrators and society.
Reframing Violence: From Expediency to Accountability
The reckoning with the CR violence in Guangxi did not happen all at once; rather it unfolded through the gradual reconstruction of official narratives. From the end of mass violence to the early 1980s, the Party’s explanations shifted from expedient justifications to limited notions of accountability, incorporating elements of justice but always constrained by the need to restore legitimacy and maintain control. Although this shift was tightly bounded by authoritarian logic, it laid the ideological and bureaucratic groundwork for more systematic investigations after 1983. This process formed a contained transitional justice: a top-down effort to restore legitimacy, selectively address trauma and preserve the Party’s monopoly over history.
The earliest attempt to explain the violence began in 1969 once the bloodshed had subsided.Footnote 20 By 1972, amid the nationwide campaign to criticize Lin Biao,Footnote 21 the Guangxi leadership framed the violence as a result of Lin’s subversive influence via his loyal supporter, Huang Yongsheng 黄永胜, the former Guangzhou Military Region commander and chief culprit.Footnote 22 The violence was portrayed as inevitable factional conflict, a narrative that evolved alongside modest political relaxation, encouraging increased demands for redress. The families of the Guangxi victims petitioned the authorities and travelled to Beijing, seeking rehabilitation for the dead and punishment for perpetrators.Footnote 23 In response, the central authorities instructed the Guangxi leadership to investigate related deaths. Under pressure, the provincial leadership shaped a dominant narrative.
This narrative largely absolved the incumbent leadership of any responsibility. Instead, it attributed the violence to “traitors and agents of imperialism” – namely Lin Biao and several recently purged central-level radicals, such as Chen Boda 陈伯达, Wang Li 王力, Guan Feng 关锋, as well as their “accomplices in Guangxi.”Footnote 24 These individuals were blamed for instigating factional violence and disrupting revolutionary unity. While acknowledging that “22 April” members were victimized, the leadership simultaneously blamed them for opposing the formation of the new revolutionary committee, which, they argued, had led to legitimate political retaliation.
The most notorious justification was linked to the implementation of the “3 July Orders,” which sparked widespread violence. According to the official discourse:
A vast revolutionary mass was extremely outraged by how a tiny group of class enemies [i.e. the “22 April” faction] sought to sabotage the establishment of the [Guangxi] regional revolutionary committee and therefore launched furious attacks against them by using the “3 July Orders” as a weapon.Footnote 25
This framing depicted the violence as a justified revolutionary act. Ultimately, the 1972 narrative redefined both victimhood and responsibility. By casting blame on politically discredited figures from Beijing and locally marginalized factions, the Guangxi authorities effectively shielded themselves from scrutiny and accountability. The violence was interpreted either as justified acts of revolutionary suppression or as the tragic consequences of mass factionalism. Justice for victims remained politically unresolved, and many of the perpetrators, who were still in power, escaped accountability. Although some counties initiated investigations into the violence, it was generally treated as an unfortunate excess rather than criminal wrongdoing.Footnote 26 This politically expedient narrative appeased the central authorities but foreclosed meaningful redress.
The political climate began to change, with increasing public petitioning and a more permissive political atmosphere following the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Party Congress in December 1978. Guangxi emerged as a major hub for expressing grievances. Wei Chunshu 韦纯束, who later became governor, recalled that the province had “the highest number of petitioners in the country.” He compared the surge of pent-up anger to a spring that had been released suddenly.Footnote 27 Local reports from 1979 to 1980 recorded unrest in towns as victims’ families demanded redress.Footnote 28 Under mounting pressure, Beijing dispatched at least three central investigation teams to Guangxi between 1979 and 1981.Footnote 29
One notable mission in 1981, which was jointly headed by the Central Discipline Inspection Commission and the Organization Department, included 18 members from six central-level agencies. Their internal report confirmed the scale of CR-era violence, with an estimate of 100,000 casualties, and directly linked the “3 July Orders” to coordinated political repression. It identified the continued political dominance of perpetrators – the “three types of people” – as a primary source of ongoing injustice and instability.Footnote 30 This investigation marked the first authoritative effort to reframe Guangxi’s CR violence as a problem of state responsibility.
However, the Guangxi leadership forcefully rejected these findings. Wei Guoqing, then director of the PLA General Political Department (jiefangjun zong zhengzhibu 解放军总政治部) and still a highly influential figure in Guangxi affairs, also submitted a rebuttal defending the local actions.Footnote 31 This pushback aimed to preserve both individual reputations and the legitimacy of the provincial leadership. Likely due to Wei’s strategic importance for Deng Xiaoping’s 邓小平 reform agenda, the central authorities refrained from immediate corrective action. Thus, the 1981 investigations failed to prompt a shift in narrative or any substantial redress. Nonetheless, limited investigations continued under the existing narrative. Violent episodes were still attributed to mass spontaneity, perpetrators remained in office and redress efforts focused on modest material aid rather than formal exoneration or justice.Footnote 32
A turning point came in late 1982 when Wei Guoqing was moved to a largely ceremonial position, allowing for a structural reconfiguration of provincial authority.Footnote 33 In March 1983, Beijing reshuffled the Guangxi leadership, including the Guangxi Leading Group on Handling Problems Left Over from the CR (Guangxi chuli wenhua dageming yiliu wenti lingdao xiaozu 广西处理文化大革命遗留问题领导小组), and dispatched a 40-person central work team to supervise the handling of CR legacies.Footnote 34 Led by Wei Chunshu, the new provincial leading group launched a multi-year campaign to address a wide range of injustices, focusing especially on the mass killings. This effort laid the bureaucratic and evidentiary groundwork for the most comprehensive official investigation of CR-era violence in the post-Mao period. By 1987, 81,118 people had been investigated and around 53,000 had received various sanctions, although most cases were handled leniently.Footnote 35 While victims were rehabilitated and given token compensation, broader accountability for perpetrators remained limited.Footnote 36
In May 1983, the provincial leadership issued a draft document titled “Opinions on certain historical issues since the CR (outline for discussion),” which was revised during a province-wide conference in early summer. This document, which was finalized and then distributed internally, offered a new interpretive framework for understanding the CR violence. While aligned with the Party’s 1981 Resolution, the document signalled a shift in official discourse, with its emphasis on responsibility and the need for redress in Guangxi’s specific context.
The document divided the years from 1966 to 1983 into four periods: the CR (1966–1976); the transitional phase (1976–1978); the post-Plenum period (1978–1983); and, finally, a new phase of historical reckoning, beginning in March 1983. While adhering to the Party’s periodization, the Guangxi leadership marked the post-March 1983 era as a break from the Maoist past – a transition marked by accountability, correction and renewed institutional legitimacy.
In contrast to earlier narratives, the 1983 document underlined that both the civilian and military leaderships had been heavily infiltrated by factionalism. It acknowledged that provincial elites and PLA units had actively fuelled armed conflicts by aligning themselves with opposing factions. A key passage explains:
Owing to the military’s intervention in the local CR by supporting one faction and suppressing the other, some leaders of the autonomous region issued erroneous “statements,”Footnote 37 causing the mass organizations to evolve into two antagonistic camps. These disputes eventually escalated into full-scale armed conflict across the region.Footnote 38
This recognition that violence was driven by entrenched local authorities marked a significant shift from earlier accounts, which had largely attributed the conflict to incitement by radical outsiders.
The document gave emphatic attention to the notorious “3 July Orders,” which had played a key role in institutionalizing factional violence and thus became a key target of the efforts to reassess historical responsibility.Footnote 39 It explicitly acknowledged that these directives had misclassified actions by the “22 April” faction as counterrevolutionary, thereby legitimizing their violent suppression.Footnote 40 It stated:
When implementing the Orders, the regional revolutionary preparatory group supported one faction [the United Command] and suppressed the other faction [the 22 April], and used the military and militia to crush a part of the masses, resulting in a large number of arbitrary killings in various parts of Guangxi. The consequences were extremely severe.Footnote 41
This account challenged the 1972 justification of “counterrevolutionary suppression” and reframed the violence as politically motivated persecution. Responsibility was assigned to the former provincial leadership. Additionally, the document highlighted the destructive role of the state media, especially Guangxi Daily (Guangxi ribao 广西日报), which published nine editorials endorsing the “3 July Orders” and inciting violence.Footnote 42 This emphasis on media-driven mobilization confirmed that the persecution was not spontaneous but politically orchestrated.
Importantly, the document introduced a differentiated framework of culpability. While acknowledging that some violence was spontaneous, it noted that many killings were “organized and premeditated” by cadres at the county and township levels who exploited factional struggles to eliminate rivals under the guise of enforcing central policy.Footnote 43 In such cases, disciplinary or legal punishment was considered appropriate. However, consistent with the 1981 Resolution, the document avoided framing the violence as systemic criminality. Instead, echoing the Party’s long tradition of rectification campaigns, it treated these acts as deviations to be corrected internally. In particular, cadres with revolutionary credentials had their complicity recast as political errors rather than as crimes and were thus treated leniently. This distinction reflected the Party’s strategy of preserving elite legitimacy while selectively acknowledging abuse – an authoritarian logic of transitional justice that pursued order over full accountability.
The 1983 narrative constituted a crucial rhetorical and institutional break from the expedient explanations of the 1970s. Unlike the earlier portrayals that either exonerated the local leadership or blamed abstract external forces, this new narrative reassigned responsibility to the CR-era provincial authorities and their factional allies. Consistent with the central Party line, it introduced a stratified understanding of complicity, distinguishing between political misjudgement and criminal liability.Footnote 44 This paved the way for a bureaucratic mechanism of controlled reckoning, reinforcing the Party’s monopoly over historical interpretation.
Although far from transparent or comprehensive by liberal standards, this evolving narrative fulfilled several functions associated with transitional justice: acknowledgement of harm, reclassification of victims and bureaucratic redress. Within the authoritarian political conditions of post-Mao China, this constituted a constrained but notable effort at historical reckoning, one that partially confronted past excesses, reaffirmed institutional order and sought to rebuild political legitimacy from within.
Internal Reckoning without Public Truth
As official narratives on the violence were being crafted, internal processes of historical reckoning were also being created. Between April and July 1983, a series of mobilization conferences initiated by the reconstituted Guangxi leadership marked a new phase of intra-Party engagement with the province’s violent past.Footnote 45 These included the Fifth Provincial Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in April and then the Shangsi 上思 County Conference in late June, which was followed by a cascade of prefectural and county-level meetings. While limited in scope and tightly managed, these forums allowed for a degree of retrospective judgement that was unprecedented in the province. The result was a highly structured, state-sponsored moment of institutional reflection: a form of contained transitional justice.
These internal deliberations did not emerge in a vacuum. They built upon earlier patterns of restricted intra-Party critique. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, limited debate over CR injustices surfaced during the “Criticize the Gang” campaign and the drafting of the 1981 Resolution on Party history.Footnote 46 However, these moments were carefully curated to protect the image of Mao Zedong and the institutional legitimacy of the Party.Footnote 47 The 1983 discussions in Guangxi, by contrast, were shaped by more immediate local pressures: the persistence of collective memory, the availability of survivor testimonies and the urgent need to distance the new leadership from past atrocities. The discussions represented a more penetrating and politically riskier form of internal reckoning.
The internal bulletins (jianbao 简报) reveal the extent of these debates. At the April CPPCC meeting, 526 reinstated members representing various sectors, including the education, civilian administration and medical sectors, as well as other parties, openly expressed their grievances and recollections of the violence.Footnote 48 The Shangsi County Conference included 570 incumbent and retired grassroots officials, many of whom had been direct witnesses to, or victims of, the violence.Footnote 49 Their dual identity as both Party insiders and survivors lent their testimonies particular weight.
As the debates unfolded, a central issue emerged: how to characterize the mass violence. For over a decade, official discourse had labelled it as “arbitrary killings” (luan da si ren 乱打死人), implying spontaneous, factional chaos. In contrast, many of the 1983 participants began to use the terms “massacres” (tusha 屠杀) and “great massacres” (da tusha 大屠杀). This linguistic transformation reflected a deeper interpretive turn, one that moved away from the narratives of popular excess and towards acknowledgement of bureaucratic coordination and institutional complicity.
This shift was underscored by detailed testimonies. In a bulletin entitled “Why did so many people die in Guangxi?” the vice-chairman of the provincial Association for Science and Technology questioned the nature and origins of the violence:
After the release of the “3 July Orders,” and in particular after the establishment of the regional revolutionary committee, there was a force-12 storm blowing [a metaphor for the extremely intense and violent escalation], leading to numerous deaths. What was the nature of those events? Were they random beatings among the masses? Or were they acts of suppression?Footnote 50
He substantiated his concern by citing the case of Shanglin county 上林县, where 176 people were killed in a single mass rally organized by the newly established county revolutionary committee. The scale, timing and official coordination of the violence, he argued, could not plausibly be explained away as spontaneous factional conflict. Instead, he revealed a systematic pattern of violence that emerged only after local party-state institutions had consolidated power, suggesting that the killings were not merely tolerated but actively encouraged and implemented by the emerging political order.
Other participants backed up this interpretation by drawing on personal experience. At the Shangsi Conference, a cadre from Luchuan county 陆川县 testified that the killings had been “orderly” and “supervised by the local leadership at both upper and lower levels.”Footnote 51 He cited the actions of Liu Hanhua 刘汉华, then the commissar of the county’s armed forces department, who not only followed higher-level instructions but even escalated the violence by assigning “quotas of executions” down to the level of individual production teams. In some brigades, where no obvious victims could be found, common thieves were dragged out and killed to fulfil the quota.Footnote 52 This level of detail underscored the bureaucratic routinization of political violence. Another cadre described how local authorities cultivated an atmosphere conducive to killing, then established a specialized unit to carry out executions.Footnote 53 This account not only highlighted the planning and deliberation behind the violence but also suggested that there was institutional learning and replication, which are the hallmarks of organized political violence rather than chaotic mob action.
Significantly, blame began to be apportioned to individuals. Participants openly named members of Guangxi’s former leadership, such as Wei Guoqing, Liu Chonggui 刘重桂, Zhao Maoxun 赵茂勋 and Qiao Xiaoguang 乔晓光, as the orchestrators of the terror. Wei Guoqing, in particular, was heavily criticized. In Shangsi county, one participant asserted:
Wei Guoqing should bear the primary responsibility for the disaster caused by Guangxi’s CR, as he had the strongest factionalist inclinations … after the release of the “3 July Orders” … he used the military and transferred the militia to suppress one mass faction [referring to the “22 April” faction] by force.Footnote 54
This rhetorical move – shifting responsibility from the institution to discredited individuals – enabled limited accountability without undermining the Party as a whole. Such targeted attribution was politically expedient, as many of the accused had already been purged or were facing mounting pressure to undergo rectification-style criticism and self-criticism during the concurrent redress campaign.Footnote 55
Alongside structural critique and individual attribution, the debates also revealed previously hidden atrocities. In one bulletin, employees of the Shangsi County Bank recounted how three of their colleagues were killed, with two of the victims later cannibalized, their internal organs consumed by the perpetrators.Footnote 56 The bank’s former head, Huang Binglian 黄炳连, was explicitly identified as the principal culprit.Footnote 57 Elsewhere, a survivor from Shangsi county’s department of transportation described a mass execution he witnessed in Pingfu Commune 平福公社: on the night before the killings, local militia officials received a “list of targets” from upper-level authorities. The next day, several victims, including the speaker, were paraded through the streets before eight were killed.Footnote 58 The consistent presence of chain-of-command elements in these testimonies further undermined the notion that the violence had emerged spontaneously from mass political fervour.
These testimonies collectively dismantled the earlier portrayal of violence as the product of chaotic factionalism. Instead, they painted a picture of vertical coordination, official complicity and bureaucratic escalation. By implicating local political and military actors at multiple levels, the debates marked a decisive shift in historical framing, from viewing violence as an unfortunate byproduct of revolutionary excess to recognizing it as structured repression.
Yet a critical question remains. Where were the perpetrators during these debates? Were they themselves involved in shaping the narrative? In fact, they were largely absent. In parallel with the internal deliberations, the Guangxi leadership, under the guidance of the central work team, had launched a sweeping purge of cadres implicated in the CR violence. By mid-1983, over 1,600 officials had been subjected to temporary organizational measures, such as suspension, dismissal or reassignment, with the final outcomes dependent on the results of further investigation. By the year’s end, the total number of cadres affected had reached nearly 5,000.Footnote 59 Although some perpetrators remained in office during the campaign’s early stages, most were sidelined or placed under review as the most intense debates unfolded. Some testimonies came from cadres who were both survivors and participants, but the most egregious offenders were excluded from shaping the new historical narrative. Some attempted to resist, culminating in the so-called “cold wind” (chui lengfeng 吹冷风) incident, during which a group of officials denounced the redress proceedings as political persecution. Their protests reflected anxieties about retrospective accountability and shifting political legitimacy. However, this backlash was ultimately suppressed by central intervention and personnel reshuffles,Footnote 60 reaffirming the Party’s control over the terms of historical reckoning.
Despite the richness of the internal discussions, their content was heavily sanitized in public reports. Euphemisms, such as “issues of severe violations of the law and discipline” (yanzhong weifa luanji wenti 严重违法乱纪问题), replaced references to “massacres.” Compared with the detailed internal debates on historical accountability, public media presented the killings only in general terms, avoiding specific events or details. This bifurcated strategy exemplified the Party’s approach to historical inquiry: while internal forums were permitted to acknowledge and dissect past abuses, public representations were tightly controlled to prevent political instability.Footnote 61 One senior leader issued the following instruction on press coverage, “given the sensitivity and complexity of the CR’s aftermath in Guangxi, even small missteps in public messaging could intensify tensions, potentially hindering the implementation of central policies.”Footnote 62 This warning underscored the regime’s intent to manage historical reckoning within safe ideological and institutional limits.
The 1983 debates thus served as a critical yet constrained forum for confronting the legacy of the CR. They exposed the complicity of former state apparatuses, challenged the prevailing narratives of factional violence and identified specific individuals as responsible. While these discussions facilitated limited internal justice, they were carefully insulated from broader society and remained confined to Party communications. This reflected a broader strategy of transitional justice in authoritarian settings, where efforts to acknowledge past wrongdoing are tightly controlled. By selectively recognizing state violence and attributing responsibility to individuals, the Party preserved institutional authority while avoiding broader systemic critique. The internal debates also prepared the political and rhetorical foundations for subsequent revisions of official historiography. In the years that followed, this process became more institutionalized through classified reports, internal publications and re-written local chronicles.
Between Truth-seeking and Control: Official Accounts of Cultural Revolution Violence
During the redress campaign, the Guangxi authorities initiated a systematic and bureaucratically coordinated fact-finding effort. A key function of this campaign was the investigation of political violence committed during the CR, intended not only to assign responsibility and rehabilitate victims but also to establish a factual foundation for the ongoing Party-led redress and the reconstruction of political legitimacy.
Fact-finding was carried out by a multi-tiered structure of redress offices established at the provincial, municipal, county and sub-county levels. Following the formation of the provincial leading group, corresponding leading groups were formed at each administrative level. Subordinate to these were dedicated offices and task-specific departments responsible for investigation, case review and victim registration.Footnote 63 Over 100,000 cadres were mobilized across the province. Cadre selection prioritized political reliability, non-factionalism and fair-mindedness;Footnote 64 individuals implicated in CR-related infractions or factional activity were explicitly excluded.Footnote 65 To strengthen oversight and technical guidance, more than one hundred provincial-level work team members, drawn from among both central and local personnel, were dispatched to all 12 prefectures as well as major industrial units and universities.Footnote 66 In areas with limited capacity or big case backlogs, prefectural authorities deployed additional support teams to assist local efforts. At the grassroots level, county teams visited severely affected villages and production brigades to investigate specific incidents and identify those directly involved, including both perpetrators and victims, deliver symbolic state condolences to victims’ families, and conduct legal education campaigns to discourage extrajudicial retaliation.Footnote 67
Fact-finding relied heavily on in-person interviews with a wide range of participants, including perpetrators, victims, local cadres and ordinary residents. Investigators cross-checked testimonies to eliminate discrepancies and gradually reconstruct a coherent account of events.Footnote 68 Special attention was paid to verifying how many had died and their identities during the CR violence. Responsibility for reporting deaths was distributed by social category: work units compiled reports for state employees and workers; communes and neighbourhood committees were responsible for peasants and urban residents; and schools for students.Footnote 69 Because the investigations were often conducted within relatively closed communities, such as work units, villages or neighbourhoods bound by long-standing social ties, it was generally possible to gain accurate data on deaths.
As the fact-finding phase wound down in late 1983 – by May 1984, Guangxi’s leading groups had filed investigation reports on 18,027 individualsFootnote 70 – a parallel effort began: the official historiographical reconstruction of the CR. Closely linked to the ongoing rectification campaign and the broader ideological repudiation of the CR, this project focused on recording past injustices and systematizing historical memory. In Guangxi, as in other places, this historiographical effort remained internal and tightly restricted. By around 1987, it had culminated in several large-scale compilations produced under official supervision for cadre education and ideological consolidation. The most extensive and representative of these compilations was Archival Materials on the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi, an 18-volume collection that played a central role in shaping the province’s official memory of the recent past.Footnote 71
The compilation of Archival Materials was organized by the provincial Party rectification office and delegated to local Party rectification offices at various administrative levels. Personnel for the project were carefully selected based on their familiarity with the redress investigations, strong Party loyalty, impartiality and writing competence.Footnote 72 Most were drawn from former investigators involved in the redress campaign, as well as from local gazetteer bureaus, Party history offices and archival departments. Drafts were first reviewed by local Party leaders before being submitted to higher-level Party rectification offices for approval. During the writing process, compilers primarily relied on three types of sources: archival documents produced by Party and state organs during the CR, although many of these had been lost or deliberately destroyed;Footnote 73 investigative materials generated during the fact-finding effort; and oral testimonies from individuals with firsthand knowledge of the events, collected through interviews or cadre symposiums.Footnote 74
These sources were not incorporated uncritically. Authorities mandated multiple rounds of verification, selection and cross-checking to ensure accuracy. The stated goal was to “eliminate the false, retain the true, discard the superfluous, and preserve the essential,” so as to reflect history as it had actually occurred. Official directives repeatedly stressed that compilers must “record facts as they truly occurred” and warned that “our effort must be grounded in truth … If something proves to be untrue, it must not be written down; if it is written and later found to be false, it must be corrected.”Footnote 75 This insistence on factual rigour was not merely epistemological but also political. By establishing a credible and verifiable record of past abuses, the authorities sought to forestall future challenges or reversals by implicated perpetrators. In this sense, the production of “truth” served not only as a reckoning with past injustices but also as a bulwark for the legitimacy and durability of the broader transitional justice project in Guangxi.
The Archival Materials adopted two primary historiographical genres: “major events” (dashijian 大事件) and “chronicle of major events” (dashiji 大事记). Each provincial-level department and public institution, prefecture and county was required to compile both genres following strict guidelines. For instance, the authorities mandated the inclusion of the following information in “major events”: an overview of the CR, including the numbers of deaths and wounded; time, place and development of key incidents; consequences; the names and roles of those involved; and the sources of evidence. Descriptions were expected to be direct and unsentimental, although evaluative commentary was sometimes necessary to clarify the political nature of each event and demarcate right from wrong.Footnote 76
The principles of documentation mentioned above were closely applied to the recording of the killings. Authorities clearly prioritized these episodes as epitomes of the cruelty and extremism of the CR. At the 1986 Provincial Archival Work Conference, Ou Jiwen 区济文, chief editor of the Archival Materials, was adamant that the ten years of internal chaos, which had brought severe calamities to the Party and the country and resulted in tremendous loss of life and property, should be faithfully recorded in the chronicle of major events.Footnote 77 For veteran cadres like Ou, the killings likely constituted a powerful repudiation of the CR. Counties were even criticized for failing to include killings in their chronicle, as was the case with Hepu county 合浦县.Footnote 78 Following the documentation guidelines, vague generalizations were to be avoided and detailed records presented instead. Each entry typically began with aggregate casualty statistics by administrative unit, followed by specific information on locations, dates, causes, processes and consequences. The names of perpetrators, including organizers and direct participants, were recorded alongside victims, together with administrative decisions on rehabilitation and punishment. As Ou repeatedly emphasized, documentation that merely listed figures without any factual narrative was inadequate and returned for revision.Footnote 79 The aim was to produce a body of records that allowed readers to clearly understand where and how each major killing unfolded, and to reach an unambiguous conclusion regarding responsibility and victimization.
A striking example of this detailed documentation appears in the entry “Taocheng township poor and middle peasant representatives conference killings” in Major Events of the Daxin County Cultural Revolution.Footnote 80 It begins with an account of a February 1968 county-level meeting, where over 300 lower-level cadres, including Liu Guocai 刘国才, head of Taocheng township’s armed department, gathered to implement the new political line. Motivated by this meeting, Liu convened a township-level conference from 5 March to 9 March. On the first day, he addressed 500 local attendees, inciting violence against “class enemies.” The following day, 44 “bad elements” were brought in by local communes and denounced, and Liu personally ordered the execution of Nong Guangye 农光业, triggering a wave of killings. On 7 March, another 17 individuals, all of whom are named in the record, were killed by local authorities. The chronicle also notes Liu’s later sentence of eight years’ imprisonment and records that all victims were posthumously rehabilitated and compensated in accordance with Party regulations. The level of factual detail – names, dates, decisions and outcomes – reflects not only a bureaucratic ethos of precision but also a clear political intent: to anchor memory, assign responsibility and foreclose alternative interpretations.
This evidentiary approach, therefore, was far from neutral. While it addressed victims’ demands for recognition and justice, it also reinforced the Party’s control over historical narrative. It functioned as a mechanism for truth disclosure within a framework of contained transitional justice. Rather than encouraging public debate or producing a comprehensive truth report, the Party used internal investigation and bureaucratic truth production to reassert political order. Historical documentation thus served a dual purpose: it delegitimized the CR by exposing its violence while simultaneously reaffirming the regime’s interpretive authority. Ou’s insistence on “faithfully documenting this disaster” and “using the lessons of blood and tears to educate the masses, warn posterity, and ensure long-term stability” reflects this dual function.Footnote 81
In this sense, the historiographical project aligns with what Ruti Teitel refers to as “transitional narratives” – efforts to frame traumatic pasts as instructive episodes that justify the political present.Footnote 82 The Party constructed a redemptive storyline in which the CR was depicted as a tragedy whose lessons would secure China’s future. Yet unlike liberal truth commissions, this narrative operated within narrow limits. It presented an official truth that silenced alternative voices while acknowledging limited culpability. Although falling short of liberal ideals, it illustrates how authoritarian regimes can partially reckon with past violence through controlled historical inquiry. Compiling the Archival Materials was not simply a technocratic fact-finding project but a politically constrained mechanism of historical justice, combining partial redress with a reaffirmation of Party dominance over historical memory.
Conclusion
The Party has long viewed history as a critical instrument of governance. Its official re-examination of the recent past continues the tradition of internal rectification campaigns that began with the Yan’an rectification movement (Yan’an zhengfeng yundong 延安整风运动). Since then, at every political juncture deemed crucial, new leaderships have orchestrated historical re-evaluations not only to allocate responsibility but also to consolidate their power, legitimize new policies, unify thought, reinforce ideological discipline and maintain Party unity.Footnote 83 By reinterpreting recent history, the Party can repudiate elements of past ideologies, selectively reassign blame and enforce internal consensus. In this process, official historiography functions less as an open inquiry than as a tightly managed mechanism of political legitimation.
The case of Guangxi reveals the structural constraints of this model. For over a decade, the province’s massive political violence was unacknowledged and obscured by a sanitized and distorted narrative that obscured its political roots. It was only in the mid-1980s that a renewed internal reckoning emerged, one that acknowledged the victims’ innocence and attributed blame to factional and administrative leaders. Yet even this corrective narrative, although more accurate, remained confined within bureaucratic channels and never fully reached the public domain.
What distinguishes this episode is not the absence of truth-finding, but rather the Party’s monopolization of “truth.” Investigations were detailed and exhaustive: perpetrators and victims were named, timelines reconstructed and institutional failures carefully recorded. But these findings were treated as internal property rather than public knowledge and were locked away in archives inaccessible to the very people whose lives had been shattered – although selected excerpts were sometimes released in tightly vetted forms for internal education or limited public reports. The Party’s logic was clear: by withholding the full horror of the past, it hoped to preserve social stability, shield elite actors from retroactive accountability and protect the ideological authority of the 1981 Resolution. Truth, in this model, was to be managed and not shared.
This strategy illustrates how a regime can conduct historical reckoning without regime change, democratization or independent oversight. It shows how limited truth-telling and victim rehabilitation can be used under authoritarian control to shore up legitimacy rather than foster pluralistic memory. Unlike global transitional justice models that emphasize truth commissions, public testimony or judicial mechanisms,Footnote 84 the Guangxi case demonstrates a distinctive contained approach: only internal detailed investigations, and all findings to be kept tightly controlled. It thus adds a revealing authoritarian example to comparative debates, showing how selective truth-seeking can serve as a tool of governance rather than of genuine transformation, and how such strategies may delay but not resolve tensions over historical responsibility. Although once effective, this containment has grown fragile in today’s digital and global era.
Since 1989, the space for critical reflection on the CR has narrowed considerably. Archival access has been curtailed, and independent research faces growing political and institutional barriers. Yet this suppression has not produced silence, but a vacuum. Into this space have entered unofficial actors, including grassroots historians, survivors and independent chroniclers, who attempt to reconstruct the past through personal testimony and fragmented records.Footnote 85 All these competing narratives proliferate via social media and unofficial publications, and collective memory becomes increasingly fractured.Footnote 86 Ironically, the Party’s continued refusal to enable open historical engagement has undermined the very consensus it once imposed. This not only reveals the limits of Party-controlled remembrance but also highlights the fragility of the Party’s historical strategy.
This fragmentation underscores the structural fragility of contained transitional justice. What once appeared to be a brief period of limited candour during the 1980s now seems unlikely to be repeated. Under the current leadership, the political climate has shifted towards a more assertive affirmation of the Maoist legacy, prioritizing national unity, ideological continuity and historical pride at the expense of critical reflection.Footnote 87 In this context, even the cautious investigations of the 1980s appear increasingly out of place. Nonetheless, these partial efforts, initiated and conducted within Party institutions, provided rare moments of historical clarity regarding recent episodes of political violence. They endure as lessons in blood, fragile but not forgotten. Whether such lessons can still be acknowledged or serve as a foundation for future reckoning remains an open and pressing question.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge the support provided for this research by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement No. 336202, and to thank the many individuals in Guangxi who generously shared their experiences and provided valuable support throughout the research process.
Conflicting interests
None.
Guoqing SONG is an assistant professor at the School of History at Anhui University. His publications explore social and political reactions to mass violence during the Cultural Revolution, particularly in Guangxi. He is also the author of Gaizao “jiushehui”: Nanjing shehui jiuzhu yanjiu (1949–1956) (Transforming the “Old Society”: Social Assistance in Nanjing, 1949–1956) (2025) and is completing a book manuscript titled “Healing the Wounds?” Coming to Terms with the Legacy of the Cultural Revolution in South China.
