Daniel LEESE (Freiburg University)

How can a dictatorship cope with historical injustices committed in its own name? The CCP presented its answers to a domestic and international audience over the course of 1981, as it first sentenced a small number defined as perpetrators through legal means and then provided a standard narrative of how to evaluate the past in its famous second resolution on party history. In my talk, I will take these events as a starting point to offer a critical account about how the party approached questions of historical guilt and the need for societal reconciliation in more general terms in the decade after the death of Mao Zedong.