With Dr. Daniel Leese Professor of modern Chinese history and politics\, University of Freiburg

This talk will ta ke recent debates on the legacies of the Cultural Revolution as a starting point to address the question of how the Chinese Communist Party dealt with injustices from the Mao era in the late 1970s and early 1980s and place th ese developments in broader historical perspective. Given that the Communis t Party politically survived a tumultuous event such as the Cultural Revolu tion\, but also the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union\, the strategies of coping with a violent past under stat e socialism merit special interest. The talk will highlight in particular t he relation between politics and law\, competing strategies of legitimation under Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping\, and the party leadership’s holistic approach to justice and rehabilitation. Thereby it will also raise the issu e of how selectively applied approaches nowadays associated with the concep t of transitional justice may serve to strengthen rather than subvert autho ritarian rule.

About the speaker: Daniel Leese is Pr ofessor of modern Chinese history and politics at the University of Freibur g and currently a fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the author of Mao Cult (Cambridge 2011) and Die Chinesisch e Kulturrevolution (C.H. Beck 2016)\, as well as the editor of Br ill’s Encyclopedia of China (Brill 2009) and Victims\, Perpetrator s\, and the Role of Law in Maoist China (De Gruyter 2018\, with Puck E ngman). He is principal investigator of the project “The Maost Legacy: Part y Dictatorship\, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Truth” and with h is research group has compiled a digital archive on this period.

POSTER