Reckoning with the Past: Official Historical Inquiries into Guangxi’s Cultural Revolution, 1983–1987

Abstract This article draws on newly accessible primary sources to examine how, between 1983 and 1987, the Chinese Communist Party addressed the legacy of Cultural Revolution-era political violence in Guangxi. It focuses on a series of initiatives through which local authorities revised historical narratives, assessed political responsibility within bureaucratic frameworks, and documented past events through structured writing efforts. These efforts, the article argues, amounted to a form of contained transitional justice – a Party-directed, bureaucratically managed process of reckoning with the past that combined internal investigation, symbolic redress and controlled truth production. While resembling global practices of transitional justice in truth-seeking and victim rehabilitation, the process was tightly constrained by ideological priorities and excluded meaningful public participation. The Guangxi case, exceptional for both the scale of violence and the timing of its reckoning, offers insight into how authoritarian regimes manage traumatic historical legacies through disciplined yet symbolic mechanisms of historical clarification.