Drawing on local judicial records and on-the-ground interviews, the chapter examines two criminal cases in a Shandong village, highlighting how, in the hyper-politicized context of the Great Leap Forward, factional struggles among rural elites took on a dangerous new significance. The revival of the Socialist Education Movement saw the downfall of two leading cadres in early 1960. The local lineage made a series of incendiary allegations against them, leading to their removal from office, prosecution, and long-term imprisonment. A key learning from this case study concerns the way in which the implementation of campaigns, as well as judicial punishments, produced contingency. At the local level, campaigns were not just a path by which the state achieved or failed to achieve its own goals, but also provided a framework for individuals to exercise their own agency. Meanwhile, a decentralized judicial system with limited safeguards and poor evidence-gathering and case-making practices allowed campaign-induced conflict to spill over into criminal punishment. The convergence of campaign-style politics with politicalized legal enforcement seems inevitably to have ratcheted up the stakes to the point where only one endgame was possible: a bitter struggle followed by brutal and ultimately fatal punishments.

Chapter 1 engages the scholarly debates, discussions, and controversies surrounding how the Black middle class is defined. Chapter 1 paints the context for many of the key topics addressed by the Cohort in subsequent chapters related to how they view their middle-class status and how their class status interacts with their SALA lifestyle. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the distinction between class and status and discusses the range of scholarly and historical definitions and conceptualizations of the Black middle class over the past 120 years. Such debates raise pertinent questions on how class should be captured; if status is a more useful measure than class; whether Black middle classness should be defined separately from other middle classness; and, if so, why. Chapter 1 investigates issues surrounding gender and the role of marriage in perpetuating (or otherwise) the Black middle class and is highly relevant to the rise of the Love Jones Cohort where a substantial majority of its members are Black women.