This chapter examines the psychological factors that underlie behavioral continuity after revolution leads to regime change. Revolutions change the people in power, but they do not necessarily change the behavior of those who come to power after the revolution. All revolutionaries, irrespective of their particular ideologies, face the challenge of changing the behavior of people in their society – behavior that took shape over many years in the pre-revolution society. All revolutionaries are confronted with the stubborn resilience of how people think and act as it was shaped before the revolution – but how are behavioral changes to be achieved toward the ideal society that revolutionaries envisaged? Mao and some other revolutionaries proposed there should be “perpetual revolution,” because the possibility of backsliding to pre-revolution behaviors is too great. But perpetual revolution also means perpetual uncertainty and instability – and even chaos. Other extremist programs attempted by revolutionaries (to prevent continuity in behavior) are emptying cities (as practiced by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) and emptying universities (as practiced by Mao in China and Khomeini in Iran).

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.