This chapter looks at the publication of a series of books in Guangdong in the 1990s on the “Pine Hill incident,” a miscarriage of justice that took place during land reform (1950–1953) and directly implicated Tao Zhu, an important figure in the CCP’s post-Cultural Revolution pantheon of veteran revolutionary leaders. The process leading to the publication of these volumes – which, the chapter argues, should be understood as a form of moral rehabilitation – sheds light on the complex dynamics of research and publication on sensitive topics in the context of partial transition. The volumes’ author and his collaborators made effective use of institutions, policies, and discourses that emerged during the 1980s to overcome major obstacles to publication, but Tao Zhu’s prestige at the central level ultimately limited the extent to which facts relating to the Pine Hill incident could became part of the public record. The chapter thus illustrates both the way local narratives on party history could emerge in the post-Mao period and the limited ability of such narratives to challenge those of the Party Center.

The conclusion considers the implications of the epistemic destruction of the twentieth century for general narratives and scholarly works on modern Chinese history. It then turns to the continued role of wenshi ziliao as a form of communal memory, the role of disaster commemoration in the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, and the continued political relevance of revolutionary memory in the post-Mao People’s Republic of China.

This chapter explores the process behind local cultural-memory production in Guyuan, the devastated regional hub of eastern Gansu at the time of the Haiyuan earthquake of 1920. It considers three textual forms of communal memory produced over the twentieth century – published diaries or memoirs, wenshi ziliao (Cultural and Historical Materials) and difang zhi (city or district gazetteers) – for what they reveal about fundamental tensions within official, party-sponsored records, in other words between revolutionary and communal accounts of the past. The chapter examines the extent to which the language and broader system of values from the republican period lived on in official local records through the Maoist People’s Republic and afterwards. Held up against Maoist storytelling on the old society, gazetteer biographies and wenshi ziliao accounts provide profoundly mixed messaging on “how things used to be,” from mutual-aid practices to civic life, before the interventions of the Communist Party. The chapter then turns to the question of silences in the communal record, of the limited role of women in communal memory and how this evolved over time, and the fate of the historical record of Guyuan’s Muslim population.