The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Year ...

justice but can only make recommendations to the government for such actions.¹⁴ Truth commissions are thus designed to deliver not retributive justice but reconciliation.

One quandary about truth commissions is that the pursuit of truth often comes at the price of justice. To get a full account of crimes committed against fellow citizens, a truth commission must give perpetrators guarantees, often in the form of conditional amnesty, to confess how they have violated human rights. This conditional amnesty is for perpetrators’ sworn complete and truthful account of their crimes.¹⁵ As contributors to the volume Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions have concluded, if the truth can bring restorative justice to an injured society and allow its people to arrive at a certain degree of reconciliation, so as to begin the healing process and move forward, then the compromise with retributive justice is worthwhile.¹⁶ The truth sought by truth commissions “is not merely factual but also evaluative,” state Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson.¹⁷ Taking the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work as her point of departure, Martha Minow echoes this reconciliatory value of truth, noting that “the healing brought by the TRC does not require apologies or forgiveness. On behalf of bystanders and perpetrators, as well as victims, it seeks to reestablish a baseline of right and wrong, to humanize the perpetrators and to obtain and disclose previously hidden information about what happened, who gave orders, where missing persons ended up.”¹⁸ It is this sort of truth seeking that can allow a wounded society to move on with a sense of justice, restorative justice, for future generations.

This brings us back to China’s Internet blogging. Can we take the blogging by Chinese netizens recalling their memories of Maoist atrocities as a precursor of a future truth commission? A truth commission is normally set up after “a totalitarian/authoritarian regime has been succeeded by a democratic one,” explains Robert Rotberg. The truth commission is there to ask difficult but necessary questions: “What happened to husbands, sons, wives, and lovers at the hands of the ousted