Once a person was assigned a bad class label (landlord, rightist, counter-revolutionary), the designation functioned as a permanent identity that followed them across decades and institutions, shaping every subsequent decision about their work, marriage, and residence regardless of their later conduct. The label, not the behavior, became the thing the state responded to.
Reconstructing political history through the archival paper trail of obscure, powerless individuals — rather than leaders or policies — reveals how campaigns actually operated at ground level, where abstractions like 'counter-revolution' were applied to confused, ordinary people by local officials improvising under pressure. The system's logic becomes visible only from below.
Persecution was frequently driven less by genuine ideological threat than by local officials needing to meet quotas, settle personal scores, or demonstrate zeal, so victims were often selected for their vulnerability and availability rather than any actual political act. The target's guilt was manufactured to fit a pre-existing need to produce an enemy.
Yang Kuisong reconstructs eight ordinary Chinese — among them petty criminals, small-time swindlers, and marginal figures with no political significance — who were caught up and destroyed in Mao-era campaigns, their lives documented only because the state's own repressive apparatus generated detailed case files on them. These files, created to condemn them, became the sole surviving record of their existence.
The same bureaucratic record-keeping that enabled persecution — the dossiers, confessions, and investigation reports — is what later allows the persecuted to be recovered as historical subjects, so the instrument of their erasure becomes the instrument of their remembrance. A repressive state inadvertently preserves the people it tried to destroy.