Historical Revisionism After Mao
After Mao's death, many of the convictions were revoked in 1979. At that time under paramount leader Deng Xiaoping the country needed talent and experience to get the country moving economically and subsequently the guilty verdicts of thousands of counterrevolutionary cases were overturned — affecting many of those accused of rightism and who had been persecuted for that crime the previous twenty two years. This came despite the fact that Deng Xiaoping had been one of the most enthusiastic prosecutors of the movement during the "First Wave" of 1957.
Read more about this topic: Anti-Rightist Movement
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“The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)