Why Chairman Mao’s victims are denied justice

FOR any regime bent on forgetting past horrors, the last surviving victims are a troublesome group. As they grow old, those who suffered or witnessed acts of political violence become harder to cow into silence. China’s Communist Party faces such a moment. Even the youngest participants in the Cultural Revolution will be turning 70 soon. While there is time, some survivors are speaking out about that deadly decade of purges and bloodletting, unleashed in 1966 by Chairman Mao Zedong as a way to outflank critics within the party establishment. Unfortunately for such survivors, the collective interests of the ruling party and thus the nation, as defined by the supreme leader, President Xi Jinping, leave little room for individual pangs of conscience.