Between Civil Dispute and Political Crime: Property Rights and Denunciation in Maoist China

Abstract This article uses a legal dispute between two families over a small building in semi-rural Jiangsu, and the political scandal it led to during the Socialist Education Movement (1963–1966), as a lens through which to explore the Mao era legacies of two prominent themes in the historiography of late imperial China: concepts and practices of property and contract, and the use of false accusations to enlist the coercive power of the state in economic disputes. It argues that over the course of the 1950s, norms of ownership in rural China were gradually undermined. This went beyond what was intended by the Party leadership, and was followed, in 1961–1962, by an effort to stabilize the conventions of who could own what in socialist China. The article then goes on to consider how the pursuit of property claims through accusations of political crime in the Mao era compares to such practices in the late imperial period.