Rehabilitation of wrongful convictions

During the Cultural Revolution, a large number of wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice were created. The number of state cadres investigated accounted for 17.5 percent of the total number of state cadres at that time, and the number of senior cadres at the level of vice ministers and above of central and state organs and vice governors and above of local governments was as high as 75 percent.^[1][2][3][4] From 10 November to 15 December 1978, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party held a working conference lasting 36 days.^[5] The main topics discussed were the problems left over from the Cultural Revolution and the criticism of Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing’s Two Whatevers. During the conference, the 1976 Tiananmen Incident was first redressed. Later, at the suggestion of Deng Xiaoping, Hua Guofeng, Chairman of the CCP Central Committee, announced the rehabilitation of the “wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice” on behalf of the Politburo and transferred all cases to the Organization Department of the CCP for handling, which was then carried out by Hu Yaobang, Head of the Organization Department.^[2][6][7]

In 1979, the Supreme People's Court issued a report entitled Request for Instructions on Several Issues Concerning the Successful Completion of the Review and Correction of Wrongful Convictions. The report revealed that since the third plenary session of the 11th CCP Central Committee in 1978, more than 241,000 counter-revolutionary cases sentenced since the Cultural Revolution had been reviewed, and more than 130,000 cases had been corrected.^[8] More than 570,000 ordinary criminal cases were reviewed, and more than 350,000 wrongful convictions were corrected. Later, the CCP Central Committee continued to redress some major political cases, such as the case of the 61-person traitor group, the case of Liu Zhidan, and the redress of CCP leaders persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, including former Chairman Liu Shaoqi who was persecuted to death. According to the People's Daily article Setting an Example and Establishing a Monument published on 1 June 1989, more than 3 million cases nationwide have been redressed since 1978.^[2]