This has been an unusual experience. As an outsider to the PRC History Group and an anonymous reviewer, I had not expected to be invited to add this commentary at the last minute. How could I say no? Aminda Smith, Fabio Lanza, and their group's engagement with the criticisms and questions posed to them, their passion for the subject, and their commitment to substantive dialogues with those who think and work differently from themselves are admirable. I am happy to continue the conversation.1There is much to recommend in these pages that I will assign to my graduate students. This includes useful sections on sources and methodology, especially the innovative sources analyzed by Sigrid Schmalzer and Smith's call to “map the grain” of Maoist sources. The inquiries into the relationship between methods and theoretical frameworks for this period opens a path well worth pursuing with sustained effort. The self-reflection called for throughout—to ensure the “same level of empirical and epistemological scrutiny,” as Smith puts it—is always important for historians. Even if not exhaustive, the range of theoretical genealogies traced offers much to explore and question about the common terms, categories, and assumptions with which we often think and write. I will also assign those sections I do not endorse, for the benefit of alternative perspectives and for the productive reflections stimulated by our differences.Of course, not all that divides us inspires constructive debates. Let me simply note and set aside several of my less stimulating quibbles. Like Matthew Johnson (this issue), I do not perceive a crisis-level deficiency of understanding of Maoism in the scholarship. Nor do I consider the “demonizing” of Maoism to be dominant in the field tout court. The terms irrational and illogical (Smith foreword, this issue) may be common characterizations of Great Leap Forward economic policy, implementation, and persistence in the face of overwhelming evidence of disaster and of the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, but hardly seem widespread, definitive judgments on the entirety of Maoism. The notion that the so-called “garbology” approach associated with Johnson and Jeremy Brown's targeted edited volume, Maoism at the Grassroots (2015), is hegemonic appears peculiar to a North American vantage point or “siloed” presumptions within the subfield. The assertions of these perceived problems contribute, at points, to erecting caricatures of existing scholarship that will be justifiably contested.What I find more interesting is the fabric of the logics that distinguish this project. Of course, there is a lot going on in these articles, so, against my predilection, I will be reductive. As I read several versions of this project in the making, I thought of the contributors, in Maoist vocabulary, as consisting of a “backbone” core of the PRC History Group—the Good Left—and a few of their “friends.” It is to the Good Left, and its proposed diagnosis of the problem in the field and prescription for a cure, that I address my comments, starting with the cure.To “Good PRC history is Left history” (Smith foreword, this issue), I reply: Left history can be good history if its theorizing and analyses enrich and sharpen our historical understandings and explanations. The Good Left's passion for inhabiting Maoism, seeing it from the inside out, in all its complexity, formation and evolution, fullness and limitation, as vision, theory, propagation, implementation, variant manifestations, lived experiences, reproductions, and imaginations promises much to our collective historical endeavor. Recapturing emancipatory visions and social inspirations surely is central to this. Yet I remain perplexed by the minimizing of scholarship that has made such contributions2 and of commonalities across subfield periodization. There is no acknowledgment, for instance, that the much targeted Elizabeth Perry, in her most recent historical monograph (2012), sought to recover veins of inspiration in an initially nonviolent, moral vision for the oppressed in the CCP revolutionary tradition; see in this issue the views expressed by Smith, Lanza, Jake Werner, and Alexander Day. Their notion of inhabiting also seems particular to Maoism, and not meant to be extended, for instance, to the study of the Qing, the KMT, or the Wang Jingwei state. Why grant this twenty-seven-year period such an aura of exceptionalism?A significant move in this project involves salvaging the reputation of Maoists in their time of governance; see in this issue, Smith (foreword and article); Lanza; Werner; Covell Meyskens. Defending Maoism's importance and against charges that it was “irrational,” “dogmatic,” “bumbling,” and ineffective recalls previous salvage projects, such as the studies that challenged once standard narratives of the KMT's incompetence and inevitable failure (Kirby 1984; Wakeman 1995; Strauss 1998; Van de Ven 2003). Yet, in this comparison, I am struck by the Good Left's anxiety about the judgment. Something they see in the dismissals of Maoism and its import to their own hopes for recovering value seems responsible for this disquiet.Recovering positive aspects of Maoism for the sake of a fuller, richer historical picture than we currently display does not seem to be enough for this project. The aim appears to be the resuscitation of an elementally Good Maoism. This is evident in arguments defending Maoist leadership and activists’ authenticity, sincerity, and good intentions and in claims for a “popular legitimacy,” not in Mencian, but in republican-popular sovereignty terms (in this issue, Smith foreword; Werner; Day). This deep desire to see, omnisciently, the essential honesty and moral good in the motives of historical actors concerns definitive judgments whose potential for substantiation and relevance to historical illumination can only be limited. This is not solely because of the difficulty of demonstrating such points with evidence, but also for the reason that historical records abound with cases of destructive, abusive human actions initiated by the sincere and well intentioned “on their own terms.” More problematic, such an immutable, a priori determination asserts itself at the expense of the historian's struggle to comprehend the complexities of human thought and action in motion and context. Why insist to this extent?The drive for this, as articulated most thoroughly by Smith in her foreword, is a product of dissatisfaction. The Good Left appears to be as disillusioned with the state of the field, with their teachers, and with China now as the “disillusioned scholars” they take to task were decades ago. Surely this would be a moment to draw on our historian's “empathetic imagination” (Wakeman 2009: 416, Bonnin 2013: xxv) and extend it to some of our colleagues and predecessors. I read in the ample discussions of the place of politics and presentism in this corner of historical studies tones and principles that evoke much about our recent present, especially looking out from within North American academia. There is an understandably strong desire for emancipatory visions and a feeling of profound repugnance with the notion that our histories might unconsciously, as William Sewell (2005) argued, abet, and that we would be “disarmed” before, powers and forces remaking the world for the dominant and destructive few. Disillusion can be creatively productive, as is evident in both generations, and the mutual recognition of our predicaments in different moments may be as helpful to our practice as mutual criticisms. We all seek to communicate intelligibly to our present in terms that are never free of our aspirations for the future, and, in doing so, cannot abrogate our principal mission to make sense of the past. The tensions involved are inherent to these aims and aspirations. To add a variation to Johnson's criticism in this issue, I would argue that all forms of politics, consciously and unconsciously reflected in history writing, can lose their potential for illumination and careen into obfuscation if they become unassailably dominant or demonstrably yoked in service to the powerful. Self-reflection is necessary for all of us, as this project has emphasized.To this end, let me raise more questions. First, why does this project appear more interested in identifying good Maoism and asserting the Mao era CCP's socialist bona fides than developing its own coherent Marxist-inspired critique? The long tradition of Marxist criticism of Maoism, inside and outside China, are, with the exception of some maneuvering around the shadow of Moishe Postone, unmentioned (see in this issue Meyskens; Werner). Is this a move away from Marxist theorizing for the sake of the salvaging project? Second, why, after repeated assaults on “state-society” frameworks, does this discussion leave the impression that the centrality of the Party-state to PRC history, which closely reflects that state's claims to ubiquitous dominance, remains unchallenged? Third, why does this project, which states its aims so forthrightly, still often engage in mercurial qualifying statements about the “dark sides” and exercises in selective good Maoism? Is good Maoism just in the “early years” or mainly “the radical potential that never belonged to Mao or the PRC state”? (See in this issue, Smith foreword; Meyskens; Day.) Does the latter statement include figures like Yu Luoke, who were labeled “counterrevolutionaries” and executed under Maoism for their Maoist criticisms of Mao (Wu 2014: 75–79)? I ask these questions not as rebuttal, but to suggest that a better Good Left history would not blind itself to those avenues just as they shed light on others discovered missing. I urge direct confrontation of the subjects that fit least well with the broader critique and, above all, a willingness to balance the productivity of critical skepticism with an open curiosity that keeps our imperfect art breathing with the question “After all, was there not more than this?”Good Left history should not be satisfied with just acknowledging that violence, coercion, and exploitation were “fundamental” to Maoism. The interest in showing that tragedy and brutality are “not the whole story” best proceeds if it does not, as Johnson notes, “sidestep” the violence or leave the impression that those who suffered were the “collateral damage” price of radicalism (see in this issue, in addition to Johnson, Smith; Lanza). In fact, theorizing and narrating of that “whole story” requires confronting Maoist violence, as Jake Werner's approach in this issue suggests. This does not mean enumerating statistics and sketching images of horrors detached from context and thin on explication. The inhabiting of Maoism requires, as for all such phenomena, seeing up close its theoretical commitment to and legitimation of violence, the policies, institutions, and means of its practice, and the intimacy of the pain, destruction, and trauma it wrought on specific human beings, families, and communities; the imprints it left and transformations it coerced, induced, and informed. In recording the inhumanity of humanity to humanity, to paraphrase Primo Levi (1988: 44), we have to find the capacity to make sense of not just the coexistence of compassion and brutality in a single society, community or episode of violence, but also bear witness to its coexistence “in the same individual, and in the same moment.”Land Reform violence in the villages from the mid-1940s into the early 1950s, for instance, demands such interrogation of specific cases and of the uniform Maoist statement that the violence was justified because “the masses demand[ed] we suppress counterrevolutionaries” (Smith, this issue). In my research on rural Northern Jiangsu communities, places with long histories of violence, Land Reform violence was common and something different. It rarely involved interclan hostility or vendetta, even when it employed the language of vengeance. It was mob murder in which some villagers, guided and sanctioned by CCP officials, used specially prepared long, wooden “turning over big clubs” (翻身大棍) to beat to death fellow villagers in full view of the community, before relatives and children. The bloodied long-clubs were retained, in cases displayed, as symbols of the new authority. Even if we set aside the troubling matters of who the killers and killed were in their social settings and the validity of any kind of mob-justice killing, we cannot avoid what its practice and its justification meant in these communities. Whatever emancipatory changes and visions would be advanced in those places were inextricably founded not in an abstraction of war or revolutionary violence, but in intimate, bloody murder. Acceptance of this willing of the murder was the initiation into membership in the new political community, “the masses.” And, in village terms at that time, it extended moral responsibility for the death, before gods, ancestors, and relatives, to all who accepted its justification. Since this was almost an entirely rural phenomenon, the Maoist knowledge act aspect alone expanded on the modern epistemological creation of “the peasant” (Cohen 1993; Eyferth 2009), requiring that the apparent barbarousness of this class would be manifested in its original act of liberation. As in all Maoist epistemology of the Mass Line, elements of practical power and ideology openly went hand in hand, and the ideal visions of the ends were inscribed in the structures of the means.The Good Left's emphasis on the significance of Maoism as epistemology is a view I share (Lanza, this issue). Yet, it is essential that we recognize (1) that by design it was expressly backed by armed force and (2) that all ways in which this transformative, revolutionary epistemology was productive of possibility were bonded to the ways in which it was reductive through what it excluded and redefined with powerfully simplifying labels. Maoist political and historical theory and practice were both formulated this way (Gao 2018). Can the Good Left really align its historical practice with this epistemology? Can it just replace a liberal values reductive model (Smith foreword, this issue) with a Maoist one? Is this the better theory we need to correct a presumably unhinged empiricism? We do not necessarily have to agree on Timothy Cheek's (2016: 307) view of Maoist “epistemological elitism” or cite generations of scholarship on this point (U 2019; Eyferth 2009). I agree with this group that Maoists stated their theories quite plainly. And I concur that Maoist epistemology set out its vision and recorded much about how it was being limited and contested in their own Maoist terms. Smith acknowledges that there was much the PRC state “never came to know” (Smith foreword, this issue). Still, I would be more concerned by a historical practice based on what Maoists claimed to know in their own way.This is where Brown and Johnson (2015) entered with their quest for something “more than this.” Under Maoist epistemology, what will be missing about the past, about lives lived partly before 1949, about all forms of difference of opinion and expression, politics, morality, aesthetics, creativity, language, religion, cultural and social practice, ethnicity, locality, bodies, gender, sex, approaches to making a living, of being born, living and dying? Will the Maoist version capture fully, on its own, the historical significances of subalterns, or as Lanza (this issue) has it, “those who work with their hands”? As Smith and Lanza know, I have argued that local family and religious “language and practices,” in the most basic matters of life and survival, “were the idiom through which rural people were expressing their experience in troubled times” in the 1950s (Kiely 2019; see also Wang 2020). Some evidence for this was drawn from archives and government documents depicting abundant phenomena defined as “feudalism” and “superstition” targeted for elimination. I would hope we can see more than this—a space for emancipatory visions and expressions of “moral autonomy and human dignity,” both “central to the socialist project” (Wu 2014: 56) and to Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, Christian, local religious, family, and other articulations identifiable under Maoism.Debates will continue about the privileging of the details of our empirical work set against the meaning making and abstractions of our theories. For historians, there is no way out of this—much as is the case with our posture toward social reality. These are tensions inherent to our craft. Neither can be discarded or overlooked. So, let us embrace the tensions as creative and recognize how much this demands of us. We can afford neither free-floating evidence nor theories of an abstract social totality, flattened and lifeless. Nor can we get bogged down in complaining about our sources. All historical sources are remnants or remembered fragments, shards, and glimpses, even when they claim comprehensiveness; limited, distorted, obscured by both the conditions of order and those of disorder we find them in. All require strenuous cross-examining and decoding in relation to what we can comprehend of their symbolic and social contexts. In keeping with this Good Left project, let us continue to interrogate method in relation to frameworks and, in the manner that Smith and Werner attempt, pursue theories that can explain more fully, not less. Let us continue to open up the aperture of our inquiries, surely to those whose contributions are least understood and yet not at the expense of all others. In doing so, let us not reject what might be learned from different generations and types of scholarship, including those of social scientists.3 We need all the help we can get.Smith (foreword, this issue) and I agree on the significance of the “squat in a spot” (dundian 蹲点) approach, in my case as a practice of historical anthropology. I take inspiration in not being alone in this, from the collective engaged in this work before, now, and coming after; those who have put the time into localities and viewed them over extended periods (Siu 1989; Dubois 2005; Grove 2006; Li 2009; Eyferth 2009; Hershatter 2011; Harrison 2013; Guo 2013); those who have pioneered collaborations across borders, like Gail Hershatter (2011) and Gao Xiaoxian and Andrew Walder (a social scientist) and Dong Guoqiang (a historian) (Dong and Walder 2020); and especially the new generations of Chinese scholars setting the standard for “squatting” (Liu et al. 2015) and producing rich histories likely to shape understandings of China's history for an approaching time when English language scholarship will be globally less prominent than it is today. The complexity with which we are coming to think of the early history of the PRC is not a minor matter, even if it is not itself a revolution.The Good Left and I can hopefully share an appreciation of the resonances from Mao Zedong's 1941 criticism of Marxist historians’ knowing “only ancient Greece but not China and . . . in a fog about the China of yesterday and the day before yesterday. With this attitude, a person studies Marxist-Leninist theory in the abstract and without any aim” (Mao [1941] 1960: 799). And yet I hope we can agree that, whatever our politics, we cannot act like Promethean revolutionaries when we are doing the onerous mental labor of historical research. If often seemingly modest and limited in its rewards, the historian's contributions to “progressive intelligibility” or “good enough” history (Bloch 1954: 10; Hershatter 2011: 3) has values to our attempts to inquire into and make sense of ourselves and our predicaments that, history shows, are most recognized when they are abruptly denied to us.