 After Mao’s death, this grotesque politicization of Legalism discontinued. While in the 1980s Legalism still could surface in China’s intellectual debates about paths that the country needed to take, and while echoes of Chinese polemics could be heard in the West as recently as the 1990s (Fu Zhengyuan 1996), this “usage of the past to criticize the present” gradually receded (Pines and Defoort 2016). With it, studies of Legalist thought receded as well, especially in the West and in Japan, but to a certain extent also in China. Most recently, this trend is changing, and the academic community is rediscovering the richness of Legalist thought. Without excessive endorsement or disparagement, scholars can investigate this set of ideas, which was highly effective in the context of the Warring States period, but proved less applicable to other historical circumstances.