BEIJING — As compensation for an official act of injustice, the $429 a Chinese court awarded the mother of a rape victim on Monday was relatively paltry. Symbolically, the money carried a wallop.

That is because the award, issued by a high court in Hunan Province in southern China, was an explicit acknowledgment that the mother, Tang Hui, had been wrongly sentenced to a labor camp last year after she publicly demanded that some of the men convicted of kidnapping, raping and prostituting her 11-year-old daughter be more harshly punished.

Two of the men were sentenced to death; five others were given long jail terms. But Ms. Tang, who was largely responsible for rescuing her daughter after the local police bungled the case, demanded that all those involved in the crime be executed.

As part of the court’s decision on Monday, the local police chief who meted out Ms. Tang’s original 18-month sentence offered her an apology.

The ruling, which overturned a lower court decision, was another public blow to re-education through labor, a widely reviled system of punishment that allows the police to send away minor offenders for up to four years without trial, and with little chance for appeal.

For some legal experts, the ruling provided further evidence that the ruling Communist Party is preparing to modify a Mao-era extralegal judicial system that has become increasingly untenable, both to international bodies like the United Nations and among the Chinese public.

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