UC Santa Cruz

The controversy over Hai Rui Dismissed from Office is typically situated at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and remembered as a catalyst for the power struggles and mass mobilizations that followed. Such approaches, while not amiss, tend to foreground its socio-political repercussions at the expense of the content — theoretical, historiographic, polemical — of the texts in which this controversy developed. This dissertation examines Hai Rui in relation to what came before, situating it instead at the end of a sequence of debates over historical drama and traditional morality that began in 1951 with a similar controversy over The Life of Wu Xun. This shift in historical perspective opens a different vista on the history of the PRC prior to the Cultural Revolution, a period bookended by the emergence and reemergence of a set of questions for which the dominant theoretical discourse had no answers.