"hai Rui Dismissed From Office" And "discussion" To See The Mentality Of The Intellectuals

The discussion about the historic play "Hai Rui Ba Guan" was initiated by Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao, and soon turned out to be an overwhelming political event in contemporary China, with the "Cultural Revolution" being a consequent to it. Previous studies of the discussion were conventionally confined to its meaning in politics history. This paper attempts to explore how the intellect, as a very important party of the discussion, experienced different stages of mind change.The discussion about "Hai Rui Ba Guan" originated from Shanghai. Most of the local intellect, historians in particular, were involved in it, who were innocent of the real purpose of the discussion in the beginning, and gradually realized that it was a political criticism movement rather than an academic discussion. Within this period, the intellect, as a group, experienced different mental changes and each of them, as an individual, exhibited different characteristics of mentality. It will be meaningful to study the changes of their minds as an "ideal model" for getting a whole picture of the tension between academy and politics and to see how politics affected the characteristics of intellectualists in that particular period.