This thesis examines the local production of investigative practices during late 1950s Maoist political campaigns through a micro-historical study of the case of Du Gao, a young playwright accused of organizing a counterrevolutionary “clique” within Beijing’s literary and art circles between 1955 and 1957. Drawing primarily on the recovered parts of Du Gao’s personal dossiers – a collection of case files containing interrogation records, confessions and investigation reports – this study analyzes how cadres and other activists of Du’s work unit learned to create coherent narratives of counterrevolutionary crimes in response to the Party’s call for mass participation in political movements. The case of Du Gao demonstrates the unexpected outcomes brought about by the employment of non-professional investigators with vested interests. Charges of counterrevolutionary activity were inherently vague, and the official criteria by which such charges could be evaluated changed radically at different junctures. Faced with ideologically confusing official guidelines, these amateur investigators trained themselves by officially promoted model cases and often took the initiative to determine how suspects’ actions should be interpreted and categorized when Party directives proved insufficient. In some cases, investigators were also required to turn investigation reports into didactic materials for broader distribution, and in doing so, they actively promoted their own interpretations of the ideological principles underlying the campaigns. By tracing the evolution of Du Gao’s case across successive campaigns, this study highlights how personal relationships and professional rivalries contributed to and were in turn reshaped by decentralized practices of campaign justice, as well as the process through which investigators were motivated to help flesh out the controversial official concepts of “clique” and “factionalism” in order to legitimatize their own appropriation of the terms. At the same time, investigations also generated an overflow of information from the suspects’ past and present, which provided potentially incriminating materials that could easily be recycled in future campaign that supported a stricter understanding of the past.
