Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, was sitting on the sofa reading when several people slipped into the room. It was late in the evening and dark outside, but Jiang’s reading lamp was still on.
“What do you want?” she asked, starting in surprise.
The officer leading the operation stood stiffly in front of her and said:
“Jiang Qing! You have ignored the warnings of the Central Committee. You have continued to form cliques and factions. You have engaged in activities aimed at splitting the Party and plotted to seize power. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has decided to place you under isolated investigation. The decision is to be carried out immediately.”
An era was over. Jiang Qing had met Mao in 1938, when he was still living as a guerrilla leader in the country’s barren northwest, far from the centre of power.
The marriage they entered into two years later was not a happy one, and in time they came to live apart. But Mao never completely cast Jiang aside, and when he launched his frenzied Cultural Revolution in 1966, he needed her more than ever. Jiang was more than willing to act as Mao’s spearhead and urge the Red Guards into battle.
Over the next few years, the country was plunged into chaos. Between one and two million people were killed, while countless others were tortured and maimed.
Eventually, even Mao himself appeared to have had enough. In the early 1970s, the country entered calmer waters. Jiang Qing and her followers, however, wanted to carry on the revolution “to the very end”.
Then Mao died on 9 September 1976. Suddenly the radicals had lost their great and seemingly invincible leader — and Jiang Qing had lost both her husband and her powerful protector.
Less than a month after Mao’s death, on 6 October, the more moderate forces within the Party felt strong enough to act. Jiang Qing was not the only one arrested. So were the three other members of the so-called Gang of Four — Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan. All held senior positions in the Party leadership.
The arrests had been meticulously planned. That evening, the leader of the moderates, Hua Guofeng, had summoned members of the Politburo Standing Committee to a meeting inside Zhongnanhai, the heavily guarded leadership compound often described as the Communist Party’s forbidden city. The stated purpose was to discuss publication of a new volume of Chairman Mao’s Selected Works.
But that was merely a pretext. Wang, Zhang and Yao were arrested as they arrived for the meeting. Armed security guards sprang out from concealed positions and handcuffed them. Moments later, they were driven to an underground detention facility in Zhongnanhai.
Then it was Jiang Qing’s turn. She lived in a relatively new villa inside the same sealed-off compound.
“Chairman Mao’s body is not yet cold, and still you do this to me,” she is said to have lamented as she was taken into custody.
“You are now being taken to another place. You must observe discipline and honestly confess your crimes to the Party,” the officer in charge replied.
She too was then placed in isolation in the underground facility.
Several days passed before the arrests were officially announced, largely because a considerable number of suspected accomplices were also to be detained. Among the best known was Chairman Mao’s nephew, Mao Yuanxin. He was Party secretary in Liaoning Province in northeastern China.
When news of the arrests was finally made public, thousands of jubilant people poured into the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and other cities. At the head of the processions, marchers carried banners and beat noisy gongs, while others pushed improvised launchers for fireworks.
Beijing experienced what became known as the “Three Empties” — empty wine shops, empty fireworks shops and, supposedly, empty hospital beds. The last referred to Party members who had declared themselves ill because of the Gang of Four, only to spring from their beds and pronounce themselves cured.
According to the New China News Agency, around 5.8 million people took part in the demonstrations in Beijing between 21 and 23 October.
As a result of the power struggle, the aforementioned Hua Guofeng was appointed Mao’s successor.
“With you in charge, I am at ease,” Mao is said to have written on a slip of paper and handed to Hua a few months before his death.
Hua was in his mid-fifties and was soon being hailed as “the Wise Leader”. But over the following years he was pushed into the background by the even more astute Deng Xiaoping, who wanted to reform the Chinese economy and open the country to trade and foreign investment.
In November 1980, Jiang Qing and the other three members of the Gang of Four were finally put on trial.
While in prison awaiting proceedings, Jiang had exercised regularly. Her purpose, she said, was “to be able to walk as upright as possible to the execution ground”.
In her verbal duel with the prosecutors, Jiang insisted that she had at all times acted on the orders of Mao, her husband and “close comrade-in-arms”:
“I was Chairman Mao’s dog. When he told me to bite, I bit!”
Jiang Qing had been an actress in her younger days and had even played Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She enjoyed being at the centre of attention, and although the Beijing courtroom was certainly not the stage she would have chosen, much suggests that she played her role there with both pathos and arrogance.
The verdicts were handed down on 25 January 1981.
Jiang Qing was sentenced to death, but with a two-year reprieve. This meant that the sentence could be commuted to life imprisonment if she demonstrated good behaviour and genuine repentance.
Zhang Chunqiao received the same sentence. Wang Hongwen was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Yao Wenyuan — the Cultural Revolution’s chief propagandist — received twenty years behind bars.
“There is no crime in making revolution!” Jiang Qing shouted as she was dragged from the courtroom.
No foreign observers were allowed to attend the trial, and many people, both Chinese and foreign, continued to question Mao’s own political responsibility. Was he not complicit? Was he, in effect, the Gang’s fifth and most important member?
To safeguard Mao’s historical legacy, the new Party leadership decided to undertake an official assessment of his life and record.
As a prelude, Deng Xiaoping agreed to be interviewed by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.
“Will Mao’s portrait continue to hang above the Gate of Heavenly Peace?” she asked.
“Yes, forever,” Deng replied.
He reminded her that Mao, despite his “mistakes”, had been “the principal founder” of the People’s Republic of China.
“When we assess his merits and his mistakes, we maintain that his mistakes were secondary.”
And so it was decided.
For Jiang Qing, the years that followed were tragic. Her death sentence was indeed commuted to life imprisonment, but her health gradually deteriorated.
In the spring of 1991, at the age of 77, she took her own life. According to several sources, she hanged herself using strips of cloth torn from a bedsheet, although the exact circumstances remain unclear.
Zhang Chunqiao’s death sentence was likewise commuted to life imprisonment. He died in 2005, aged 88.
Wang Hongwen died of liver disease in 1992, while Yao Wenyuan died in 2005.
“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao once said.
On that point, at least, he was right.
