The Gang of Four
Jiang Qing is most famous for creating the group known as the Gang of Four in 1966, which included party leaders Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyan and Wang Hongwen (men who had helped her husband, Mao Zedong, secure Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution). She was active in the Cultural Revolution, and the Gang of Four was largely responsible for both the propaganda during the CR and the lawlessness of the government’s actions during the CR. Toward the end of the CR, a power struggle between the Gang of Four and Mao’s rivals—Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying—took place.
The Fall
Though it is unsure today, the Chinese Communist Party holds that a year before his death, Mao had turned against his wife of nearly forty years and her allies in the Gang of Four; and that after Mao died in 1976, the Gang of Four attempted to seize power.
Imprisonment
With her husband’s death, Jiang now had no justification for her political actions. Hua Guofeng, the new Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, arrested the Gang of Four in October 1976. In 1981, the Gang of Four were tried publicly and convicted for being counter-revolutionaries. Yao and Wang confessed their crimes, and were given twenty years and life in prison; but Jiang and Zhang maintained that they only followed Mao’s orders, so they received death sentences, which later became life sentences to prison. Jiang was accused of persecuting creative artists, hiring people disguised as Red Guards to ransack homes. Later, all four were released.
Jiang was discharged for treatment of the throat cancer she had developed in 1991; she committed suicide ten days after her release.
Info about the Gang of Four
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