JIANG QING

Wade-Giles Chiang Ch'ing, stage name Lan Ping, original name Luan Shumeng born 1914?, Chu-ch'eng, Shantung province, China died May 14, 1991 third wife of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong and the most influential woman in the People's Republic of China until her downfall in 1976, after Mao's death. As a member of the Gang of Four (q.v.) she was convicted in 1981 of counter-revolutionary crimes and imprisoned. Reared by her grandfather, Jiang became a member of a theatrical troupe in 1929. Her activity in a communist-front organization in 1933 led to her arrest and imprisonment. Upon her release she went to Shanghai, where she played minor roles for the left-wing Tien Tung Motion Pictures Company. When the Japanese attacked Shanghai in 1937, Jiang fled to the Chinese Nationalist wartime capital at Chungking, where she worked for the government-controlled Central Movie Studio until she crossed the Nationalist lines to join the Communist forces in Yen-an. As a drama instructor at the Lu Hsn Art Academy, she met Mao for the first time when he gave a talk at the school. Their subsequent marriage was criticized by many party members, especially since the woman whom Mao divorced (one of the few women to survive the Communists' Long March of 193435) was then hospitalized in Moscow. Party leaders agreed to the marriage on condition that Jiang stay out of politics for the next 30 years. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Jiang remained out of public view except to serve as Mao's hostess for foreign visitors or to sit on various cultural committees. In 1963, however, she became more politically active, sponsoring a movement in the Peking opera and ballet aimed at infusing traditional Chinese art forms with proletarian themes. Jiang's cultural reform movement gradually grew into a prolonged attack on many of the leading cultural and intellectual figures in China and culminated in the Cultural Revolution that by 1966 had begun to sweep the country. Jiang reached the height of her power and influence in 1966, winning renown for her fiery speeches to mass gatherings and her involvement with the radical young Red Guard groups of the Revolution. One of the few people whom Mao trusted, she became the first deputy head of the Cultural Revolution and acquired far-reaching powers over China's cultural life. She oversaw the total suppression of a wide variety of traditional cultural activities during the Revolution. As the Revolution waned in the late 1960s, however, so did Jiang's prominence. She reemerged in 1974 as a cultural leader and spokeswoman for Mao's new policy of settling down. Mao died on Sept. 9, 1976, and the radicals in the party lost their protector. A month later, wall posters appeared attacking Jiang and three other radicals as the Gang of Four, and the attacks grew progressively more hostile. Jiang and the other members of the Gang of Four were soon afterward arrested. She was expelled from the Communist Party in 1977. In 198081 at her public trial as a member of the Gang of Four, Jiang was accused of fomenting the widespread civil unrest that had gripped China during the Cultural Revolution, but she refused to confess her guilt; instead, she denounced the court and the country's leaders. She received a suspended death sentence, but in 1983 it was commuted to life imprisonment. Her death in prison was officially reported as a suicide. Additional reading Ross Terrill, The White-Boned Demon (1984), is a lengthy biography.