Summary: The Chinese government announced that Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong and a former leader of the Cultural Revolution, died by suicide at age 77 while serving a life prison sentence. She was a central figure in the Gang of Four, widely reviled for her role in the political persecution and chaos of that era, and her trial was a major public spectacle. The announcement of her death was reportedly delayed due to government concerns about protests around the Tiananmen Square anniversary.
Main Topics Covered:
1. The suicide and delayed announcement of Jiang Qing's death.
2. Her role as a leader of the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution and her subsequent trial and imprisonment.
3. Her historical legacy as a symbol of ideological extremism and brutality.
4. The political context of her death in relation to contemporary Chinese leadership and public sentiment.
Supported by
Women’s History Month
From 1991: Suicide of Jiang Qing, Mao’s Widow, Is Reported
A former actress who grew up in poverty, she was one of the most hated women in modern Chinese history for her role in the Cultural Revolution.
This obituary was originally published on June 5, 1991. It is being republished for a package for Women’s History Month.
Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao and herself a leader of China during some of its most tumultuous years, has committed suicide, the Government announced tonight. She was 77 years old.
Ms. Jiang was serving a life prison sentence for her role as leader of the Gang of Four. That name was given to the group of radical Communist leaders whose closeness to the all-powerful Mao enabled them to speak in his name and carry out what they said were his policies during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976.
Ms. Jiang killed herself in the early hours of May 14, the official New China News Agency reported. The three-paragraph dispatch did not say how she had committed suicide or why, and it was impossible to confirm the account. The agency said also Ms. Jiang had been receiving medical treatment outside prison since May 1984.
Grew Up in Poverty
Raised in conditions so poor that hunger reportedly left her with lifelong stomach problems, Ms. Jiang grew up to become a beautiful actress, then used her marriage to Mao to reach the apex of power in China and help preside over the brutal persecution and chaos of the Cultural Revolution. She tried to build her own power base and exercised real control over much of Chinese culture, but in the end she owed her authority, and her ability to inspire fear, to her link with Mao. When he died in 1976, she and her allies in the Gang of Four were soon overthrown.
Few people have been so hated in modern Chinese history, and after her fall she became a symbol of the excesses and brutality of the Cultural Revolution. When her trial was televised each night at the end of 1980, most of the nation was delighted and riveted by the spectacle of Ms. Jiang in the dock. She refused to repent, and even taunted the court to chop off her head.
It was grand drama, for Ms. Jiang could be cruel, petty, ruthless and couragious. Above all, her ambition was dizzying.
“Sex is engaging in the first rounds,” she once told an interviewer. “What sustains interest in the long run is political power.”
The delay in announcing her death almost certainly was linked to the Government’s concern about possible protests leading up to the second anniversary today of the army crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. While it would be difficult to imagine university students taking to the streets to mourn her, the authorities apparently thought it best not to take any risks.
In fact, the Tiananmen anniversary passed quietly today, and Ms. Jiang’s death seems unlikely to have any major impact on the Chinese political scene. While there is some nostalgia for Mao, his widow was linked with just the kind of ideological extremism from which many Chinese are now trying to escape.
Ms. Jiang (her name is pronounced jyahng ching) came to symbolize the fanatical egalitarianism and passion for ideology of the Cultural Revolution years. Paradoxically, China has returned half a step in that direction in the last two years, and the present leadership is almost certainly far closer to her ideologically than to the growing number of young intellectuals who are waiting for a post-Communist period to dawn.
To many young Chinese, there is not much difference between Ms. Jiang and some of the neo-Maoist hard-liners who remain in power. Ms. Jiang was faulted for persecuting intellectuals, for insisting on an inane uniformity in the arts and for joining in the violent suppression of a democracy movement at Tiananmen Square — an earlier one, in 1976. Those are precisely the complaints that young people have about some of today’s leaders.
During the Cultural Revolution, Ms. Jiang oversaw mass rallies in which her enemies were humiliated and physically abused. She also is said to have sought out and killed those who spurned her in earlier years.
One of her grave miscalculations, in retrospect, was to make an enemy of Deng Xiaoping, now China’s senior leader, and denounce him as an “international capitalist agent.”
Ms. Jiang has been widely criticized for her ambition and for her efforts to exploit her relationship with Mao for personal gain. There is no doubt that the former actress offended other leaders, usually men, with her aggressiveness, and many accused her of using beauty and sex to win power.
Ms. Jiang caught Mao’s eye in the caves at Yanan, the Red Army’s hideaway in northern China during the civil war against the Nationalists, in 1938, and she scandalized top Communist officials when the couple apparently began living together before Mao got around to divorcing his previous wife, a respected revolutionary. Ms. Jiang was Mao’s third wife, not counting a childhood betrothal that was never consummated.
Apparently because of indignation at the divorce of the second wife and a sense of impropriety that Ms. Jiang was just 24 years old while Mao was 45, party officials reportedly insisted that Mao could marry Ms. Jiang only if she never exercised any political power.
Mao kept that bargain for decades, even after the Communist victory of 1949 established him as the leader of the People’s Republic of China. In the 1950’s, Ms. Jiang held only minor posts in the cultural world, and there are some indications that the marriage was not going well. Ms. Jiang was in Moscow for health treatment, for example, when Mao made a state visit to the Soviet Union. But he did not visit her.
Role in Cultural Revolution
In the 1960’s, as Mao felt his influence waning and as he worried about the Communist Party becoming ossified and corrupted by years in power, he launched the Cultural Revolution. Ms. Jiang was involved in the planning of the Cultural Revolution and came to play an increasingly important role in that period.
As Deputy Director of the Cultural Revolution Group, Ms. Jiang appeared at rallies beginning in 1966 and praised the Red Guards, young followers of Mao who were dragging the country into chaos. Her status rose, and she became firmly linked to the faction that favored prolonged revolution and class struggle.
She served on the party Politburo, was in charge of literature and the arts and promoted “revolutionary operas” and other works intended to foster a suitable ideological outlook.
Mao died in September 1976, and within a month she and the other members of the Gang of Four — Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan — were toppled in a virtual coup d’état. There was widespread rejoicing in the streets.
Steadfast in Her Views
For all the accusations that she was a callow opportunist, Ms. Jiang was one of the few top Chinese leaders over the last few decades who stuck to her views even when they were unpopular. Even Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, revered by many Chinese, bent with the political winds, but after she was arrested and faced the possibility of a death sentence, Ms. Jiang did not renounce her fervent Maoism.
“I was Chairman Mao’s dog,” she said in her defense. “Whomever he told me to bite, I bit.”
After a famous show trial that began in November 1980, Ms. Jiang was sentenced to death, with a two-year reprieve. This was commuted to life imprisonment, and the New China News Agency said in its dispatch today that she had been “out of custody and receiving medical treatment since May 1984.”
Earlier this year, an official Chinese newspaper suggested in a rare report about Ms. Jiang that she was still adamantly opposed to the present Government policies.
While it might seem strange that the Communist Party leadership could continue to hail Mao during the 1980’s while excoriating and imprisoning his widow, the two were not close by the time Ms. Jiang achieved power. By the 1970’s they lived apart, and a Chinese book published last year asserted that Ms. Jiang had to request permission from the party Central Committee’s Work Office to see her husband.
Interviews With U.S. Scholar
Some of the best insights into Ms. Jiang came from a remarkable series of interviews she gave in 1972 to an American scholar, Roxane Witke. Ms. Jiang apparently was attempting to bolster her stature with the interviews. Rivals denounced her for making unauthorized statements, and in the end the interviews hurt her badly.
Jiang Qing, named Li Jin at her birth in March 1914, told Ms. Witke that she had had a miserable childhood. Her mother was a concubine and her father a small-town landowner who beat mother and daughter until they fled home.
At age 14 she joined an underground theater troupe in Shandong Province. At age 16, bereft even of underwear, she went off to Beijing with a traveling theatrical group without consulting her mother. She said that she made contact with the Communists in Qingdao, a port city in Shandong, and that she joined the party in 1932.
In Shanghai, the most exciting city in China in those days, Ms. Jiang played bit parts in a variety of plays, and later films, as well as a few larger roles. One of her roles was that of Nora, the rebellious modern woman, in Henrik Ibsen’s “Doll’s House,” which was then very much in fashion in China.
Actors were then scorned in China, but the theater was dominated by leftist politics and increased her political awareness. She also married or lived with at least two men in this period, and in later years she went to great effort to cover up her early romances and failures. She also sought during the Cultural Revolution to punish anyone who had looked down on her during her Shanghai days.
She asserted that she had been kidnapped by Nationalist agents and held for eight months; whether or not that was true, she did flee Shanghai for the Communist base at Yanan, where she met Mao.
After the triumph of the revolution in 1949, she, like other Communist leaders, developed a taste for luxury. Even during the Cultural Revolution, when she was hailing egalitarianism and posing for pictures doing agricultural labor, she enjoyed foreign films, gourmet meals and the use of a private airplane.
There were rumors in recent years that Ms. Jiang was suffering from throat cancer and that she was refusing to be treated.
Her only known child was a daughter, Li Na, fathered by Mao. According to a Chinese account, Li Na visited Ms. Jiang regularly in Qincheng Prison in the early 1980’s but refused to write to the authorities to request her release.
At her daughter’s refusal, Ms. Jiang is said to have hurled a watermelon to the ground and protested: “Even you do not care for me. You are heartless.”
To preserve archival articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life.”
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