From the Shanghai stage to the pinnacle of the Cultural Revolution: Mao's wife who led the Gang of Four and remade Chinese revolutionary art
At her 1980 trial, Jiang Qing defied the court: 'I was Chairman Mao's dog — I bit whomever he asked me to bite.' Dragged from the courtroom, she shouted revolutionary slogans.
A central leader of China's Cultural Revolution and head of the Gang of Four, Jiang Qing was, as Mao Zedong's wife, the most powerful woman in the Chinese Communist Party. After working as a left-wing stage and film actress in 1930s Shanghai, she went to Yan'an in 1937 and married Mao; barred from politics for twenty years, she returned to the public stage in 1963 through a campaign to revolutionize Peking opera. Appointed deputy director of the Central Cultural Revolution Group in 1966, she opened the Cultural Revolution with the attack on the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, established eight revolutionary model operas (yangbanxi), and was elected to the Politburo in 1969. Arrested in October 1976 after Mao's death, she was sentenced to death for 'counter-revolutionary crimes,' saw her sentence commuted, and died by suicide in a Beijing hospital in May 1991.
Career Timeline
- 1933Joined the Chinese Communist Party
- 1935–1937Left-wing film and stage actress, Shanghai (stage name: Lan Ping)
- 1938Married Mao Zedong; drama instructor, Lu Xun Art Academy, Yan'an
- 1949–1951Deputy Director, Film Guidance Committee
- 1966–1969Deputy Director, Central Cultural Revolution Group
- 1969–1976Politburo member, CCP
- 1976Arrested with the Gang of Four
- 1980–1991Death sentence → life imprisonment → medical parole → suicide