Gang of Four
4인방
The Shanghai-based Politburo group of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, who represented Mao Zedong’s radical line in the Cultural Revolution. Controlling propaganda and culture, they fought the normalisation course of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping and engineered Deng’s second fall after the April 1976 Tiananmen incident. A month after Mao’s death, on 6 October 1976, Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing had them arrested, and the special court of 1980–1981 concentrated the guilt of the Cultural Revolution on them. Mao himself coined the name when warning them in 1974.
In depth
The four came together in Shanghai in 1965 while preparing Yao Wenyuan’s attack on Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. Jiang Qing ran the arts and defined revolutionary culture through the “model operas”; Zhang Chunqiao supplied theory with the Shanghai Commune and the doctrine of “restricting bourgeois right”; Wang Hongwen represented the worker organisations. After the Tenth Congress of 1973 they formed a radical bloc in the Politburo.
Mao used them and checked them. In 1974 he warned “don’t form a gang of four” and entrusted the government to Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. But from late 1975 the campaign to “criticise Deng and beat back the right-deviationist reversal of verdicts” restored the radicals’ advantage, and in April 1976 they had the mourning protests for Zhou declared counter-revolutionary and Deng removed.
After Mao’s death, judging that the four were reaching for the party leadership, Ye Jianying persuaded Hua Guofeng; on 6 October Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan were seized at Zhongnanhai, then Jiang Qing. At the trial Jiang Qing declared “I was Chairman Mao’s dog” and shifted the blame to Mao, receiving a suspended death sentence. The label “Gang of Four” was also a device for separating responsibility for the Cultural Revolution from Mao.