Jiang Qing

Actress and Revolutionary

Jiang Qing was born in 1914 in Shandong province. She worked as an actress in Shanghai in the 1930s, appearing in several films under the name Lan Ping. She joined the Communist Party in 1933 and made her way to Yan'an, the Communist base area, in 1937. There she met Mao Zedong, and they married in 1938 — a marriage that senior Party leaders reportedly opposed on the grounds of her class background and theatrical past. As a condition of Party approval, she reportedly agreed to remain out of politics for twenty years. She remained largely in the background until the 1960s.

Cultural Revolutionary Power

From 1966, Jiang Qing became one of the most powerful figures in China as a leading member of the Central Cultural Revolution Group. She directed the radical transformation of Chinese arts and culture, suppressing virtually all traditional and foreign cultural expression and replacing it with the "eight model revolutionary works" she personally curated — a set of operas and ballets with explicitly revolutionary themes. She wielded this cultural authority to persecute hundreds of artists, writers, and performers. Her personal vendettas — against old colleagues, critics, and rivals from her Shanghai acting days — were settled through the Cultural Revolution's machinery.

The Gang of Four

By the early 1970s, Jiang Qing had formed a tight political alliance with Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan — the group that Deng Xiaoping would later call the "Gang of Four." The four dominated ideological and cultural policy throughout the Cultural Revolution decade. After the death of Zhou Enlai in January 1976, the Gang moved to block Deng Xiaoping's rehabilitation and consolidate their grip on power. They were widely seen as positioning themselves to succeed Mao. When Mao died on 9 September 1976, their bid for power lasted less than a month: they were arrested on 6 October 1976.

Trial and Defiance

Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four were put on trial in 1980–81 in a televised proceeding that was one of the most watched events in Chinese history. She was charged with persecuting over 700,000 people, of whom 34,375 died. Throughout the trial she was defiant, shouting at judges, refusing to accept charges, and declaring "I was Chairman Mao's dog — whoever he told me to bite, I bit." She was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1991 she was released on medical parole. She hanged herself in 1991, reportedly leaving a note that said she was "a revolutionary who died for the revolutionary cause."