Zhang Chunqiao

Early Career and Yan'an Period

Zhang Chunqiao was born on 1 February 1917 in Juye, Shandong. He was involved in left-wing literary movements in his youth; in March 1936, at age 19, he published an article under the pen name 'Di Ke' in the Torch supplement of the Ta Kung Evening News criticising a novel by the writer Tian Jun (Xiao Jun); Lu Xun promptly published a rebuttal naming and mocking 'Di Ke,' part of a broader dispute within the left-wing literary world between the 'national defence literature' and 'mass literature of the national revolutionary war' slogans. After 1976, official investigative materials from the 'Two Cases' review suggested a link between Zhang and Nationalist intelligence, on the grounds that the Torch supplement's editor, Cui Wanqiu, was later confirmed to have been a Nationalist agent; independent scholars have disputed this, arguing that submitting an article to the publication does not by itself establish knowledge of or involvement in intelligence work, and the question remains contested. In late 1937, Zhang left Shandong for Yan'an, arriving in January 1938 and enrolling at the Shaanbei Public School; he joined the Chinese Communist Party that August. Through the 1940s he held a series of journalism posts in the Jin-Cha-Ji border region, becoming an editorial board member of the Jin-Cha-Ji Daily in 1944 and later its deputy editor-in-chief and editorial department head.

Shanghai Years and Theoretical Writings

In May 1949 he entered Shanghai with the People's Liberation Army. He became president of Liberation Daily (解放日报) in October 1951 and its editor-in-chief in January 1955; he was elected to the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee in 1956 and served as head of its Propaganda Department from March 1963 to June 1965. In September 1958, he published the essay 'Break Away from Bourgeois Legal Ideas' in Shanghai's Liberation (解放) biweekly; it was reprinted with an editor's note by People's Daily that October, drawing Mao Zedong's attention and approval, and marking a key turning point in his political rise.

Rise during the Cultural Revolution

On 28 May 1966, Zhang was named a vice-director of the newly formed Central Cultural Revolution Group, taking charge of its propaganda work from then on. In January 1967, Shanghai rebel factions seized Wenhui Bao and Liberation Daily and declared the seizure of power from the municipal Party committee and government -- the 'January Storm'; on 5 February, the 'Shanghai People's Commune' was proclaimed, with Zhang as its director. Mao subsequently rejected the 'commune' designation, and on 23-24 February the body was reorganised as the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, with Zhang continuing as its director. In April 1969, the 9th Party Congress elected him to the Politburo; in August 1973, the 10th Congress elected him to the Politburo Standing Committee, and he formed the core of the Gang of Four together with Jiang Qing. In January 1975 he became Director of the PLA General Political Department, was appointed Vice-Premier by the State Council that same month, and from February concurrently sat on the Central Military Commission's standing members. That April, his essay 'On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie' was discussed by the Politburo, annotated by Mao, and published in Red Flag magazine, becoming one of the programmatic texts of the late Cultural Revolution's 'continuing revolution' theory.

Trial and Later Years

On 6 October 1976, Zhang was arrested alongside the other three members of the Gang of Four and placed under isolated investigation. He was expelled from the Party in July 1977. From November 1980 to January 1981, a Special Tribunal of the Supreme People's Court publicly tried the 'Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Cliques' case; Zhang refused to plead guilty throughout the proceedings and remained silent, offering no statement or defence. On 25 January 1981, the tribunal sentenced him to death with a two-year reprieve and lifelong deprivation of political rights; when the reprieve period expired in January 1983 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment as a matter of course; it was further reduced to eighteen years in December 1997; and he was released on medical parole in January 1998. Zhang died of pancreatic cancer on 21 April 2005, at the age of eighty-eight.