Smith, Greg dot com

In 1981 the remarkable trial of the Gang of Four took place in China.

The Gang of Four were the principal Communist Party officials who oversaw the Cultural Revolution that terrorized China between 1966 and 1976. The leader of the Gang of Four and the star of the trial was Jiang Qing, who became known as "The White Boned Demon."

What made Jiang Qing's story so compelling was that she was the first lady of China: Madame Mao, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao married her in 1938, before the Long March, before the Revolution, before he became the new emperor of communist China. Jiang Qiang rose to power with him and eagerly gathered as much of it as she could for herself. In fact, the term "Gang of Four" came from a warning Mao gave her as she and the other three Party officials began to ruthlessly eliminate their political opposition: "Do not try to begin a gang of four to accumulate power."

Before meeting Mao Jiang Qing was an actress in the theater industry of Shanghai, the Paris of Asia. She was a bright and gifted individual, but also vain, petty and mean. As she fought the inevitable battles to build her career in the Shanghai theater scene she kept a score of perceived slights, remembering everyone who she believed had ever hurt or offended her.

The product of a broken family (her mother was a servant and prostitute), she learned early to be self-assertive and resentful of those around her. Having chosen acting as a career, she loved to play to crowds. By turns she could be petty, charming, cruel and seductive. In a country where women were supposed to stay at home, she literally parlayed sex into power. Mr. Terrill shows that she too had been married three times when, at the age of 24, she met and captivated Mao.

Jiang Qing nursed her hurt feelings and kept her mental lists of enemies, waiting for the day when she would be in a position exact revenge.

In the 1950s, Jiang Qing was involved with the Ministry of Culture. Backed by her husband, she was appointed deputy director of the so-called Central Cultural Revolution Group in 1966 and emerged as a serious political figure in the summer of that year. She became a member of the Politburo in 1969. By now she has established a close political working relationship with--what in due course would be known as the Gang of Four... She was one of the most powerful figures in China during Mao's last years and became a controversial figure.

During this period, Mao Zedong galvanized students and young workers as his Red Guards to attack what he termed as revisionists in the party. Mao told them the revolution was in danger and that they must do all they could to stop the emergence of a privileged class in China. Jiang Qing incited radical youths organized as Red Guards against other senior political leaders and government officials.

During the Cultural Revolution Jiang Qing organized the Red Guards to arrest anyone who she wished to label "counter-revolutionary," which often meant anyone she perceived as an enemy or critic.

Much of the Cultural Revolution - one of the great disasters of modern Chinese history - can be explained by her willful, vindictive personality and tempestuous relationship with Mao. For her, the Cultural Revolution, during which millions of Chinese were persecuted, had no ''deep meaning'' but was only a chance for revenge on the people she felt had wronged her, dating back to [her days as an actress in Shanghai in] the 1930's.

During the Gang of Four trial the court stated that 729,511 people had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, of which 34,800 were said to have died.

However, the true figure may never be known since many deaths went unreported or were actively covered up by the police or local authorities. Other reasons are the state of Chinese demographics at the time, as well as the reluctance of the PRC to allow serious research into the period. One recent scholarly account asserts that in rural China alone some 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, with roughly the same number permanently injured.²⁹ In Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim that as many as 3 million people died in the violence of the Cultural Revolution.