Word: ch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During the 1950s, Chiang Ch'ing faded almost entirely from the political scene. Reason: cervical cancer and other ailments. In the 1960s, her health finally restored, she emerged from relative obscurity to dazzling prominence. At first she worked from behind the scenes, playing an increasing role in the arts, particularly as a chief critic of "bourgeois" plays and movies. Early opposition to her was swept aside by the Cultural Revolution. Conceived by Mao as a way of re-revolutionizing the Communist Party, the massive assault on the bureaucracy soon got completely out of control, degenerating into constant factional violence...
...been formally named Mao's successor, allegedly attempted to assassinate Mao and take supreme power for himself. When his plot failed, the official but as yet unverified account continues, he died in a plane crash over Mongolia while he was trying to flee to the Soviet Union. Chiang Ch'ing recounted the entire case in great detail during her interview, disclosing several new elements in the Lin-Mao struggle...
...Chiang Ch'ing then went on to say, "Comrades like the Premier and myself were on the side of Chairman Mao. They [Lin Piao's Ultra-Left] set fires everywhere, and we acted like a fire brigade. [In 1971] Chairman Mao continually advised the Premier on how to deal with such clashes, but Mao's ideas were not easily carried out. During the peak of the crisis she flew to the side of the Premier several times to help "cool things down." Constant threats, divisiveness among the people, and conspiratorial actions made it almost impossible for them...
Like Paris in the Belle Epoque or Berlin in the '20s, Shanghai in the '30s was not only a city but a state of mind. When Chiang Ch'ing arrived in 1933, it was an Oriental boom town that neither Japanese aggression nor worldwide Depression could seriously daunt. Since the late '20s its population had grown by a third, to well over 3 million, its real estate values had trebled, and skyscrapers had pierced its once low skyline. At the same time-such was the city's schizophrenia-Shanghai contained vast pockets of poverty...
Shanghai catered to the mind as well as the body, however, and ideas and ideologies throve and warred in its fevered atmosphere. Except for Chinese opera, there was little commercial theater in China, but young performers like Chiang Ch'ing vied to appear at coolie wages in dozens of small, semiprofessional theaters-an off-off Nanking Road. Most of the plays were dreary ideological tracts, melodramas or translations of Western plays, like those of Ibsen or Shaw, that were deemed by one of the dozens of left-wing sects to have a social message. One of Chiang Ch...