Word: ganged
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...universities, where the four had influence, were surrounded by troops. With one stroke, the four leaders who had dragged China through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution had been disposed of and the way had been cleared for others to assume power. That episode, the arrest of the radical "Gang of Four," took place four years ago. Last week the Chinese leadership announced that the gang is going on trial, and thus it appeared that the final act of the drama would soon unfold. TIME Peking Bureau Chief Richard Bernstein reports...
...trial promised to be a meticulously staged affair, by means of which Peking's leaders will provide touches of both finality and legality to the elimination of their once dreaded enemies. The gang will be brought before a specially appointed 35-member tribunal, probably within the next month, according to the official announcement. At the same time the Chinese will dispose of another, even older bit of unfinished business: the 1971 plot in which then Defense Minister Lin Biao allegedly tried to assassinate Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Lin reportedly died in a plane crash after his attempt failed...
...charges against all ten defendants are serious. Lin Biao's allies will be charged with sedition and plotting to kill Mao. The Gang of Four will be on the block for "conspiracy to overthrow the proletarian dictatorship, persecution of cadres and the practice of a fascist dictatorship," and for trying to "engineer a counterrevolutionary armed rebellion...
Execution of the Gang of Four would cause little uproar in China. Few would rue the demise of the group's leader, Jiang Qing, 66, a once sexy, grade-B movie actress from Shanghai, who in 1937 crossed the country to the Communist revolutionary base in northwest China and promptly captured the heart of the young guerrilla leader Mao Tse-tung. Mao's live-in arrangement with her-which apparently ended a few years before his death in 1976 -was tolerated by his comrades on the condition that he keep his new commonlaw wife away from politics...
Jiang Qing assumed power with the assistance of her three fellow gang members: Yao Wenyuan, 56, a literary critic whose extremist articles in the Shanghai daily Wen Hui inaugurated the Cultural Revolution; Wang Hongwen, 43, a party secretary in a Shanghai cotton mill, who in 1973 was elevated by Mao to the third highest post in the Communist hierarchy; and Zhang Chunqiao, 69, who helped Jiang Qing purge almost the entire cultural establishment of China. The four instituted a reign of terror during which thousands of writers, artists and scientists were so relentlessly persecuted that many died or committed suicide...