Word: qing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...notorious Gang of Four and six other high-ranking "evildoers." The carefully orchestrated courtroom drama, which is expected to last for several weeks, is the most important show trial to take place in the 31 years that the Communist Party has ruled China. The most celebrated defendant is Jiang Qing, 67, the widow of Mao Tse-tung, who, along with her allies in the Gang of Four,* led Mao's reckless and violent Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. They were arrested four years ago, shortly after Mao's death in 1976. Also on trial are a group...
True, Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, makes a convincing villain: she all but destroyed the Peking Opera and the theater by permitting only dull, politically correct works. (Nowadays at theatrical performances, foreigners sometimes find themselves clapping more than the Chinese present; the guide explains that during the Cultural Revolution, when attendance was compulsory but the programs awful, the Chinese withheld applause as a form of retaliation, and are only now beginning to clap again.) Everybody knows that many of the bureaucrats who waged the Cultural Revolution still occupy high places. But the government's propaganda campaign lets writers...
Some speculation inevitably focused on the radical Gang of Four. Gang Leader Jiang Qing, Mao Tse-tung's onetime companion, and her accomplices from Shanghai (municipal Party Official Zhang Chunqiao, Literary Critic Yao Wenyuan and cotton-mill Party Functionary Wang Hongwen) assumed power in the mid-1960s and instituted a reign of terror in which thousands of writers, artists and scientists were so relentlessly persecuted that many died or committed suicide. Though the gang members were arrested and dis graced four years ago, the announcement that they would go on trial for then-crimes came only last month...
...aware of. The ambitious, flexible programs that China has begun will produce tensions and fissures in a society long controlled by force and regimentation. Even as statues of Mao are vanishing all across China and the trial of the Gang of Four-which includes Mao's wife Jiang Qing-begins, there are rumors of conflicts between the reformers and the Maoists...
After her arrest, Jiang Qing became the object of one of the most sustained and virulent attacks in China's history. She was described by some journals as "malevolent as a demon, treacherous as a serpent, savage as a mad dog." Despite official claims that the trial is "open," it will be tightly controlled; no foreign observers will be permitted, on the grounds that the case involves "state secrets...