Word: qing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chinese government is trying to prove the credibility of its new legal system by suspending the death sentence of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's widow, Jiang Qing, Harvard experts on China said yesterday. Jiang was given two years to reform...
...final presentation of evidence, the prosecutors flashed grisly pictures of the bruised corpse of former Coal Mining Minister Zhang Linzhi on a large screen in the courtroom and called two witnesses to testify that Jiang Qing had ordered Red Guards to deal with him as a counterrevolutionary. Then, in the "debate" portion of the trial, which allows a modicum of defense, Prosecutor Jiang Wen demanded that Mme. Mao be punished in accordance with Article 103 of China's criminal code. It allows the death penalty in cases where "serious harm" has been done to the state...
Speaking for herself (she had refused an attorney), Jiang Qing gave a long and rambling two-hour defense of the Cultural Revolution, only brief portions of which were shown a week later on Chinese TV. In it she declared that she had only carried out the decisions of Chairman Mao, Premier Chou En-lai and the party Central Committee. Jiang even drew laughs from many of the 600 courtroom spectators when, establishing her revolutionary credentials, she gave an account of her closeness to Mao. "During the war, it was I, the only woman comrade, who followed and accompanied Chairman...
Given a final chance to speak, Jiang Qing sarcastically noted, "You are pushing the blame on me as though I were some kind of devil with three heads and six arms who can do anything she wants." Then, just before the courtroom drama concluded with her forcible eviction, she once again declared her willingness to die for her cause. "I only wish," she said, "that I had several heads for you to chop...
Many Chinese, particularly those who suffered during the Cultural Revolution, remained totally unmoved by Jiang Qing's defense. "They wouldn't let me go to the trial as an observer," said one middle-level bureaucrat who spent four years in Peking's Qincheng Prison during the Cultural Revolution. "They were afraid I'd start shouting, 'Kill the bitch! Kill the bitch!' " Others grumbled that the case was a classic show trial whose purpose was only to give an appearance of legality to the vengeful elimination of the once powerful radical faction. "There...