Word: qing
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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...
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...
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...