This edition of the program is devoted to Jiang Qing, the girlfriend and ultimately the wife of China’s Communist leader Mao Zedong. After Chairman Mao’s death Jiang Qing tried to become his political successor but after the infamous Gang of Four of which she was a leading member, fell from power, she was arrested. 

Traditionally dismissed as underdogs, Chinese women have repeatedly vindicated themselves and Mrs. Mao certainly ranks here with the grand Empresses of the past.  A ruthless operator, she never did anything just for the sake of it.  If she became someone mistress that was only because she wanted to eventually destroy her lover. She joined the Communist movement only because her gut told her they were going to win. This woman was so perseverant, so able to adjust to just about any situation and she was so insatiable in her desire to live and a real life for Jiang Qing meant to be able to rule.  She wanted to become the one and only successor to Chairman Mao and his empire. Why was the Great Helmsman so dominated by a woman who wasn’t even beautiful?

Jiang Qing, the daughter of a carpenter, was born in Zhucheng, China, in 1914. Two years after entering a school of performing arts in 1928 and two years later she married a trader named Huan. The marriage lasted just a couple of months and then Jiang Qing started working in a university library in  Qinghai rubbing shoulders with  actors, making friends and swinging.  Always driven by a lifelong desire to marry China’s number one man, she, meanwhile, was accepting the attentions of a middle-aged actor and critic Ta Nah. When she abandoned him and their two kids Ta Nah threatened to kill himself.  The whole story made a lot of buzz in the local newspapers. Having close connections with the Communist party since she was 18, Jiang Qing new exactly where she was headed. Shortly after, she caught the attention of Mao himself who found her and asked her to be his guest.  Awed as she was by the invitation, Jiang Qing said ‘no’ but later accepted the offer.  That was the beginning of their lifetime romance which they kept away from the public eye for a pretty long time. Their eventual marriage scandalized Mao’s fellow revolutionaries who did not want him to divorce his third wife who was then undergoing a course of medical treatment in the Soviet Union. Mao firmly brushed off their objections though saying it was his life and he would live it just the way he wanted. 

Meanwhile, Jiang Qing was seriously disturbed by the uncertainty of her position. She was well aware of the sad fate that befell her three predecessors.  She knew that Mao had divorced his first wife imposed on him by his parents. His second wife, the daughter of a scholar Mao very much respected, bore him three children but was later executed by the Kuomintang.  He sent his third wife to the Soviet Union ostensibly for medical treatment and when she came back, he committed her to a mental hospital.  Always an actress, Jiang Qing was watching her step though. In 1939, she married Mao Zedong and thereafter remained in the background of Chinese Communist affairs while, at the same time, playing a very important role of something more than the chairman’s wife, but of his close friend and ally.  In her memoirs, Jiang Qing wrote she had never called Mao a husband or by name, only “Chairman”. Little by little she was grabbing more and more power into those little hands of hers…

Appointed deputy director of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Jiang Qing embarked on a crusade against the enemies of proletarian culture inciting radical youths against senior party and government officials, and replacing nearly all earlier works of art with revolutionary Maoist works. Virtually uneducated save for three short months she once spent at a drama school years ago, Jiang Qing was as determined as she had ever been moving up and up the party ladder. High as she had already gotten in the party hierarchy, however, Jiang Qing wanted more, to become a Red Empress to take over from the aging and ailing Great Helmsman. They say that she once told her dying husband that a man should abdicate in favor of a woman. That a woman could be a monarch too and that there could be an empress even under Communism… 

Mao’s death on September 9, 1976 set off a fierce power struggle with Jiang Qing and other members of the so-called Gang of Four trying desperately to seize power. They were all arrested shortly after. In 1980 they were found guilty of plotting a fascist dictatorship and Jiang Qing and another leading members of the Gang of Four were sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment). That was the sad end of the head spinning career of Chairman Mao’s great wife, a career once dreamed by a young actress with a poetic name Jiang Qing, a Blue River in Chinese. On May 14, 1991, ten days after her release from prison, Jiang Qing was found hanging in her Beijing apartment…
 
 

03/12/2006