Gang of Four

He would actually die just weeks later.

The radical faction known as the Gang of Four was fighting for control.

The government was deeply paranoid, insular, and totally obsessed with projecting an image of absolute strength and socialist self-reliance.

And that obsession directly cost lives.

He was 82 years old.

He died still in power and within weeks of his death, the Gang of Four, which included his wife, Jiang Qing, and three other most radical architects of cultural revolution were arrested.

Within a few years, the party issued an official assessment of his record that said roughly he was 70% right and 30% wrong.

And that formulation is one that has struck me when I was creating this podcast as one of the most politically crafted sentences in history because it's designed to preserve enough of the revolutionary legacy to maintain party legitimacy, but then acknowledging enough of the disaster to give the reformers room to move.

His wife, Jiang Qing, grew bolder as he weakened.

She ran the Gang of Four, controlling propaganda, persecuting enemies, preparing to inherit his throne.

She’d perform revolutionary operas for him while he drooled, unable to speak, blinking once for yes, twice for no. Zhang Yufeng, his final mistress, became his voice.

A train attendant he’d noticed years earlier, now the only person who could understand his garbled speech.

Traditional Chinese believed natural disasters meant heaven had withdrawn its mandate.

September eighth, he fell into a coma.

His organs shut down one by one while the Gang of Four and the moderates plotted in adjacent rooms.

At ten minutes past midnight on September ninth, his heart stopped.

[dramatic music] A bit of the spirit there of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

It was launched by Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 and brought to an end a decade later with his death in September 1976 and the subsequent arrest of the notorious Gang of Four.

10 years of chaos in China between those two dates saw mass violence and political upheaval, with up to two million people killed and the lives of millions more thrown into absolute turmoil.

To remind us of that extraordinary period and how it is remembered in China, or indeed forgotten, I spoke to Linda Jaivin, an acclaimed China expert and author of several books, including Bombard the Headquarters: The Cultural Revolution in China.

How could, how could anybody not be affected? That said, there was the odd person you will still meet in China today who somehow managed to stay in their grandparents' house and read old classics, you know, the whole time.

[laughs]

The chaos ended in 1976 when Mao Zedong died in September and the Gang of Four, which included his widow, was arrested the following month.

Was there then a reckoning? Was there any admission that it was all a dreadful mistake and was there any punishment for the persecutors?

Yeah.

And so did Ryan, obviously, because he got it with the Gang of Four.

Yeah, so Ryan manages to get a lock by the end of Double Jeopardy!.

He's at 18,900.

Emma, Beijing.

1976, a month after Mao died, Premier Hua Guofeng summoned the Gang of Four, Mao's widow Jiang Qing and three allies, to a Politburo meeting at Huairen Hall.

The meeting was a pretext.

Yao Wenyuan was lured with a draft of Mao's selected works.

Around Mao, a group of radical Cultural Revolution figures had consolidated their influence over cultural and propaganda affairs.

Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and a young Shanghai worker turned official named Wang Hongwen formed the group that would later be called the Gang of Four, though nobody used that name while Mao was alive.

They competed with Zhou Enlai and the rehabilitated officials for Mao's ear, and the last years of Mao's life were shaped by the tension between these two factions pulling in opposite directions.

Mao himself was increasingly confined.

He was seventy-eight years old.

The public mourning was immediate and widespread, partly because Zhou had genuinely been loved in a way that was different from the fear and reverence that surrounded Mao, and partly because his death was understood by many Chinese to represent the passing of a figure who had, through careful management, limited some of the worst impulses of the Cultural Revolution years.

The Gang of Four moved quickly to suppress public expressions of grief that seemed too enthusiastic, correctly reading them as implicitly critical of the political direction they represented.

The Qingming Festival, the traditional day for mourning the dead, falling in early April, provided the occasion for something the party had not managed to prevent.

Clique in China means coup, major trouble.

The Gang of Four, after the death of Mao, was a clique.

Clique talk means China's unstable.

I just parked that there.