Zhang Chunqiao, 88, One of China's Gang of Four, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN May 11, 2005 New York Times

Zhang Chunqiao, a radical Maoist who held several positions at the apex of China's government when he was convicted in 1981 as a member of the infamous Gang of Four, died April 21, the Chinese government reported yesterday. He was 88.
The Globe and Mail

Zhang Chunqiao, around 1976.
Readers
Forum: Asian Politics

The state-run New China News Agency said Mr. Zhang had died of cancer. There have been erroneous reports of his death or of serious illness going back at least to 1980.

In 2001, he was released from prison, having had his death sentence commuted in 1983 for medical reasons. He lived in obscurity in Shanghai.

His moment of greatest prominence came under glaring lights in a show trial that began in 1980 in which he and other top Chinese Communists were charged by other top Chinese Communists with persecuting hundreds of thousands of people. Mr. Zhang, who four years earlier was one of the most powerful leaders in China, not only refused to answer questions but also pretended to go to sleep.

"His ugly, stubborn attitude naturally aroused the indignation of many observers," the Chinese news agency reported at the time.

In 1976, Mr. Zhang was a deputy prime minister, the third in power - behind Deng Xiaoping, also a deputy prime minister, and Zhou Enlai, the prime minister. He was also director of the General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and considered a possible successor to Mao Zedong as leader of the ruling Communist Party.

Then on Oct. 6, 1976, a month after Mao died, Mr. Zhang; Jiang Qing, Mao's widow; Yao Wenyuan; and Wang Hongwen were arrested in a moment of rare drama by an elite unit of the People's Liberation Army. All were top party officials and all were charged with conspiring to overthrow Hua Guofeng, the new party leader, among other treasonous acts.

Speculation in the Western press had been that Mr. Deng, the leading moderate, and Mr. Zhang, the leading radical, had been pre-eminent candidates for the top party post. Some characterized Mr. Hua's triumph as amounting to a coup within the regime.

Gang of Four was a term of derision, and its members were all closely associated with Mao's Cultural Revolution, when Chinese society was turned upside down in the years from 1966 to 1976. Students were let loose on teachers, workers on managers and citizens on bureaucrats. Mao had started the devastating political firestorm in a last-ditch effort to root out elitism and what he saw as an emerging bourgeoisie.

But Hua's new government was veering toward a more moderate course, and a purge of the most prominent radicals was part of its strategy.

In the televised show trial in 1980, sometimes described as a Chinese version of the Nuremberg trials, the four were charged with persecuting more than 700,000 people, almost 35,000 of whom died as a result.

"At their trial they were accused of almost single-handedly causing millions to suffer," Jonathan Mirsky wrote in The Times of London in 1996. "This made it unnecessary to inquire why millions more enthusiastically collaborated."

Mr. Zhang and Ms. Jiang were sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life in prison. She hanged herself. Mr. Wang died of a liver ailment in 1992. Mr. Yao, who was born in 1931, is believed to be the only member of the "gang" still living.

Mr. Zhang was born in 1917, and little is known about his early life except that he came from an intellectual family. By the time he was in his 20's, he was already active in the Writers and Artists Association in Shanghai. During the war, he did propaganda work for Communist guerrillas in northern China. In 1975, The New York Times said, "In a sense, he has been a propagandist ever since."

As he became more prominent in Shanghai's artistic life, he also rose in the party hierarchy, becoming director of the city's propaganda department in 1963. When Ms. Jiang sought to revolutionize the Beijing Opera, he helped her revise one opera a dozen times. He helped begin the Cultural Revolution in 1966, during a visit by Mao to Shanghai, by publishing in two newspapers he controlled scathing attacks on party bureaucrats in Beijing.

Mr. Yao wrote one of the articles, and from then on the two were identified as leaders of the radical movement in Shanghai. In 1967, Mr. Zhang was a leader in setting up the Shanghai Commune, modeled after the Paris Commune in the French Revolution, then in reining it in after it became manifestly unmanageable.

News reports in the 1970's suggested that Mr. Zhang was trying to strike a balance between his radical Maoism and the more pragmatic tone increasingly in evidence. During President Richard M. Nixon's visit to China in 1972, Mr. Zhang, who was described as a smooth and pleasant man with sharp features, met with Mr. Nixon in Shanghai as chairman of the city's revolutionary committee and in Beijing as a member of the Politburo.

The Chinese government made no mention of survivors.