Jiang Qing

"In 1966, however, Mao appointed her deputy director of the Cultural Revolution, a vast revolutionary terror, in partnership with Zhang Chungiao (a one-time journalist), Yao Wenyuan (a literary critic) and Wang Hongwen (a former security guard) — the so-called Gang of Four. She zealously directed the repression, manipulated by Mao. Her call for radical forms of expression, instilled with ideologically correct subject matter, escalated into an all-out assault on the existing artistic and intellectual elites. Renowned for her inflammatory rhetoric, she manipulated mass communication techniques to whip young Revolutionary Guards into a frenzy before sending them out to attack — verbally and physically — anything bourgeois or reactionary. In an orgy of denunciation, terror and murder, the Communist Party, including moderates like President Liu Shaogqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, was purged, The real victims were ordinary citizens — around three million of whom were killed white countless others were imprisoned or brutalized."

"The 20th century produced a communist equivalent of the figure of Empress Wu, in the form of Jiang Qing, a.k.a. ‘Madame Mao’, ambitious, ruthless and dogmatic. An only child and the daughter of a concubine, Jiang became an actress after leaving university, acquiring an enduring belief in the importance of the arts. In the late 1930s, however, she met Mao Zedong, future founder of the People’s Republic of China, after joining the Communist side in China’s civil war, becoming his fourth and final wife in 1939 (see page 264). Since Mao was still married at the time, she had to keep a low profile for many years."

"Though Mao hated her, Jiang remained powerful. On his death in 1976, his successor Deng ended her ascendancy and arrested Madame Mao in a palace coup. In 1981 Jiang was found guilty of counter-revolutionary crimes. Her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but she committed suicide in 1991. A hated figure, she was described by one biographer as a vicious woman who helped dispose of many people; the white-boned demon who, in her own words (when on trial), was Chairman Mao’s dog. Whomever he asked me to bite, I bit."