Comrade Dowager Chiang Ch’ing

Abstract

Chiang Ch'ing, the widow of Mao Tse-tung, will be remembered as one of the most controversial figures in this troubled and highly competitive century. Whether we praise or condemn her, laud her as a sincere if misguided patriot or condemn her as a secondrate actress interested only in self-aggrandizement, we cannot deny to her the prominent place she has earned in history. Rising from obscure origins of which we have little record (and much of that provided by herself), Chiang Ch'ing achieved for a brief number of years a degree of power over a vast number of people equalled by few men and possibly by no other woman in China's past. Whatever the final judgment of history on her, she deserves special notice as the defacto last Empress Dowager of China, and perhaps its most influential woman-at least until the appearance of a Chinese Indira Gandhi, which will not be soon. This essay will attempt to deal with Chiang Ch'ing as a creation of her times and the forces that dominated her society. The task is complicated by our closeness to her life and by the absence of a concluding act. For although she is under death sentence, Chiang's drama has not yet ended, and there are those who hope for a dramatic denouement. Chinese society formed Chiang Ch'ing. But it was her own psychological makeup that took her to the heights of power and, as some would have it, the depths of personal depravity. From her March 1914 birth in poverty in Shantung Province to her death sentence before a Peking court in January 1981, her life has been a drama whose most persistent theme has been her own striving for recognition and position. A woman of superior intelligence, ambition, and determination, and yet with chronic insecurities in both her personal and professional relationships, she has usually evoked either