The Rise and Fall of Comrade Chiang Ch’ing

Abstract

THE CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding the purge of Chiang Ch'ing, Mao Tse-tung's last wife, comprise one of the great mysteries of contemporary Chinese Communist history. It may be years before we know -if, indeed, we ever do-just exactly what happened to dethrone one who most people expected to be a powerful post-Mao leader. Already, Chiang Ch'ing's career has become a legend; and this article is an attempt to right the record on at least a part of the story. Chiang has been widely publicized in the Western press, especially since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1964-70. Officially, this consort of Mao Tse-tung, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, was known simply as Comrade Chiang Ch'ing (in Chinese, Chiang T'ung Chih). She was never known in Communist China as Mrs. Mao (Mao T'ai T'ai) or Madame Mao (Mao Fu Jen). Moreover, it was wrong to call her Miss Chiang, as many journalists did. Nor was the proper translation for her name River Green, as has been widely propagated. Who, then, was Chiang Ch'ing? What was the origin of her name? The most authoritative and original information on the origin of her name comes from my former colleague and friend Tso Shunsun, a schoolmate of Mao Tse-tung at the Changsha Normal School in the second decade of this century, and later a leader of the Young China Party. On 1943, he visited Yenan, the wartime capital of the Chinese Communists, with other representatives of the Democratic League. During the visit, Tso and Mao-old political opponents but personal friends-had a private talk in the cave residence of the Mountain Fortress King (Shan Chia Wang), at which Chiang and her fiveor six-year-old daughter were present.