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Member of Gang of Four Zhang Chunqiao dies
(chinadaily.com.cn/xinhua)
Updated: 2005-05-11 09:16 Zhang Chunqiao, a member of China's notorious
“Gang of Four” led by the wife of late Chairman Mao Zedong, died of cancer last
month, the Xinhua news agency reported. He was 88.
Zhang had been on
medical parole since January 1998 and had died on April 21, Xinhua said without
giving further details of any survivors.
China’s supreme court in
Beijing gave Zhang a death sentence suspended for two years in January 1981. His
sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in January 1983, and reduced again to
18 years in prison.
The “Gang of Four”, which reportedly was given its
name by Chairman Mao Zedong, directed the purge of thousands of moderate
Communist Party officials and intellectuals, and wrecked China’s economy pushing
it to the brink of famine.
The violence of the Cultural Revolution pitted
neighbor against neighbor, traumatized the nation, and forced a generation of
intellectuals to work in the countryside. A month after Mao's death in 1976,
members of the Gang of Four were arrested, marking the end of the Cultural
Revolution.
Zhang and Jiang Qing, widow of Mao, were both sentenced
to death in 1981. Jiang died in 1991 in captivity. Another member of the Gang of
Four, Wang Hongwen, died in 1992. The fourth member, Yao Wenyuan, was released
in 1996. He is still alive.
Zhang was in charge of China's largest city
Shanghai, now a glittering symbol of China’s reform program, but which 40 years
ago was a stronghold of communism in its purest, most uncompromising form.
Zhang and Wang set up a Shanghai Revolutionary Committee that tried to
turn the city, China's most prosperous and Westernized, into a bastion of
radicalism. Zhang was accused of running Shanghai like a warlord, with a private
militia of thousands.
In one incident, 100,000 radicals led by Wang attacked
a factory held by a rival faction and beat, kidnapped or tortured at least 600
rivals, according to trial testimony.
Their detention was instrumental in
bringing to the fore Deng Xiaoping who shortly afterward set in motion the
reform and opening-up which had led to the economic miracle China is now
experiencing.
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