Jiang Qing
- Category : Entertainment-Actor-Actress
- Type : MGE
- Profile : 5/2 - Heretical / Hermit
- Definition : Split - Small (20,59)
- Incarnation Cross : LAX The Plane 1
Categories
Biography
Mao Zedong's last wife.
In the West, Jiang was known as Madame Mao. She went by the stage name Lán Píng during her acting career, and was known by various other names during her life. She married Mao in Yan'an in November 1938 and served as Communist China's first first lady. Jiang Qing was best known for playing a major role in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and for forming the radical political alliance known as the "Gang of Four". She was named the "Great Flag-carrier of the Proletarian Culture".
Jiang Qing served as Mao's personal secretary in the 1940s and was head of the Film Section of the CPC Propaganda Department in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, she made a bid for power during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). In 1966 she was appointed deputy director of the Central Cultural Revolution Group and claimed real power over Chinese politics for the first time.
Before Mao's death, the Gang of Four maintained control of many of China's political institutions, including the media and propaganda. However, Jiang's political success was limited. When Mao died in 1976, she lost the support and justification for her political activities. She was arrested in October 1976 by Hua Guofeng and his allies, and was subsequently accused of being counter-revolutionary. Since then, Jiang Qing and Lin Biao have been branded by official historical documents in China as the "Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-revolutionary Cliques" to which most of the blame for the damage and devastation caused by the Cultural Revolution was assigned. The assessments of western scholars have not been as uniformly critical. Though initially sentenced to execution, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983, and in May 1991 she was released for medical treatment.
Before returning to prison, she committed suicide on 14 May 1991.