CHINA: The Empress Takes the Stand

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Mao's widow defiantly refuses to cooperate and confess

She stood at the witness stand, leaning with studied casualness against the wooden railing, and fixed her partly contemptuous, partly resigned gaze on the panel of judges in front of her. The courtroom was silent. Then, with klieg lights glaring, onetime Actress Jiang Qing gave the most stunning, if also the briefest, performance of her life. Jiang Qing was on the stand to answer questions about her alleged attempt to seize power during the infamous Cultural Revolution. She neither admitted nor denied the charges. Instead, as spectators oohed and aahed with surprise, she departed from the script and refused to answer directly.

"Jiang Qing," intoned Chief Judge Zeng Hanzhou, "did you or did you not send for [fellow Gang of Four members] Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan on the evening of 17 October, 1974?"

"No," replied the widow of Chairman Mao.

"No?" repeated Zeng incredulously.

"I don't know."

"What did you four talk about?"

"I know nothing at all. How could I know anything?"

That bit of courtroom drama, televised to tens of millions of Chinese,* was the high point of the trial of China's radical so-called Gang of Four, which completed its first full cycle of testimony last week. One by one, each of the four—plus Mao's former personal secretary Chen Boda—were brought to the stand to answer questions about the first of four major areas of crime they are alleged to have committed: "Framing and persecuting party and state leaders" in an attempt to usurp power for themselves.

First to testify in the large, brightly lit courtroom were the more compliant of the gang's members—the youthful Wang Hongwen, who until his arrest in 1976 was a party vice-chairman, and former Shanghai Literary Critic Yao Wenyuan. Wang declared that in October, 1974, Jiang Qing called a meeting at her luxurious villa in Peking to find ways of discrediting their enemies in the party, Deng Xiaoping, China's current strongman, and Deng's patron, Premier Chou Enlai, who, they felt, stood in the way of their plan to seize power. At that meeting Jiang Qing told Wang Hongwen to fly secretly to the south-central city of Changsha, where Mao was staying, and make a false and insinuating report about Deng and Chou to the supreme party leader. Wang claimed in his testimony that he was only passing along to Mao what the plot's instigator, Jiang Qing, had ordered him to say.