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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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