Surrounded by women, Mao barely saw his own wife, Jiang Qing. She preferred the more spacious quarters at Diaoyutai, another former imperial residence, where she assembled her own court. There she could indulge her love of fashion and costumes, sometimes having whole boxes of them brought to her so she could play at dressing-up. In 1972 she befriended the American anthropologist Roxane Witke, who spent hours watching her play billiards, discuss imported movies and run her fingers through fine silks and cottons with ecstatic exclamations of appreciation that would have landed any of her less powerful countrywomen in very deep trouble. She occasionally recognised the hypocrisy of her revolutionary posturings and her own love of beautiful things. ‘We are the real capitalist roaders,’ she once said of her clique.
A short, pop-eyed figure, just into her sixties, she had once been an actress in Shanghai, and something of a looker. Her love life had been complex, and marked by frequent betrayals on all sides. ‘Sex is engaging in the first rounds, but what really sustains attention in the long run is power,’ she once remarked, and she had a remarkable nose for where power in China was shifting.
In 1937, at twenty-three, she had thrown her previous life aside and travelled to join the Communists in their mountain fastness around Yanan, where she contracted a clandestine marriage to Mao, and had a daughter. In her youth, she certainly possessed a fiery charm; and it had been one of the things that drew Mao to her. They had never been deeply in love - she was his fourth wife, and he her third husband - and they had used each other with great political ruthlessness, but he had been surprisingly dependent on her at one stage, unhappy and fretful unless she was at hand, looking after his needs. After 1949 they drifted apart personally, becoming more political partners than husband and wife, and since 1966 she had increasingly associated herself with three other radicals, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen.
They all had roots in Shanghai, with a strong support base there. Shanghai embodied some of the same contradictions as Jiang herself; it had once been China’s most cosmopolitan city, and Shanghai women, even in 1976, were desperate for a semblance of fashion. They hitched their skirts short or wore daring hairstyles, and risked being pulled aside and harassed by the people’s militias that were self-appointed guardians of revolutionary purity. Yet Shanghai was also a fiercely left-wing city that produced the most hardline ideologues of the Cultural Revolution. They constantly called for more purges, more violence, more strikes against the enemies of the Revolution. Jiang used her new political power to take petty vengeance against critics and directors who had once snubbed her, or actresses with more talent or looks than she.
After her fall, Jiang would come in for far worse criticism than any other figure of the day, criticism that was charged with naked sexist hatred of Jiang as a woman. She would be called a ‘female devil’ and a ‘white-boned demon’. One of the few undoubted achievements of the Communist takeover of China had been the liberation of women, who enjoyed far greater status than they had in the past. But China still had almost no prominent female political leaders, and Jiang was seen as being somewhat unnatural in her eagerness for power.
James Palmer, Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China
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