On November 20th, 1980 the 40 day trial of the Gang Of Four started, after when they were first arrested on October 1976. On November 26, Jiang testified for the first time. When the judge asked her about the plot, she replied with “I can not remember.” Then, the prosecutor called on Wang and two other individuals to testify about the plot. Upon hearing the testimony, Jiang still denied any participation in the plot. She requested to “cross-examine” Wang. But the judge dismissed her request. Jiang began to shout, “This trial is nothing more than a parody of justice!” At that point, the judge ordered the court personnel to escort Jiang out of the courtroom.
Faced with a mountain of evidence and of tourturing comrade Liu evidence, Jiang did not deny her participation in the persecution of Liu. However, she argued that she was only an “assistant” in persecuting Liu, implicating that she was merely following the orders of Mao. Moreover, she asked: “most members of the CCP Central Committee at that time denounced Liu. If I am guilty, why not hold them guilty as well?” This remark irritated the Chief Judge. He ordered Jiang to “shut up!” In response, Jiang shouted “Revolution is glorious! Revolution is no crime!” This is a familiar slogan during Culture Revolution. The judge ordered the court personnel to escort Jiang out of the courthouse. At that point, Jiang seemed to be crazy, reportedly shouted “I was Chairman Mao's dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bit!" Again, she implicated Mao into the persecution of Liu and other senior officials. ''You accuse the wife of Chairman Mao?... We were together for more than 36 years, we went through hard times. During the war I stayed at the front following Mao. Where were you hiding?"
Defiance was the keynote of her performance. It was even reported in a preliminary hearing that Jiang Qing complained of the heat. When nothing was done she steipped naked before the judges - only putting her clothes back on when officials turned off the heating. But the authorities did not censor Quig's extrordinary outbursts, which made the proceedings utterly compelling as a human drama. For example, on December 12th, Liao Mosha, an eminent essayist, described how he had been condemned to eight years in a gaol at the behest of Mao's wife. He started to cry and this infuriated Jiang Qing. In sneering tones she hurled abuse at the man, shouting that he was an 'enemy agent'. When the judges tried to quiet her she called them 'renegades' before being dragged out of court. "I always acted in accordance with the instructions and decisions of the central committee headed by Chairman Mao Tse-tung," Jiang Qing said in a nationally televised segment of the trial broadcast tonight. "Arresting me and bringing me to trial is a defamation of [the late] chairman Mao Tse-tung.''
Jiang Qing, who has been ejected from the courtroom in the past for her violent outbursts, had to be warned again today by the court to observe courtroom etiquette. In return, she defiantly called the judge a "revisionist" and giggled while he told her that her courtroom slanders and false accusations constituted a new crime that would be considered against her at her sentencing.
"Just ask the monkey king to give me more heads to be cut off," she yelled back, referring to the hero of a classical Chinese children's story who had the magical ability to create new monkeys with the wave of his wand. Prosecutors who have pinned full blame on Jiang Qing during the five-week trial quickly criticized her defense as a cover-up and urged judges to sentence her to death. The verdict, an all but foregone conclusion, is expected soon, with sentencing for Jiang Qing and her nine codefendants to come next month.
Jiang Qing, who at 67 appears still to possess the personal strength and savvy she displayed as first lady of the Cultural Revolution, was well aware of the historical significance of her testimony and trial, calling the proceeding little more than a political vendetta. "You want to vilify the millions upon millions of people who took part in the Cultural Revolution," she shouted at the long bench of judges. "You want to reverse verdicts [leftist gains] and make a restoration" of captalism. In her own defense, Jiang emphasized her slavish devotion to Mao, saying, "I have never had my own line of action. During the [civil war with Nationalist Chinese], I was the only woman comrade to follow Mao."
In closing arguments, prosecutors tried to separate Jiang Qing from Mao, citing several cases where the late chairman expressed distrust for his wife, saying at one point that she "does not speak for me" and in another that "after I die, she will make trouble." Listing a series of persecutions against high-ranking party officials that Jiang Qing was alleged to have directed, prosecutor Jiang Wen turned toward the defendant and asked, "Can it be true that chairman Mao asked you to do all this?" Jiang Qing had framed and persecuted too many people to enumerate," the prosecutor said. "She attempted to shift the blame to chairman Mao so as to deny her responsibility and escape due punishment by law. This would never work." During the long show trial, Miss Jiang taunted the court to execute her, shouting that ''it is more glorious to have my head chopped off.'' There is no sign that Mao's widow, having been blamed for everything that went awry in the Chairman's last years, has shown the slightest remorse.
It is rumored that Jiang Qing, now 69 years old, is confined to Qincheng Prison in suburban Peking, where she has been put to work making dolls. Prisoners in China must do something useful. But according to one version, she has embroidered her name on each doll so they cannot be sold and are now piling up in a warehouse.
On her last day in court she yelled out "I am without heaven, and a law onto myself. It's Right to Rebel! Making Revolution is No Crime! Bombard the Headquarters!" On December 29th, in what was supposed to be her last appearance in court before the sentence is handed down, Chiang Ching (Jiang Qing) shouted out these slogans from the Cultural Revolution and once again created a grand revolutionary disruption in the revisionists’ trial of Mao’s comrades. The presiding judge, once again taken aback, warned that she was straying from the issues and slandering the Chinese leaders and the court, and then ordered “Take her away.” The television footage shown to the public went blank at this point. What the film did not show was Chiang Ching being dragged out of the court by three armed bailiffs, for the second time (at least) since her outburst on December 12th.
Following the prepared script, the judge chimed in by stating that “The facts are clear, and the evidence is conclusive. The special court will pursue her criminal liability in accordance with law.” The judge’s statement, according to the L.A. Times, “brought a sardonic smile to Chiang Ching’s face.” The Chicago Sun-Times reported that “with a cold laugh” she said. “You just want my head,” and also shouted “I am prepared to die!” During the course of the hearing, the Times said, she “repeatedly mocked both the judges and the prosecutors interrupting their speeches with contemptuous comments, making faces and once simply taking off her earphones and closing her eyes to ignore the prosecutor’s attack.” Chiang Ching attacked the current rulers as “reactionaries, counterrevolutionaries and fascists” and mocked the judges and prosecutors, calling them a “bunch of vampires,” and “dirty vultures.” Given a chance to make a last statement, Jiang Qing made the attempt by the revisionists to bully her into submission through threats of execution look very feeble by declaring sarcastically “Let the monkey king give me more heads for you to chop off,” referring to a character in Chinese mythology with magical powers. Jiang Qing was not only saying that she was unafraid to die for the international proletarian revolutionary cause, but she was also warning the revisionists: ''If you want to wipe out revolution, you will have to chop off more than my head–there are millions more you will have to deal with.''
The revisionists wanted Jiang Qing to get bogged down in trying to refute every single cooked-up charge that they had thrown at her. But she refused to step into this trap, dismissing the charges as an attempt to “pick the bones from an egg”–in other words, there is nothing to it. Instead, she got right to the heart of the matter by insisting, as she has done throughout the trial, that “all my basic actions were in line with the decisions of the Party Central Committee headed at that time by Chairman Mao.” This is a truth that the revisionists, with all their rantings about her “crimes,” have not been able to wipe out. She even dared the revisionists to “Go and check materials still locked in my personal safe. If you can find anything that shows I violated any policies of the former Central Committee headed by Chairman Mao, then I will be guilty of plotting.”
According to one news report, Jiang Qing also read a poem accusing the revisionists of trying to “steal the sky and change the sun.” It could very well be that she was referring in part to the song “The East is Red” which begins, “Red is the East, rises the sun.” and goes on to sing the praises of Mao and the Communist Party. This song, formerly China’s national anthem, was banned right around the time the trial started as part of the revisionists’ campaign to downgrade Mao. Dealing with Jiang Qing's defiant stand has been very difficult, not only for the Chinese revisionists, but for reactionary ruling classes all over the world, including the U.S. imperialists. Confronted with the fact that Chiang Ching has been exposing that it is precisely Mao’s revolutionary line that is on trial in China, the U.S. press has scraped around for some new crap to spread in a rather desperate effort to cover over the truth. So they have resorted to characterizing her stand as “blaming Mao”–as if she were trying to evade the punishment by blaming someone else. Come on, imperialists, surely you could cook up something better than this. “Blaming Mao” as she stands up and shouts “It’s right to rebel!”! “Blaming Mao” as she calls her accusors “counter-revolutionaries” and “revisionists”! “Blaming Mao” as she says “I am prepared to die”!
Jiang Qing appears to have even gotten physically stronger and sharper as the trial has progressed and the attacks intensified. In fact, she revealed in a two-and-a-half-hour long statement she made on December 24th that while in prison, she woke every morning at the crack of dawn to train her body so that she could do her best in court to defend the Cultural Revolution. This major statement was apparently a real blockbuster. The regularly scheduled TV program on the progress of the trial was cancelled without notice that night, and the December 25th edition of the official People’s Daily did not mention her speech at all. Very little of the details of the statement has been allowed to leak out. According to Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong pro-revisionist mouthpiece, “Chiang Ching completely evaded the facts about the crimes of frameup, persecution and interrogation to death contained in the indictment, shamelessly playing the part of ’upholder of Mao Tsetung Thought’.” Before she began her statement, Chiang Ching demanded to know “Are you going to interrupt while I speak? This could be my last chance to speak in my life, and it is also the first time in the four years I have been locked up that I am able to speak before an audience.” While having no illusions about the nature of this railroad, Chiang Ching has used every opportunity, including the revisionists’ facade of bourgeois legality, to stir things up. Again according to Ta Kung Pao, the central part of her statement was “singing the praises of the 10-year turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. She reviewed the Cultural Revolution from the May 16th Circular of 1966 to the campaign against the right-deviationist wind to reverse the correct verdicts of the Cultural Revolution that took place in 1975. She stated that all she carried out were the decisions and instructions of the Central Committee led by Mao.
The January Storm (the overthrowing of revisionist leadership in Shanghai in January of 1967, led by the Four), she stressed, had Mao’s approval. She said she was the only woman comrade to follow Mao to the frontlines when the Kuomintang reactionaries were advancing on Yenan. “Where were you then?” she asked. “You are trying Chairman Mao’s wife,” she stated. “You are trying to destroy me because you know you can never destroy Chairman Mao.” Finally, Chiang Ching stood up to read a written declaration which was full of Mao’s quotations and slogans from the Cultural Revolution, such as “The bourgeoisie is in the Communist Party,” “As for bourgeois right, it must be restricted under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and “Take class struggle as the key link, when the key link is grasped, everything will follow, continue making revolution.” At the end, she dared the revisionists to sentence her to death in front of a million people in Tienamen Square in Peking and proclaimed “It is more glorious to have my head chopped off” than to yield to the revisionists.
As the trial went on, Jiang became increasingly defiant. On December 24, after the Chief Judge summarized the charges against Jiang, Jiang suddenly stand up and loudly accused the Chief Judge as a “fascist.” She claimed that “the real purpose of the trial is to vilify Chairman Mao and the great Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao.” Obviously she was “defending” herself by cloaking herself in Mao's mantle. When the Judge reminded her to “rationally” defend herself, Jiang became even angry. “This trial is only a show trial. I do not bother to defend myself.” Jiang then announced that it would be “more glorious to have my head chopped off” and dared the court to execute her. On December 29, 1980, after the testimony of forty-nine witnesses and the showing of more than 870 pieces of evidence, the trial finally came to the end. Summing up the case, the Chief prosecutor acknowledged Chairman Mao’s “great contribution” to China, but also noted that Mao was responsible for the “plight” of people during the Cultural Revolution. He argued that the GoF (particularly Jiang) can not escape punishment by raising Chairman Mao as a “shield.” He then cited some remarks of Mao in 1974 and 1975, trying to demonstrate that Mao disagreed with the GoF on many issues. He then demanded death sentence for Jiang.
Upon hearing this, Jiang immediately began to shout ''Revolution is glorious! Revolution is no crime!” Again, she was dragged out of the courthouse. On January 25, 1981, the sentences were handled down. Jiang and Zhang were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve. Wang was sentenced to life imprisonment. Yao received a 20-year imprisonment sentence. There was no appeal process. Chairman, your student and fighter is coming today to see you.''
On May 14th 1991, after hoarding socks and handkerchiefs to have enough to make a rope, she hung herself in her prison cell. Writing in her suicide note, she said that ''Today the revolution has been stolen by a clique led by Deng Xiaoping. The result is that unending evils have been unleashed on the Chinese people. Chairman, your student and fighter is coming to see you.''
