Jottings from the Granite Studio

On this date in 1976 former Chinese leader and Granite Studio sympathy fave Hua Guofeng ordered the arrest of the widow Mao (Jiang Qing) and three other accomplices, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen–collectively better known as the Gang of Four (四人帮). The Gang went to trial in 1981, accused of trying to seize power during Mao’s waning days.

I’ve said this before, but Hua gets short shrift. By arresting the Go4, he created a useful way to signal the end of the Cultural Revolution–then already well past its zenith–and gave the CCP a neat little political handle to grapple with the complex, mixed, and bloody legacy of the man called Mao. Anti-Japanese resistance? Good Mao. Bloody chaos and social mayhem in the Cultural Revolution? Gang of Four.

Not so easily duped, people in Beijing for many years after the arrest would sometimes hold up five fingers when referencing the Gang–four fingers for those in prison and a fifth for the one kept under glass in Tiananmen Square.

The machinations and maneuvering of the 1960s and 1970s are only now just starting to emerge from the shadows. We have the broad strokes (Mao dies, supposedly names Hua as successor, Hua arrests Go4, Deng comes back and puts Hua to pasture, Starbucks opens in the Forbidden City, etc.) but in the last few years, people are becoming (a little) less reticent to give information about their role or the role of others in the shenanigans at Zhongnanhai. There is always the possibility that future access to the voluminous CCP archives will allow researchers to put together a complete picture of not only the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, but of the Great Helmsman as well.
————————–
Top left: Anti-Go4 poster, “Resolutely overthrow the anti-party clique of Wang, Zhang, Jiang and Yao.”

Middle right: Photographs of the Gang of Four during their 1981 trial.

Bottom left: New Year’s print distributed in Tianjin for Spring Festival, 1978: “Smash the Gang of Four.”

Both posters from Stefan Landsberger’s brilliant Chinese Propaganda Posters Pages.