A Leader's Rise, a Widow's Fall

By Richard Bernstein

Hu seems to displace Hua, as the Gang of Four trial ends

The case of the missing Chairman seemed all but solved by default last week after a New Year's tea party in Peking's Great Hall of the People. The reception, televised to the Chinese people, was held by the Communist Party's Central Committee and marked by a conspicuous absence: nowhere to be seen, after 36 days out of the public eye, was Party Chairman Hua Guofeng. Instead, the gathering's host was Secretary-General Hu Yaobang, 65, who has been rumored to be the man who would displace the missing Hua. Hu is a close ally of China's most powerful figure, Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping.

Next day Chinese newspapers gave prominent play to Hu Yaobang's apparent new role as the man actually in charge of party affairs. The official Communist organ, the People's Daily, spoke of "democratic reforms" and the abolition of lifetime tenure in high office--which Hua had once been presumed to enjoy.

Foreign observers who examined the reasons for Hua's fall from grace reached varying conclusions. The Chairman--who still holds the title until the Central Committee takes it from him--had erred in disputing the breadth and speed of Deng's modernization program. Also a factor: his increasingly embarrassing connection with the discredited Cultural Revolution. It was Hua, after all, who as Premier suppressed a now celebrated demonstration against the Gang of Four in Peking in 1976. His slide from power may have been accelerated by the Gang of Four show trial, which concluded its hearings last week.

The final week and a half of the trial had been devoted exclusively to the star defendant, Jiang Qing, 67, the fearsome Mme. Mao. Proud, defiant, nearly regal in her contempt when the trial opened almost seven weeks ago, the onetime actress turned its final hours into a dramatic shouting match. Presiding Judge Zeng Hanzhou interrupted her concluding remarks on the grounds that she was using her right to speak to "smear and vilify party and state leaders," which, he said, was a "counterrevolutionary" offense.

Jiang sneeringly retorted that it was the court that was counterrevolutionary, whereupon the judge ordered her to leave. She refused. As bailiffs then dragged her unwillingly from the chamber, she shouted Cultural Revolution slogans, unheard in China for years, that echoed her radical past: "Revolution is no crime!" she cried out. "To rebel is justified!"

It was a strangely appropriate end to the often disorderly trial of Jiang Qing and nine other former high-ranking officials. The court is now to deliberate over the evidence accumulated during the 27 days of hearings and then issue its verdicts, probably some time this month. There is no question that all the defendants--eight of whom have obediently accepted most of the charges against them--will be found guilty. There is even a possibility that one or two will be executed. Still, Jiang Qing succeeded in raising some serious questions about the validity of the case against her.

The special team of prosecutors accused her of a multitude of crimes. Among other offenses, they charged, she had slandered Vice Chairman Deng, incited Red Guards to persecute her enemies in the Cultural Revolution and ordered bands of hired thugs to ransack the homes of former colleagues in the Shanghai film world, presumably to find and destroy materials about her life during the 1930s.

In a final presentation of evidence, the prosecutors flashed grisly pictures of the bruised corpse of former Coal Mining Minister Zhang Linzhi on a large screen in the courtroom and called two witnesses to testify that Jiang Qing had ordered Red Guards to deal with him as a counterrevolutionary. Then, in the "debate" portion of the trial, which allows a modicum of defense, Prosecutor Jiang Wen demanded that Mme. Mao be punished in accordance with Article 103 of China's criminal code. It allows the death penalty in cases where "serious harm" has been done to the state.

Speaking for herself (she had refused an attorney), Jiang Qing gave a long and rambling two-hour defense of the Cultural Revolution, only brief portions of which were shown a week later on Chinese TV. In it she declared that she had only carried out the decisions of Chairman Mao, Premier Chou En-lai and the party Central Committee. Jiang even drew laughs from many of the 600 courtroom spectators when, establishing her revolutionary credentials, she gave an account of her closeness to Mao. "During the war, it was I, the only woman comrade, who followed and accompanied Chairman Mao to the front," she declared. Looking at the panel of judges in front of her, she asked derisively, "At that time, where were all of you hiding?"

After a five-day recess, Prosecutor Jiang Wen condemned Mme. Mao's defense as "a vicious slander and calumny of Chairman Mao Tse-tung." Significantly, the prosecutor did acknowledge that all people in China "are very clear that Chairman Mao was responsible for their plight during the Cultural Revolution"--the sole official recognition of Mao's mistakes made in the trial. But the prosecutor hastily added that Mao could not have ordered his wife to commit such crimes as the attacks on high state and party officials.

Given a final chance to speak, Jiang Qing sarcastically noted, "You are pushing the blame on me as though I were some kind of devil with three heads and six arms who can do anything she wants." Then, just before the courtroom drama concluded with her forcible eviction, she once again declared her willingness to die for her cause. "I only wish," she said, "that I had several heads for you to chop off."

Many Chinese, particularly those who suffered during the Cultural Revolution, remained totally unmoved by Jiang Qing's defense. "They wouldn't let me go to the trial as an observer," said one middle-level bureaucrat who spent four years in Peking's Qincheng Prison during the Cultural Revolution. "They were afraid I'd start shouting, 'Kill the bitch! Kill the bitch!' " Others grumbled that the case was a classic show trial whose purpose was only to give an appearance of legality to the vengeful elimination of the once powerful radical faction. "There's not much sympathy for Jiang Qing," said one writer, "but to have done things really fairly, the whole Central Committee would have had to go on trial, since it approved of the Cultural Revolution. The worst criminal," he added in a whisper, "was Mao."

Certainly the trial's credibility was not helped by elements like the charge that Jiang had "slandered" Strongman Deng Xiaoping. In fact, her only provable action brought out in court was sending emissaries to Mao to try to persuade him not to make Deng a Vice Premier, a perhaps imprudent act but hardly a criminal one. Also damaging to China's official claim that the trial was a "milestone" for its new legal system was the flimsiness of most of the evidence. The indictment, for example, declares that more than 34,000 people died during the Cultural Revolution, but the court presented a specific cause of death in only a single case, that of Minister Zhang. No evidence was offered to show that Jiang ordered his death or even desired it.

Despite its shortcomings, the trial, with its nightly televised segments, was an improvement on the secretive ways of China in the past--and on other Communist show trials, such as those in Stalin's Russia, when charges were trumped up and "enemies of the people" taken out and shot. An old Chinese adage has been revived, and revised, by the Gang of Four trial: the winner becomes king, the loser a bandit. In China these days the loser becomes a counterrevolutionary. At least this time the losers are a group that most people are glad to see well out of power.

--By Richard Bernstein/Peking

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