Mystery Blast

Avenging the Gang of Four?

Peking's huge central railway station is designed to handle 200,000 passengers a day, but even there the evening rush hour overcrowds every hall and stairway. One evening last week, in a welter of duffle bags and over-the-shoulder bundles, passengers hurrying to make the 6:30 to Hefei jostled against other travelers heading for the 6:40 to Fengtai. The four clocks outside the waiting-room doors said 6: 15.

The explosion came without warning, near the top of the escalator on a second-floor landing; it killed nine people and wounded 81. Fleets of ambulances ferried the wounded to hospitals. Police and soldiers cordoned off the area. Top public security and army officers converged on the scene, along with Peking's mayor and the minister of railways. At first government spokesmen called it an accident. But when the official New China News Agency finally reported the incident the following day, it announced that "the blast was caused by an explosive charge brought into the railway station by an unknown person." Thus it raised the possibility of an act of terrorism, an almost unheard-of occurrence in China. The last such incident anyone could remember was in 1976, when three people were killed by a bombing outside the Soviet embassy. An other explosion during the factional battles of 1966-67 had ripped apart a Peking market, killing several Red Guards.

Some speculation inevitably focused on the radical Gang of Four. Gang Leader Jiang Qing, Mao Tse-tung's onetime companion, and her accomplices from Shanghai (municipal Party Official Zhang Chunqiao, Literary Critic Yao Wenyuan and cotton-mill Party Functionary Wang Hongwen) assumed power in the mid-1960s and instituted a reign of terror in which thousands of writers, artists and scientists were so relentlessly persecuted that many died or committed suicide. Though the gang members were arrested and dis graced four years ago, the announcement that they would go on trial for then-crimes came only last month. The trial is reportedly set to open as early as this week.

Could the explosion have been a political gesture by "remnants" of the gang? "No," was one official's laughing reply, "it isn't that serious." But in the absence of any other explanation for the station blast, no one was prepared to rule out such a connection.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.