"The Empress" Takes the Stand

By Richard Bernstein

Mao's widow defiantly refuses to cooperate and confess

She stood at the witness stand, leaning with studied casualness against the wooden railing, and fixed her partly contemptuous, partly resigned gaze on the panel of judges in front of her. The courtroom was silent. Then, with klieg lights glaring, onetime Actress Jiang Qing gave the most stunning, if also the briefest, performance of her life. Jiang Qing was on the stand to answer questions about her alleged attempt to seize power during the infamous Cultural Revolution. She neither admitted nor denied the charges. Instead, as spectators oohed and aahed with surprise, she departed from the script and refused to answer directly.

"Jiang Qing," intoned Chief Judge Zeng Hanzhou, "did you or did you not send for [fellow Gang of Four members] Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan on the evening of 17 October, 1974?"

"No," replied the widow of Chairman Mao.

"No?" repeated Zeng incredulously.

"I don't know."

"What did you four talk about?"

"I know nothing at all. How could I know anything?"

That bit of courtroom drama, televised to tens of millions of Chinese,* was the high point of the trial of China's radical so-called Gang of Four, which completed its first full cycle of testimony last week. One by one, each of the four--plus Mao's former personal secretary Chen Boda--were brought to the stand to answer questions about the first of four major areas of crime they are alleged to have committed: "Framing and persecuting party and state leaders" in an attempt to usurp power for themselves.

First to testify in the large, brightly lit courtroom were the more compliant of the gang's members--the youthful Wang Hongwen, who until his arrest in 1976 was a party vice-chairman, and former Shanghai Literary Critic Yao Wenyuan. Wang declared that in October, 1974, Jiang Qing called a meeting at her luxurious villa in Peking to find ways of discrediting their enemies in the party, Deng Xiaoping, China's current strongman, and Deng's patron, Premier Chou Enlai, who, they felt, stood in the way of their plan to seize power. At that meeting Jiang Qing told Wang Hongwen to fly secretly to the south-central city of Changsha, where Mao was staying, and make a false and insinuating report about Deng and Chou to the supreme party leader. Wang claimed in his testimony that he was only passing along to Mao what the plot's instigator, Jiang Qing, had ordered him to say.

It was to those charges that Jiang Qing issued her repeated "I don't know," earning the accusation in China's official press the next day that she "has still not awakened from her dream of being an empress." But the last member of the gang to testify, former Shanghai Mayor Zhang Chunqiao, was even more sullenly uncooperative. Zhang, who was once thought to be a prospective premier or even party chairman, was accused on six counts of slandering party officials, most importantly Deng. Drawn and pale, a disrespectful stubble of beard on his face, Zhang sat tightlipped, stared at the panel of judges and for two full hours in the dock refused to utter a word. His silence, accused the Peking radio, "demonstrates that he stubbornly persists in his reactionary stand."

Such failure to cooperate is highly un usual in Chinese trials, where confessions of guilt are generally mandatory. That, in fact, was the pattern in the other half of the big trial in Peking last week: the special tribunal which is separately hearing the case of five former high-ranking military officers who allegedly plotted with Defense Minister Lin Biao to assassinate Mao in 1971. One by one, the gen erals were brought to the stand and one by one they admitted their roles in the anti-Mao plot. Defendants sometimes seemed to go out of their way to incriminate themselves. Former Air Force Commander Wu Faxian, for example, was asked why he turned over power to Lin Biao's son in 1969. "To curry favor," he replied. When the judge helpfully suggested that Wu might not have known of the younger Lin's future plans, Wu twice insisted, "I should be held responsible."

Both parts of the trial last week provided unusual glimpses into the workings of China's newly reformed legal system. Throughout the trial, the defense lawyers said hardly a word, not even objecting as the judges, acting more like prosecutors than impartial court officials, continually hectored and scolded the defendants. Except for the unscripted fail ure of Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao to cooperate, everybody who spoke--defendants, prosecutors, witnesses, even the judges--seemed to do so from texts. The judges themselves, many of whom were victims of the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution, seemed quick to pass judgment. Chief Judge Zeng Hanzhou dis missed Jiang Qing's claims of ignorance, declaring, "It is already recorded that the proof is overwhelming and full."

The strangest aspect of the case, so far, was the decision of the prosecuting team to confront the gang first with the relatively innocuous charge of conspiring to block the promotion of Deng, rather than some of the graver allegations that have been made of unjust imprisonments, persecuting to death more than 30,000 people and plotting a coup. But perhaps from the current leadership's point of view, the specific charges are less important than the image of the Gang of Four that is being presented to the Chinese public. China's leaders hope the trial will provide undeniable proof that, after all these years, the likes of the radical Jiang Qing have been reduced to absolute powerlessness.

By Richard Bernstein/Peking

* About 30 minutes of carefully edited footage is shown nightly.

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