Return to List of Cultural Revolution Reviews

Roxane Witke. Comrade Chiang Ch’ing. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.

In 1972, historian Roxane Witke traveled to the People’s Republic of China to conduct research on women of the Chinese revolution. But the American woman’s research plans changed drastically when Jiang Qing invited Witke to be her official biographer – in essence, to do for Jiang what Edgar Snow did for Mao Zedong 40 years earlier. Witke then spent 60 hours interviewing and conversing with Mao’s fourth wife, mostly in a sumptuous villa in Guangzhou. Comrade Chiang Ch’ing is the result of the author’s unprecedented access to the fascinating Cultural Revolution leader, whom Witke considered “the most powerful woman in the world” during the time the book was written (p. 4).

The book employs a dual structure. First, Witke provides a chronological account of Jiang Qing’s life, based on both Jiang’s self-serving and selective late-night Guangzhou ramblings and the author’s reading of documentary sources (mostly newspapers). Second, the beginning and end of many chapters read like travelogues depicting Witke’s interesting interactions with her new friend. This latter aspect of Comrade Chiang Ch’ing is the most revealing, for the imperially opulent trappings of Jiang Qing’s life in 1972 expose the stark hypocrisies of late-Cultural Revolution China. When Jiang Qing shows Witke films from her extensive personal collection, or plays billiards with her bodyguard, or the two women take artistic photographs of each other in a secret orchid garden, it is difficult to swallow Jiang’s notion that the only culture China’s masses should want or need are her stridently ideological model revolutionary operas.

Although Witke’s honest portrayal of Jiang Qing’s sumptuous surroundings, half-truths, and hypochondriac neuroses completely undermines Jiang’s attempt to position herself favorably in the historical record, the book still conveys the very real struggles and obstacles – not the least of which was deep-rooted sexism – that stood in the way of ambitious women in revolutionary China. Jiang was a film actress and underground Communist activist in 1930s Shanghai, when she went by the names Li Yunhe and Lan Ping. Even after she fled to Yanan, married Chairman Mao, and later worked incognito on land reform and marriage reform in the early 1950s, she never forgot the slights and insults she suffered at the hands of men in the Shanghai arts world. In Witke’s portrayal, a major aspect of Jiang Qing’s involvement in the Cultural Revolution, when she finally “acquired the power to arrest personal enemies” (p. 335), was an attempt to exact revenge against 1930s foes like Zhou Yang and Tian Han (p. 159).

All the same, Witke takes Jiang Qing seriously as a cultural commissar, censor, and creator. We hear Jiang expounding at length about her role in editing the eight revolutionary model works and listen as famous Cultural Revolution-era actors like Hao Liang sheepishly detail Jiang’s micromanagement. What’s more, Witke provides welcome detail on the ticket prices and production process of the model operas and ballets (p. 382). Yet in the end the author comes to a negative conclusion about the Cultural Revolution’s attempt to transform China’s ideological superstructure: “the conflict between totalitarian political authority and creative independence is irreconcilable – universally” (p. 179). In 1970s China, Witke writes, “never in the history of the world has the orchestration of ideas, images, and mass behavior been more forcefully arranged” (p. 450).

Witke finished her book in early 1977, just after Jiang Qing and the rest of the “Gang of Four” were arrested and vilified in a mass campaign. The timing of the book’s publication, plus Witke’s somewhat sympathetic feelings toward Jiang Qing, leads her to several observations that are worth revisiting today, 26 years after the many losers of 1976 have been forgotten and discarded. How much of the “sudden onrush of filth” (p. 473) directed at Jiang Qing in late 1976 was due to sexism and personal grudges? And what happened to the “hundreds who had known Chiang Ch’ing personally and the untold numbers who had built careers on her works,” for whom late 1976 and 1977 was a “reign of inner terror” (p. 476)?

All reviewers of Comrade Chiang Ch’ing had bones to pick. Anne Thurston wrote that Witke was too “sanguine” on Jiang Qing and the arts during the Cultural Revolution (Political Science Quarterly 93.1: 183-184), and Jean C. Robinson saw the book as “a self-serving political document” (American Historical Review 84.1: 227-228). However, Edward Friedman, while pointing out numerous factual errors and occasional “incoherence,” admired Witke for her efforts to piece together an engaging and revealing portrait of Mao’s wife (Journal of Asian Studies 37.3: 521-523).

Jeremy Brown

© Copyright 2003. All Rights Reserved.