Mao’s Widow Reportedly Has Throat Cancer, Refuses Surgery

Mao Tse-tung’s widow, Jiang Qing, has throat cancer but is refusing an operation because it would leave her voiceless, a pro-Beijing newspaper in Hong Kong reported Saturday.

Jiang, 74, was last seen in public Jan. 25, 1981, when a show trial ended and she was removed screaming from a Beijing courtroom, shouting revolutionary slogans and cursing her judges and China’s current leaders as “fascists, renegades, traitors.”

Jiang received a suspended death sentence for her role in the chaos and persecutions of China’s decade-long Cultural Revolution, which ended in October, 1976, a month after Mao’s death, with her arrest and the jailing of other leading radicals. Her sentence later was commuted to life imprisonment.

Chinese officials said earlier this year that Jiang was under treatment in prison for a “geriatric disease.”

Saturday’s article in the Chinese-language Wen Wei Bao, which often breaks inside reports on Chinese politics, said that Jiang has been a patient at a Beijing hospital that specializes in cancer treatment.

Doctors told her the cancer must be operated on, but she refused because she would no longer be able to talk, according to the newspaper, which did not name its sources. Doctors are using other treatment to control the disease, the report said.

It has been rumored since early 1987 that Jiang has throat cancer.

At her trial, Jiang was accused of seizing power illegally during the Cultural Revolution, wrongfully persecuting more than 600,000 officials and party members, including 34,000 who died as a result, involvement in an attempted military coup in 1971, and plotting an armed rebellion in 1976.

Three radical colleagues in what came to be dubbed the Gang of Four, plus six other prominent leftists, were also convicted at the trial.

The Justice Ministry said in February that one of Jiang’s co-defendants, Chen Boda, 84, former personal secretary to Mao, had been released from prison because of poor health.

Since late last year, persistent rumors, denied by authorities, have circulated that Jiang too had been released because of her illness.

The French news agency Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday that Jiang was moved late last year from Qincheng Prison, north of Beijing, to live with one of her daughters, Li Min, in a heavily guarded military camp in Beijing. A Justice Ministry spokesman denied the report.