PERSPECTIVE ON CHINA : The Wrong One Died Again : Jiang Qing’s death sparked little action; it’s the passing of Deng Xiaoping and his gang that the people await.

One of the most fervent hopes of Chinese people today, at least in the cities, is that the old-guard Communist leadership will die off quickly. Young people in Beijing comment sarcastically that, “I’ve been in a bad mood for a long time, and just realized that it’s because the radio hasn’t been carrying much funeral music recently.”

But the death of Mao Tse-tung’s widow, Jiang Qing, is certainly not going to get the Chinese people excited.

In April, 1989, when former General Secretary of the Communist Party Hu Yaobang died, a wall poster at Beijing University read, “The ones who ought to die don’t; the ones who died shouldn’t have.” Although the students hardly like Jiang Qing, this time they will surely be saying, “How come the wrong one died again?”

Jiang Qing, indeed, did much harm during the later years of Mao’s life. But someday, when the whole truth is told, the Chinese people will learn that she was unfairly made to bear much that was really Mao’s responsibility.

Before he died, Mao was already shifting blame from himself to the “Gang of Four.” Deng Xiaoping and his band, in order to uphold the image of Mao and to set themselves off from the “Gang of Four,” did the same.

The most important thing that Jiang Qing did in her life was to assist Mao, from beginning to end, in carrying out his so-called “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” But, while it brought unprecedented catastrophe to China, the Cultural Revolution also brought some positive results that were quite contrary to what Mao and Jiang had intended.

It was during this period that Mao pushed his mistakes of the 1950s to an extreme, bringing political persecution, either directly or indirectly, to fully 10% of the Chinese people--and thereby also sending his personal prestige and his ideology into bankruptcy.

The Communist Party’s organization and the loyalty of its members suffered immense damage, which in turn caused a major weakening of the party’s control over society. The Chinese people awakened as never before, turning from blind faith in the party to a willingness to challenge it.

Thus Jiang Qing can be said to have made an important negative contribution to progress in China. Her contribution helps to explain why, in April years ago, a few million people in Beijing walked toward Tian An Men Square using poems, speeches and other means to express their anger at Jiang Qing and the “Gang of Four,” and to shout for the return of Deng Xiaoping. It also explains why, two years ago, also beginning in April, a Tian An Men movement on an even larger scale made Deng Xiaoping its target of attack and opposition.

There is one group for whom Jiang Qing’s death is, I am afraid, a major loss: historians. For many years no one had better access than she to the details of Mao’s life and the factional struggles among the Chinese leadership.

We can hope that she wrote memoirs during her 11 years in prison. But did she? We know that she was ill for part of the time, and probably in a bad mood during the rest. A unique account of Chinese history may have died with her.

Questions of how and when to announce events such as the death of Jiang Qing must be decided at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. It is interesting that in this case the news was suppressed for fully three weeks before it was made public. Why?

The only possible explanation is that the die-hards in Beijing were afraid that the Chinese people would use it as a pretext for another anti-government demonstration (much as Beijing students used the death of Hu Yaobang to spark the Tian An Men movement two years ago) and thus wanted to wait through the sensitive period before June 4, the anniversary of the Beijing massacre, before announcing the news.

Yet Jiang Qing’s case is entirely different from Hu Yaobang’s. Her death could never become the occasion for an anti-government protest. We can see in this fact how much the Beijing government’s fear of the people has distorted its ability to arrive at sound judgments.

Today most Chinese are hoping for the early death of Deng Xiaoping and the rest of the old bunch. True, Deng’s death will not usher China immediately into a new era, as Mao’s did. But Deng is, after all, the last person who can maintain the appearance of unity in the party and army. His death will greatly hasten all of the changes that are already under way in China.