Official Chinese Commentary Gloats Over Death of Mao’s Widow

Jiang Qing was a Hitler, and the suicide last month of the widow of the late Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung was well-deserved, said an official newspaper commentary on her death.

“The witch has committed suicide,” said Shanghai’s Liberation Daily. “But it goes without saying that death cannot expiate her crimes.”

The death May 14 of the former Shanghai actress who ruthlessly wielded power to push the ultra-leftist cause was announced officially last week.

The Liberation Daily’s commentary, published Saturday and received in Beijing on Sunday, is among the first official reports to go beyond a bare death notice.

“Under Jiang Qing’s despotic rule at that time, there were many people for whom death was the only protest route,” the paper said. “Of course, Jiang Qing’s death was not of that kind,” it said.

Jiang and three allies known together as the Gang of Four were blamed for the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution that plunged the world’s most populous nation into turmoil.

They were put on trial in 1980 after China’s current paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, her bitter enemy, returned from political exile and cemented his hold on power.

Jiang was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in 1981. She never repented, but the judgment was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983.

“The ‘empress’ ’ body has completely disappeared. But we must continue to be on our guard,” said the newspaper, published in the city where the Gang of Four built its power base.

“More than 40 years after Hitler committed suicide, Germany still has remnants of old-style Nazism and the dregs of neo-Nazism,” the newspaper continued.

“We can learn from this bitter experience in the news of Jiang Qing’s death. It reminds us that we must not relax the utter rejection of the teachings of the ‘Cultural Revolution.’ ”