QI The Book of the Dead

all his many sins, Diego understood better than anyone the quality of his wife’s astonishing paintings:
    I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life .
     

     
    Cruelty and bitterness are more or less the whole story of Jiang Qing (pronounced ‘jang ching’), Madame Mao (1914–91), wife of Chairman Mao, poster-girl for the Cultural Revolution and one of the infamous Gang of Four. So far, we have had monkeys as intimate companions, substitute children, artists’ muses andliving embodiments of royal wealth and privilege. Madame Mao’s monkey was far more sinister. Hers was the monkey as henchman and accomplice in crime.
    Jiang Qing was born Li Jinhai, one of eight names she bore during her life. Her youth in Shandong province in eastern China was tarnished by poverty and neglect. She later blamed her persistent ill health on the fact that she spent most of her childhood hungry. Her mother was a concubine with little love to spare for her pretty daughter, but she didn’t subject her to the grisly ritual of foot-binding either. Jiang’s father was a violent and abusive alcoholic who drove mother and daughter out of the family home, though not before Jiang had demonstrated her fighting spirit, attacking him and biting him viciously on his arms. At the age of fourteen, after being expelled from school for spitting at a teacher, she ran away to Beijing and became an actress.
    The details of this part of her life are hazy, not least because she rigorously repressed any mention of them when she came to power, but it seems she married and separated at least twice, became a communist and was at some point arrested for terrorism. Her enemies always alleged she slept with her captors to ensure her escape. Under the stage name Lan Ping (‘Blue Apple’), she landed some major roles, including Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House , whose self-discovery and rejection of men seemed to resonate with the young actress’s own experience. Jiang developed a love for Hollywood films, copied Garbo in her dress, and wore make-up and high heels. She was also spiteful and had a long memory. Decades after being beaten to a leading role by a girl called Wang Ying (who went on to become a famous actress and performed at the White House for the Roosevelts) Jiang had her arrested and imprisoned, making sure she died in jail.

    In 1937 she forsook the stage and volunteered for the revolution, at that time based in the Yunnan caves, the endpoint of the Long March, deep in central China. She soon made herself known to Mao, sitting in the front row of his lectures. Mao, in turn, came to see her perform in an opera organised for his troops. Appearing backstage after the show, he placed his coat round her shoulders. The next day, Jiang visited the Leader to return his coat and ended up staying the night.
    The relationship was not a popular one with the Communist high command. Mao was technically still married to a senior Party official and Jiang’s past was a heady mix of sex, deceit and Western-style debauchery. She seemed an unnecessarily controversial addition to the Great Leader’s burgeoning cult, especially when rumours circulated that one of Jiang’s former lovers had tried to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle of surgical spirit and crushed match-heads. This didn’t bother Mao. He cut a deal with the Party where he got to keep Jiang as his partner on condition that she would not be acknowledged publicly as his wife or hold any political office for twenty years.
    The marriage does not seem to have been a particularly happy one. Mao soon lost interest in Jiang sexually (at twenty-three she was a little old for his taste: he had an insatiable preference for teenage virgins). At the same time, he saw that she was fanatically loyal and ruthless enough to be useful to him. As she later commented: ‘Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.’ So it was that, in 1963, when the twenty-year ‘ban’ had passed, Mao chose Jiang to head up his Ministry of Culture.
    These were the years of her greatest influence. As the ‘Great Flag-carrier of the Proletarian Culture’ she oversaw the Cultural Revolution, totally suppressing all traditional cultural activitiesand organising mass rallies in which her enemies were humiliated and physically