She bounced down the aisle of Peking's Great Hall of the People, dressed in a tailored People's Liberation Army uniform topped by a soldier's fur hat. She sat in the front row near Premier Chou En-lai and Foreign Minister Chen Yi, who did not seem to mind when the cameras left them to zero in on her. While an Albanian song and dance troupe went through its paces, she peered through her thick-lensed glasses, smiled frozenly through buck teeth and applauded energetically. Thus last week, on film released by Peking and shown on Hong Kong TV, the world outside Red China got a rare glimpse of Chiang Ching, 52, the wife of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Red China's First Lady, and the Cultural Revolution's public fury.
A Dragon Lady? The Red Chinese have lately been seeing and hearing a good deal of Chiang Ching (rhymes with young thing), who only recently emerged from years of obscurity to assume a central role in Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. At first she simply denounced Mao's supposed enemies on the implicit authority carried by her closeness to him. But in the last month or two, the words have been backed by new power. She is now the deputy director of the Cultural Revolution's subcommittee and the sole adviser to the People's Liberation Army purge group. Today she seems to stand second, behind only Army Head Lin Piao, in providing leadership and impetus for the Maoists.
As the late-blooming life of the party (or what is left of it loyal to Mao), Chiang Ching has been variously explained as the chief inventor of the Cultural Revolution, the guiding force behind Mao, a vindictive Dragon Lady out for personal revenge, and a frustrated starlet seeking the limelight. Though she and Mao are rarely seen together, they dwell in apparent harmony in a villa on a spoon-shaped peninsula in Peking's South Lake.
Off to Moscow. Born of working-class parents in Shantung province, Chiang Ching (meaning Green River) migrated to Shanghai, China's sin city of the '30s, where she became an actress under the stage name of Blue Apple. It was hardly a step up, since in old China actors and barbers were among the lowest of the low—partly because, like servants, they had to stand to perform their jobs. She was, in any case, only a grade B actress; after she married Mao, he had all of her films destroyed. But that was years later. First, at 19, she married a young Communist underground organizer, who made something of a Marxist, a nationalist and a feminist of her. As his reward, when he was sent to Shantung, she stayed behind in the Chinese movie capital, divorced him and married an actor.
That marriage foundered, too, in the confusion of China's civil war. Her first husband meanwhile set out to join Mao's Communist rebels, who had four years earlier made the Long March to the caves of Yenan, and Chiang Ching went with him. There she met Mao, 20 years her senior and then married to his third wife, the mother of his five children. The encounter was, as the Chinese tell it, like "dried firewood on roaring fire." Mao made Chiang Ching his private secretary and shipped his wife off to Moscow for "psychiatric treatment."