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Many Chinese, particularly those who suffered during the Cultural Revolution, remained totally unmoved by Jiang Qing's defense. "They wouldn't let me go to the trial as an observer," said one middle-level bureaucrat who spent four years in Peking's Qincheng Prison during the Cultural Revolution. "They were afraid I'd start shouting, 'Kill the bitch! Kill the bitch!' " Others grumbled that the case was a classic show trial whose purpose was only to give an appearance of legality to the vengeful elimination of the once powerful radical faction. "There's not much sympathy for Jiang Qing," said one writer, "but to have done things really fairly, the whole Central Committee would have had to go on trial, since it approved of the Cultural Revolution. The worst criminal," he added in a whisper, "was Mao."
Certainly the trial's credibility was not helped by elements like the charge that Jiang had "slandered" Strongman Deng Xiaoping. In fact, her only provable action brought out in court was sending emissaries to Mao to try to persuade him not to make Deng a Vice Premier, a perhaps imprudent act but hardly a criminal one. Also damaging to China's official claim that the trial was a "milestone" for its new legal system was the flimsiness of most of the evidence. The indictment, for example, declares that more than 34,000 people died during the Cultural Revolution, but the court presented a specific cause of death in only a single case, that of Minister Zhang. No evidence was offered to show that Jiang ordered his death or even desired it.
Despite its shortcomings, the trial, with its nightly televised segments, was an improvement on the secretive ways of China in the past—and on other Communist show trials, such as those in Stalin's Russia, when charges were trumped up and "enemies of the people" taken out and shot. An old Chinese adage has been revived, and revised, by the Gang of Four trial: the winner becomes king, the loser a bandit. In China these days the loser becomes a counterrevolutionary. At least this time the losers are a group that most people are glad to see well out of power.
—By Richard Bernstein/Peking