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Nakedly Ambitious. It was clear that the entire endeavor had been approved and suggested by Premier Chou. He had described Witke to Chiang Ch'ing as "young and enthusiastic for China." Nonetheless, for obscure reasons, the Peking leadership soon decided that the interviews had been a mistake. Possibly, Chiang Ch'ing, along with her allies, realized that giving the interviews made her look too nakedly ambitious. After all, the only other Chinese leader who had given an autobiography to a foreigner was Mao himself (to U.S. Journalist Edgar Snow in Red Star Over China, 1937). Months after Witke returned to the U.S., the promised transcripts had failed to appear. Word reached her that the interviews were "too long and complicated" to be issued as an authorized document by Peking. She was offered a generous "financial incentive" to dissuade her from writing her book. She did so anyway, working from the copious notes she had taken during her long talks. The result, Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, to be published by Little, Brown and Co. next month, is the most intimate, detailed and complete English-language biography ever written about anyone in Peking's secretive, secluded leadership, except perhaps Mao himself.
There are large gaps and omissions; often, Chiang Ch'ing's story is extremely self-serving. At the same time, her account of turmoil and conflict gives a whole new view to the nature of life at the top in China—ruthless, unpredictable and dangerous.
She is surprisingly generous toward some of those whom analysts in the West have regarded as her principal enemies. She saw Premier Chou En-lai as her champion. Even more surprising is her reference to Chou's ally, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, who plunged into abject disgrace during the Cultural Revolution. Teng, she admits, had been "unfairly punished." She predicts in 1972, a year before the fact, that "his work and prestige would be restored." Even so, a deadly quarrel erupted between Teng, Chou's choice to succeed him as Premier, and Chiang Ch'ing's faction in 1975, a quarrel that resulted in Teng's dismissal from all his posts. (He has since been gradually rehabilitated.) It all suggests that there was a period of relative harmony between the factions that only broke apart after 1972. That is when Chou began to bring a great many disgraced officials back to former positions of authority—and they competed with the younger generation, which had come to power during the Cultural Revolution. That policy probably precipitated the bitter factional struggles that have lasted to the present.
In her account of such struggles, Chiang Ch'ing inadvertently shows a streak of unremitting vindictiveness, particularly as she recounts a three-decade-long battle to take revenge on several cultural-political adversaries from her old acting days in Shanghai. Her quarrel with these men had little to do with high-minded ideological issues, as she always claimed; ideological quarrels have often been a kind of smoke screen hiding personal animosity. Without intending to, she makes today's Forbidden City, where the Peking leaders still live and work, seem almost the same as the old intrigue-ridden imperial court that the Communists claim to have eradicated forever.