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Throughout her long monologues, Chiang Ch'ing carefully cultivates her image as a loyal follower ("a roving sentry") of her husband, Chairman Mao. Since her fall, Peking's official press has insisted that the infallible Mao all along knew that his wife was a scoundrel, an ideological renegade, a potential usurper of power. In fact, it seems quite clear that Chiang Ch'ing did reflect Mao's most radical tendencies, especially his willingness periodically to shake up the bureaucracy in "rectification campaigns" and even to plunge China into near-total chaos for the sake of ideological purity. Thus it is almost certain that the purge of Chiang Ch'ing was indirectly a slap at her husband as well. Accompanied as it was by the triumph of the pragmatists under new Party Chairman Hua Kuo-feng, Chiang Ch'ing's fall represents the beginnings of a kind of de-Maoification in China, in fact if not in name.
As for Chiang Ch'ing herself, her testimony shows her at times to be isolated, frustrated and unhappy, at the mercy of a power game she never, even at her best moments, mastered completely. She was never really accepted by the masses; many Chinese saw her as a typical emperor's wife, whose efforts to get power for herself were illegitimate. She was bitterly hated by many veterans of both the party and the army who had been the victims of her intemperate attacks during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, when Chairman Mao died, depriving Chiang Ch'ing of her main source of support, she was left defenseless against her enemies.
Of the world beyond China, she knew little. The only American Presidents she remembered from her history lessons were Washington ("a great man") and Lincoln. She studied Gone With the Wind to understand the Civil War. She also studied American westerns and did not seem to grasp fully that they were fictional reconstructions and did not portray contemporary reality. To her, the westerns proved that "monopoly capitalist groups" had been responsible for killing off the Indians. "The working people would not act like that."
Personally, Chiang Ch'ing comes across as a woman of great complexity. She is obviously very intelligent, capable of great charm. She is also arrogant, unpredictable, self-centered. She is tireless, nervous and excitable; at one point in her interviews she became so wound up that she had to take sleeping pills before going to bed, then she overdosed herself and collapsed on the floor. At another point, she suddenly rose and started playing billiards with two aides, squealing with delight when she did well. Such exercise, she explained, was necessary to keep her legs from swelling.
Illness was a constant theme of her story. Throughout her life, she suffered from an extraordinary variety of ailments: cancer, TB, liver disorders, emaciation, unexplained fevers, fainting spells and subcutaneous bleeding, among others. She is a great believer in nature cures, which she urged on Witke, including a potion made of lotus stock (to ease urination), a solution of sea water and bamboo (good for the gums) and dried white lilies (curative powers not specified).