Gang Of Four
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Gang Of Four
The Gang of Four () was a Maoist political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and were later charged with a series of treasonous crimes due to their responsibility for the excesses and failures in the Cultural Revolution. The gang's leading figure was Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong's last wife). The other members were Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. The Gang of Four controlled the power organs of the CCP through the later stages of the Cultural Revolution, although it remains unclear which major decisions were made by Mao Zedong and carried out by the Gang, and which were the result of the Gang of Four's own planning. Their fall did not amount to a rejection of the Cultural Revolution as such; it was organized by the new leader, Chairman Hua Guofeng, and others who had risen during that period. Significant repudiation of the entire process of change came later, with the ...
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Jiang Qing
Jiang Qing (March 191414 May 1991), also known as Madame Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, actress, and political figure. She was the fourth wife of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman of the Communist Party and Paramount leader of China. Jiang was best known for playing a major role in the Cultural Revolution as the leader of the radical Gang of Four. Born into a declining family with an Domestic violence, abusive father and a mother who worked as a Domestic worker, domestic servant and sometimes a Prostitution, prostitute, Jiang Qing became a renowned Actor, actress in Shanghai, and later the wife of Mao Zedong in Yan'an, in the 1930s. In the 1940s, she worked as Mao Zedong's Personal assistant, personal secretary, and during the 1950s, she headed the Film Section of the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party, Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Appointed deputy director of the Central Cultural Re ...
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Mao Yuanxin
Mao Yuanxin (born 14 February 1941), also known as Li Shi (), is a former Chinese politician. As the nephew of Chairman Mao Zedong, he acted as the liaison between Mao and the Communist Party's Central Committee in Mao's ailing years, when he was no longer able to regularly attend political functions. He was considered an ally to the radical political faction known as the Gang of Four. He was arrested soon after Mao's death after a political struggle ensued, and was sentenced to prison. Biography Born on 14 February 1941 in Dihua (now Urumqi), Mao Yuanxin is the son of Mao Zemin, a younger brother of Mao Zedong, who joined the Communist Party in 1922 and was executed by warlord Sheng Shicai in 1943. Sheng, governor of Xinjiang, had been aligned to the Chinese Communist Party and had at first welcomed Mao Zemin, but switched allegiance after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Mao Yuanxin's mother was also arrested. After she remarried, Mao Yuanxin was brought up as part of ...
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University Of Hawaii Press
A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. The first universities in Europe were established by Catholic monks. The University of Bologna (), Italy, which was founded in 1088, is the first university in the sense of: *being a high degree-awarding institute. *using the word (which was coined at its foundation). *having independence from the ecclesiastic schools and issuing secular as well as non-secular degrees (with teaching conducted by both clergy and non-clergy): grammar, rhetoric, logic, theology, canon law and notarial law.Hunt Janin: "The university in medieval life, 1179–1499", McFarland, 2008, , p. 55f.de Ridder-Symoens, Hilde''A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in th ...
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Red Guards
The Red Guards () were a mass, student-led, paramilitary social movement mobilized by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 until their abolition in 1968, during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted.Teiwes According to a Red Guard leader, the movement's aims were as follows: Despite meeting with resistance early on, the Red Guards received personal support from Mao, and the movement rapidly grew. The movement in Beijing culminated during the Red August of 1966, which later spread to other areas in mainland China. Mao made use of the group as propaganda and to accomplish goals such as seizing power and destroying symbols of China's pre-communist past, including ancient artifacts and gravesites of notable Chinese figures. Moreover, the government was very permissive of the Red Guards, and even allowed the Red Guards to inflict bodily harm on people viewed as dissidents. The movement quickly grew out of control, frequently coming into conflict with auth ...
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Revolutionary Opera
In mainland China, revolutionary operas or model operas () were a series of shows planned and engineered during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) by Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong. They were considered revolutionary and modern in terms of thematic and musical features when compared with traditional Chinese operas. Many of them were adapted to film. Originally, eight revolutionary operas () were produced, eighteen by the end of the period. Instead of the "emperors, kings, generals, chancellors, maidens, and beauties" of the traditional Peking opera, which was banned as "feudalistic and bourgeois," they told stories from China's recent revolutionary struggles against foreign and class enemies. They glorified the People's Liberation Army and the bravery of the common people, and showed Mao Zedong and his thought as playing the central role in the victory of communism in China. Although they originated as operas, they soon appeared on LPs, in comic books (''li ...
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Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward was an industrialization campaign within China from 1958 to 1962, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Party Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to transform the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized society through the formation of people's communes. The Great Leap Forward is estimated to have led to between 15 and 55 million deaths in mainland China during the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine it caused, making it the List of famines, largest or second-largest famine in human history. The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals, the need to find new ways to generate domestic capital, rising enthusiasm about the potential results mass mobilization might produce, and reaction against the sociopolitical results of the Soviet Union, Soviet [Union]'s development strategy." Mao ambitiously sought an increase in rural grain production and ...
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Peng Dehuai
Peng Dehuai (October 24, 1898November 29, 1974; also spelled as Peng Teh-Huai) was a Chinese general and politician who was the Minister of National Defense (China), Minister of National Defense from 1954 to 1959. Peng was born into a poor peasant family, and received several years of primary education before his family's poverty forced him to suspend his education at the age of ten, and to work for several years as a manual laborer. When he was sixteen, Peng became a professional soldier. Over the next ten years Peng served in the armies of several Hunan-based warlord armies, raising himself from the rank of private second class to major. In 1926, Peng's forces joined the Kuomintang, and Peng also got introduced to communism during this time. Peng participated in the Northern Expedition, and supported Wang Jingwei's attempt to form a Wuhan Nationalist government, left-leaning Kuomintang government based in Wuhan. After Wang was defeated, Peng briefly rejoined Chiang Kai-shek ...
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Hai Rui Dismissed From Office
''Hai Rui Dismissed from Office'' (; also called ''Dismissal of Hai Jui'' in English) is a stage play, written by Wu Han (1909–1969), notable for its involvement in Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution. The play itself focused on a loyal Ming minister named Hai Rui, who was portrayed as a savior to passive peasants for whom he reversed unjust land confiscations. The play became a center of scholarly and political controversy because of its implications for debates within the communist party, including at the Lushan Conference, regarding the political role of peasants going forward in light of the failures during the Great Leap Forward. Background Wu Han, who wrote the play, was a historian and politician who focused on the Ming Dynasty. He also served simultaneously as a Deputy Mayor in Beijing. In 1959, Wu became interested in the life of Hai Rui (1514–1587), a Ming-era minister who was imprisoned for criticizing the Jiajing Emperor. Wu Han wrote several a ...
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Wenhui Bao
''Wenhui Bao'' (), anglicized as the ''Wenhui Daily'',Shanghai Municipal Government"Press Group Celebrates" 26 July 2008. Accessed 18 Dec 2014. is a Chinese daily newspaper published by the Shanghai United Media Group. History ''Wenhui Bao'' was founded in Shanghai on January 25, 1938 by leftist-leaning intellectuals centered on writer and journalist Ke Ling. Over the next decade, it was closed down twice for its political leanings. In 2024, Rappler reported that the Manila bureau chief of ''Wenhui Bao'' from 2021 until 2024, Zhang "Steve" Song, was an undercover Ministry of State Security (MSS) operative who worked closely with Huawei and gathered intelligence about the internal dynamics and politics of key personalities in the Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 island ...
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Gang Of Four Poster
A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime. Etymology The word ''gang'' derives from the past participle of Old English , meaning . It is cognate with Old Norse , meaning . While the term often refers specifically to criminal groups, it also has a broader meaning of any close or organized group of people, and may have neutral, positive or negative connotations depending on usage. History In discussing the banditry in American history, Barrington Moore, Jr. suggests that gangsterism as a "form of self-help which victimizes others" may appear in societies which lack strong "forces of law and order"; he characterizes European feudalism as "mainly gangsterism that had ...
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Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press (HUP) is an academic publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University. It is a member of the Association of University Presses. Its director since 2017 is George Andreou. The press maintains offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard Square, and in London, England. The press co-founded the distributor TriLiteral LLC with MIT Press and Yale University Press. TriLiteral was sold to LSC Communications in 2018. Notable authors published by HUP include Eudora Welty, Walter Benjamin, E. O. Wilson, John Rawls, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Jay Gould, Helen Vendler, Carol Gilligan, Amartya Sen, David Blight, Martha Nussbaum, and Thomas Piketty. The Display Room in Harvard Square, dedicated to selling HUP publications, closed on June 17, 2009. Related publishers, imprints, and series HUP owns the Belknap Press imprint (trade name), imprint, which it inaugurated in May 1954 with the publication of the ''Harvard Guide to ...
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Roderick MacFarquhar
Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar (2 December 1930 – 10 February 2019) was a British sinologist, politician, and journalist. MacFarquhar was founding editor of '' China Quarterly'' in 1959. He served as a Member of Parliament in the 1970s, then joined the BBC. In the 1980s, he became a professor at Harvard University, where he served several terms as director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He was best known for his studies of Maoist China, the three-volume ''The Origins of the Cultural Revolution'' and ''Mao's Last Revolution''. Family and early life MacFarquhar was born in Lahore, British India (now Pakistan). His father was Sir Alexander MacFarquhar, a member of the Indian Civil Service and later a senior diplomat at the United Nations. His mother was Berenice (née Whitburn). He was educated at the Aitchison College in Lahore and Fettes College, an independent school in Edinburgh. Academic and journalistic career After spending part of his national service fr ...
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