Madame Mao by Ross Terrill is the only English-language biography of Jiang Qing, the last wife of Chairman Mao.
First published in 1984, the one I am reading is the 1999 revised edition.
Her life was tough. Brought up by a single mother who was kicked out of the house by an abusive husband, she lived a peripatetic life from the time she was born in 1914 in a hamlet called Zhucheng in Shandong.
She left her loving grandparents in Jinan, the capital, to learn the performance arts in Qingdao, Shanghai, and Peking in 1933.
What is striking is that no matter how poor one is, one has a ready network of friends and comrades ever willing to help with a space to sleep in and a roof to shelter over one’s head.
Partly because of this support, she was exposed to and participated in the youth activities of the Communist Party in Qingdao and Shanghai.
Shandong then was a beehive of anti-government activities due to the Allies giving control of the defeated Germans’ controlled areas, like Qingdao, to the Japanese and not back to China, who had fought for the Allies.
From here was the seed of the May Fourth Movement and the reason for the formation of the CCP.
Lwh@ Bodbe Orthodox Monastery.
29 April 2025