At the foot of the Western Hills in Beijing sits a public cemetery called Futian, a burial ground for scholars, artists, and Party grandees. Among its graves is one for Jiang Qing (1914–1991), the fourth wife of Communist China’s founding dictator, Mao Zedong. Her presence there is the result of 12 years of legal limbo, political maneuvering, and a daughter’s agonizing compromise. To understand why, it helps to understand who Jiang Qing was.
She was Mao’s fourth wife; he was her fifth husband. They married in Yan’an in 1938, when she was 24 and he was 45, during a period when senior Party cadres routinely discarded their wartime companions for younger women. When the Party seized power in 1949, she became the first lady of the People’s Republic. The marriage itself had been bitterly contested inside the Party, since Mao’s previous wife, He Zizhen, had never formally divorced him. Mao threatened to resign and go back to farming if the match was blocked. The leadership relented, but imposed three conditions: Jiang Qing could not present herself publicly as Mao’s wife while He Zizhen remained on the books; she was to serve as his personal caretaker, with no one else permitted to make similar demands on the Central Committee; and she was barred from holding any Party position or interfering in personnel affairs for 20 years. It was a marriage with a contract attached.
Her opinions on the institution were, at that point, already on the record. In August 1935, she told a Shanghai newspaper she was “fundamentally opposed to marriage,” arguing that couples who had reached the point of love should simply live together. She meant it. She cycled through relationships in Shanghai with a freedom that scandalized her contemporaries, and the city’s gossip circles tracked her accordingly.
Her stage name came from those Shanghai years. She preferred blue clothing and had spent time in Beijing, so she called herself “Lan Ping,” meaning roughly Blue Peace. When she signed with an amateur theater association, a colleague suggested a homophone that shifted the meaning to “blue apple.” She liked the oddness of it and kept it. It was as Lan Ping that she built her acting career before Mao, politics, and the Cultural Revolution consumed everything else.
The woman who would eventually stand trial as the ringleader of what the Party branded the “Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Clique” was, by the time of her arrest in 1976, already notorious for phobias that made life around her a sustained ordeal. She feared wind, light, sharp changes in temperature, and above all, sound. Her aide Yang Yinlu recalled that staff learned to walk with legs spread wide and arms held slightly out from the body to avoid fabric friction. They held their breath rather than risk an audible exhale. A cough that slipped out could bring a beating.
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She also renamed people. Subordinates, performers, staff members: she rechristened them with casual authority, citing reasons that ranged from “too feudal” to “reeks of capitalism.” Yang Yinlu became Yang Yinglu. The Peking opera performer Qian Haoliang became Hao Liang. The concert pianist Yin Chengzong became Cheng Zhong. Her aide described the habit as one of her minor pleasures. The recipients experienced it differently.
At her 1980 trial, she delivered the line for which she is most remembered: “I was Chairman Mao’s dog.” It was said with contempt for the proceedings, but it was also, stripped of its theatrical defiance, an accurate account of how power had worked. She carried out Mao’s directives, amplified his campaigns, and absorbed the fury of his enemies on his behalf. When he died, she became the dog the Party needed to kick.
She had tried to die before the Party got the chance. After her arrest in 1976, she made the first of many attempts. In September 1984, denied permission to visit Mao’s mausoleum, she forced a chopstick into her own throat. In May 1986, she knotted several socks into a makeshift noose. In December 1988, refused permission to hold a family gathering on the 95th anniversary of Mao’s birth, she swallowed 50 sleeping pills. On May 14, 1991, at 3:30 in the morning, a nurse on night duty found her hanging from a metal rack above a bathtub. She had knotted her handkerchiefs together into a rope. She was 77.
The Party buried the news as it buried most inconvenient facts. Time magazine broke the story on June 1, 1991. The official Xinhua News Agency followed on June 4. People’s Daily, the Party’s flagship newspaper, ran a brief item in a corner of its fourth page. Her death received, in the country she had helped terrorize for a decade, roughly the attention of a minor municipal appointment.
Twelve years in an urn
On the afternoon of May 14, Li Na, the only child Jiang Qing bore with Mao, traveled to the 310th Hospital in Beijing to sign the death certificate. She agreed there would be no funeral. On May 18, the body was cremated. Li Na did not attend. No other family member appeared. She took the urn home, set it on a shelf, and left it there for 12 years.
Jiang Qing had left a will. She wanted to be buried in Zhucheng, Shandong province, the city where she was born. In 1996, one of her former secretaries, Yan Changui, visited Zhucheng and raised the matter with the local Party secretary. The official was receptive. The city had a cemetery called Fenghuang, he said; they were prepared to receive the ashes, erect a grave, and allow a headstone. He asked Yan to relay the offer to Li Na.
Yan did. Li Na withdrew.
Her reasoning was specific. Hatred for her mother remained deep and wide across Chinese society. If the burial went ahead in Zhucheng, she could not remain there to guard the grave. And if someone came with a hammer or a shovel, the act of burying her there would have made Li Na responsible for the desecration. She decided it was not yet time.
The political opening came after the Party’s 16th National Congress, when a senior Party official told Li Na, in so many words, that a hometown burial would be difficult to manage if something went wrong. Li Na used the opening. She proposed Beijing. The official agreed.
A grave under a false name
Li Na chose Futian Cemetery after comparing several options against a single criterion: security. Futian is an established, well-guarded ground, ranked third among Beijing’s public cemeteries, behind only the elite Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery and Wan’an Cemetery. Its other residents include Aisin-Gioro Zaifeng, the last regent of the Qing dynasty; the classical scholar Wang Guowei; the literary critic Qian Xuantong; the novelist Yu Pingbo; major Peking opera figures including Hao Shoucheng, Yu Shuyan, Yang Baosen, and Zhao Xiaolou; General Xu Guangda, who built the People’s Liberation Army’s armored forces; and the nuclear physicist Qian Sanqiang. The company was respectable. The walls were solid.
Even then, Li Na took two additional precautions.
The headstone does not say Jiang Qing. It gives her birth name: Li Yunhe. Tens of millions of Chinese people know the name Jiang Qing. Relatively few know the name Li Yunhe. The calculation was deliberate.
The headstone also omits the names of the family members who erected it. Where Chinese burial custom calls for the names of children and their spouses, this stone records only their relationship: “daughter” and “son-in-law.” No names. The grave is findable by those who know where to look, identifiable by those who know the history, and offers nothing to someone arriving with a grudge and a tool.
What a daughter’s fear reveals
Li Na’s 12-year wait was an act of love, calculation, and genuine terror conducted simultaneously. She was trying to honor a mother she could not defend publicly, under conditions where honoring that mother carried real physical risk. The fear of grave desecration was specific to Jiang Qing, but the anxiety behind it runs far deeper in the Party’s governing class.
A story has circulated for years in Chinese dissident circles. On a summer evening in the late 1980s, Chen Yun, one of the Party’s most senior economic ideologues, told Deng Xiaoping: “Our children are reliable. They won’t dig up their own family’s graves.” Chen then made a proposition: since they had conquered the country, their descendants should inherit it. Each family, he suggested, should place at least one member in a position of power. Deng agreed. Whether or not the conversation happened precisely as described, the anxiety it expresses is real. The instinct to surround the regime with people who share a personal stake in preventing accountability has shaped Chinese political succession ever since.
The families of those who built and ran the Party’s terror apparatus understand, at a visceral level, what their parents did. They know what a genuine reckoning would look like. The children of perpetrators inherit not only privilege but exposure.
The cries from Taihu Lake
That fear has a physical correlation in one of the stranger episodes from the Cultural Revolution’s immediate aftermath.
In 1976, residents of villages around Taihu Lake, a large body of water on the border of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in eastern China, began reporting sounds rising from the water at night. A vast, formless chorus of weeping and screaming, mixing dialects from across China, voices crying out for parents, shouting grievances, pleading innocence. Some voices could be heard intoning phrases praising Mao. Local officials were too frightened to act for weeks. When they finally reported it upward, they were told the villagers were spreading feudal superstition. The sounds grew louder. Militia units were deployed; they found no one. Finally, the Public Security Bureau recorded the sounds and sent the tapes to Beijing. Officials from across the provinces were summoned to listen. Those present recalled that even hardened public security personnel wept.
What the recordings captured, if the accounts are credible, was something like a collective residue: the accumulated voices of those who had been denounced, tortured, driven to suicide, and killed across decades of Party campaigns. Since 1949, an estimated 80 million people have died unnatural deaths under CCP rule on the Chinese mainland. Five thousand years of civilization were deliberately dismantled inside a single decade. The country’s prisons are filled with the innocent; its history books filled with fabrications.
The children of those who built this system cannot bury their parents in peace. Jiang Qing lay in an urn on a shelf for 12 years, then went into the ground under a name most people would not recognize, in a city she had not asked to be buried in, with her daughter’s name left off the stone. That is the minimum consequence for what was done. Whether it is proportionate is a question that history, and perhaps something older than history, will eventually answer.
By Jin Jianming
