Long Live the Revolutionary Spirit of Chiang Ching!

- Statement by the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement

8th June 1991

Wind and rain escorted Spring's departure,

Flying snow welcomes Spring's return.

On the ice-clad rock rising high and sheer

A flower blooms sweet and fair.

Sweet and fair, she craves not Spring for herself alone,

To be the harbinger of Spring she is content.

When the mountain flowers are in full bloom

She will smile mingling in their midst.

" Ode to the Plum Blossom", by Mao Tsetung, December 1961

On 5th June 1991, the authorities of China announced the death of Chiang Ching. Her death comes after fifteen years in captivity by the reactionary regime in highly suspicious circumstances. Chiang Ching was the living symbol of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the historic movement of hundreds of millions of workers, peasants and revolutionary intellectuals that Mao Tsetung unleashed in China in 1966. In that outstanding movement, Chiang Ching, together with other prominent followers of Mao, dared to lead the people against those big shots and high party officials who were trying to transform socialist China into a reactionary capitalist state. During this epic battle of ten years, citadels long declared off-limits to the masses were stormed and the proletariat nurtured the sprouts of a wholly different type of society. Chiang Ching was in the forefront of these great advances and is particularly associated with the transformation of Peking Opera and ballet which went from glorifying the old society to a thoroughly new art portraying revolutionary workers and peasants.

With the leadership and support of Mao Tsetung, Chiang Ching and her comrades were successful for ten years in preventing capitalist restoration in China. But only one month after the death of Mao Tsetung the rightists in China overthrew Mao's followers and imprisoned Chiang Ching, Chang Chun-chiao and other prominent Maoists. At her trial in 1981, Chiang Ching courageously turned the prisoners' dock into a tribunal to defend the accomplishments of worker and peasant rule in China and to denounce the revisionist usurpers who were trampling on Mao's legacy. In so doing, Chiang Ching spoke for and gave heart to the genuine Maoists the world over who opposed the reactionary coup in China and who had begun the process of regrouping which led to the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM have considered Chiang Ching one of our own during her long years of imprisonment, and today we commemorate the life and memory of this revolutionary heroine.

Throughout her life, Chiang Ching was the implacable opponent of all injustices and inequalities of the old society. More importantly, she dedicated her life to bringing the new society, with new relations between people, into being. Chiang Ching earned the lasting hatred of all apologists of exploitation, for whom the greatest "crime" is putting political power in the hands of the formerly downtrodden and for whom the greatest "loss of reason" is the vision of a communist society without classes. Nor could the new barons of China ever forgive a woman for having challenged their cozy nests, and they were determined to apply the feudal notion of making a widow pay for the "crimes" of her husband, Mao Tsetung. But the qualities reactionaries and the narrow-minded loathed in Chiang Ching and never stopped attacking her for are the very qualities that the communists and the class-conscious proletarians will always cherish.

Chiang Ching died in captivity without living to see the day when the bloody bandits such as Deng Xiaoping who run China today are dethroned. But when the proletariat and the masses in China finally succeed in re-establishing their rule, the memory of Chiang Ching and her lifetime of struggle for the cause of communism will surely hold a special place in their hearts and minds. In the meantime, may the fierce defiance of the chains of tradition and the uncompromising and bold revolutionary spirit of Comrade Chiang Ching continue to serve as the harbingers of Spring.