Madame Mao, the Model Works, and Gender Relations in China’s Communist Party

When Mao told the vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s security bureau that he was going to marry Jiang Qing, Xu Jianguo purportedly slammed down his teacup and said, “She’s too complicated!” As the celebrity wife of Chairman Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing was scrutinized by Party elites for decades. In her early years of marriage to Mao, questions of what it meant for Mao as a godlike figure to have human desires made Jiang’s position as Mao’s lover, wife, and comrade-in-arms untenable. As her marriage with Mao evolved from a love match to a mutually reliant partnership in precarious political times, critiques that once focused on her dangerous sexual appeal shifted to critiques of her vainglorious ambition and intellectual shortcomings. This paper reads Jiang’s contributions to the Cultural Revolution model works alongside anecdotes and rumors about her to understand the gender dynamics at play in 1930s Shanghai, 1940s Yan’an, and 1950s Beijing. It asks what made Jiang Qing so objectionable to both women and men in the elite circles of film, theater and Party politics across three decades. It asks how her various types of exclusion (insufficiently revolutionary, possibly dangerous, too scandalous, and too “complicated”) illuminate the modes of femininity favored by her detractors. Lastly, this paper will explore how Jiang used her experiences among Party elite and her fraught relationship with free love and motherhood to give her artistic work (revolutionary operas and ballets) a particular political flavor such that class struggle and equality within marriage came to be seen as mutually exclusive.