---
title: The Gang of Four:arrest, denunciation and a trial that closed the Cultural Revolution's books (1976-1981)
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/
description: Twelve days after Mao Zedong's death, Hua Guofeng had Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen arrested on 6 October 1976; a two-year…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: a Cold War intelligence collage of a non-aligned-movement conference and a map spanning Latin America, Africa and Asia.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-cold-war-global-south.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# The Gang of Four:arrest, denunciation and a trial that closed the Cultural Revolution's books (1976-1981)

At a glance

Twelve days after Mao Zedong's death, Hua Guofeng had Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen arrested on 6 October 1976…

- **When:** October 6, 1976
- **Actor:** The Chinese Communist Party under Hua Guofeng, backed by Marshal Ye Jianying and Central Guard…
- **Target:** Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, and lesser associates arrested with them…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Limited hangout](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/limited-hangout/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/)
- **Regime:** [People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/peoples-republic-of-china-mao/)

Full details

- **Actor:** The Chinese Communist Party under Hua Guofeng, backed by Marshal Ye Jianying and Central Guard Bureau commander Wang Dongxing; from 1978, the leadership under Deng Xiaoping; the Special Court of the Supreme People's Court (Jiang Hua presiding)
- **Target:** Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, and lesser associates arrested with them; Chinese domestic public opinion; the historical record of responsibility for the Cultural Revolution

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This page quotes denunciation-campaign labels ("anti-Party clique," "counter-revolutionary clique") and courtroom exchanges from 1976-81, and states persecution and death counts as the prosecution itself presented them. The labels and counts are quoted as evidence of the method. They are not this archive's own finding on any individual named here.

**In one line:** Twelve days after Mao Zedong's death, Hua Guofeng had Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen arrested on 6 October 1976; a two-year nationwide campaign then recast the four as the sole architects of the Cultural Revolution's abuses, and a televised 1980-81 trial delivered suspended-death and prison sentences, while the party's own 1981 verdict on the decade kept Mao's standing, and the record of who else took part, largely untouched.

![Diagram: Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing arrest the four on 6 October 1976; an 18 October notice names them an anti-Party clique; nationwide denunciation rallies and three rounds of published "evidence" run through 1977-78; the November 1980 to January 1981 Special Court trial is filmed for daily broadcast; the verdict of 25 January 1981 hands down suspended-death and prison terms; the 1981 party resolution repudiates the Cultural Revolution while keeping Mao's "merits primary, errors secondary"](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **9 September 1976.** Mao Zedong dies; see [Grief on schedule: Mao's death, Hua Guofeng's succession and the 'two whatevers', 1976-1978](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-death-succession-propaganda-1976/) for the succession propaganda around his death and funeral. For the following weeks Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, who then hold four of the ten seats left on the Politburo Standing Committee, retain control of the central party media and publish articles invoking "principles laid down" by Mao, whose exact wording and canonical status were themselves disputed (Hsü 1990).
- **17 September.** At an enlarged Politburo Standing Committee meeting, Hua Guofeng, who succeeded Mao as party chairman shortly before his death, criticizes the radicals' media line; Jiang Qing disagrees and asks to be named party chairman. The meeting ends inconclusively.
- **21 September - 4 October.** Hua Guofeng, Marshal Ye Jianying, Li Xiannian and Wang Dongxing, commander of the Central Guard Bureau (Unit 8341, which guards the top leadership), meet secretly over two weeks and settle on arrest rather than a Politburo vote.

![Black-and-white portrait photograph of Hua Guofeng, smiling, in a high-collared tunic](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda-hua-guofeng-1979.jpg)

*Hua Guofeng, Party chairman and organiser of the 6 October 1976 arrests, photographed in October 1979. Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville, Bibliothèques spécialisées de la Ville de Paris, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hua_Guofeng.jpg). CC0.* - **6 October 1976.** The CCP General Office summons the Politburo Standing Committee to Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai. As Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan arrive separately that evening, Hua, Ye and Wang Dongxing have each isolated for "investigation"; a separate unit arrests Jiang Qing at her residence the same night, and Mao's nephew Mao Yuanxin is arrested in Manchuria. Associates in Shanghai are summoned to Beijing "for a meeting" and arrested on arrival. Han Suyin's contemporaneous account calls the operation bloodless and efficient; the historian Immanuel C. Y. Hsü instead reports that Wang Hongwen fought the agents sent to seize him, killing two of them and being wounded himself before he was subdued — the two accounts of the arrest's violence do not agree. Hua Guofeng is named acting party chairman before dawn. - **10 October.** Deng Xiaoping, himself twice purged during the Cultural Revolution and soon to be rehabilitated, writes to Hua Guofeng praising the arrests as a victory over "careerists and conspirators" who had tried "to usurp the Party and seize power." - **18 October.** The Central Committee circulates *Notice on the Incident of the Anti-Party Group of Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan* (Zhongfa [1976] No. 16) to the whole party, explaining the arrests and ordering the "Movement to Expose and Criticize the Gang of Four" to begin.

![First page of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee notice Zhongfa 1976 No. 16, headed 'CCP Central Committee Document' and 'CCP Central Committee Notice', naming Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan as an anti-Party group](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda-zhongfa16-1976.png)

*Page 1 of the CCP Central Committee*Notice on the Incident of the Anti-Party Group of Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan*(Zhongfa [1976] No. 16), 18 October 1976, scanned from Central Archives of China, ed.,*共和国六十年珍贵档案*(China Archives Publishing House, 2009), p. 1101, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E4%B8%AD%E5%85%B1%E4%B8%AD%E5%A4%AE%E9%80%9A%E7%9F%A5%EF%BC%88%E4%B8%AD%E5%8F%91%E3%80%941976%E3%80%9516%E5%8F%B7%EF%BC%89.png). Public domain (official document of a state organ, exempt from PRC copyright).* - **21 October 1976.** State radio and the press announce the "crushing" of the Gang of Four; nationwide denunciation rallies begin the same day. Guo Moruo, vice chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, publishes a celebratory poem, "*Shui Tiao Ge Tou*: Smashing the Gang of Four," which circulates nationwide. - **24 October 1976.** A mass rally in Tiananmen Square; the party's own history records "millions" of soldiers and civilians attending to celebrate the Gang's fall. - **10 December 1976 - 23 September 1977.** The Central Committee issues three rounds of *Evidence of the Crimes of the Anti-Party Group of Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan* to the party and, progressively, the public: "Material 1" (10 December 1976); "Material 2," *The Counter-Revolutionary Face of the Gang of Four and Their Evil History* (6 March 1977); and "Material 3," *The Reactionary Fallacies Spread by the Gang of Four in Various Fields* (23 September 1977). - **July 1977.** The Third Plenary Session of the 10th Central Committee formally expels Wang, Zhang, Jiang and Yao from the party and strips them of every post. - **1978.** The party judges the nationwide "Exposition, Criticism and Uncovering Movement" (揭批查运动) — which had also drawn in millions of former Red Guards of the "rebel faction" for public criticism as associates of the Gang — to have met its aims; the December 1978 Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee formally ends the mass campaign and turns to [Boluan Fanzheng: how Deng Xiaoping's faction used a debate about truth to break Hua Guofeng's hold on power, 1977-1981](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/), the broader process of "setting things right." - **29 September 1980.** The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress establishes a Special Procuratorate and a Special Court of the Supreme People's Court to prosecute the officially named Case of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Cliques. Jiang Hua, president of the Supreme People's Court, presides. The indictment names ten defendants: the four, plus Chen Boda, tried as a member of the "Jiang Qing group," and five generals tied to the late Lin Biao (Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, Qiu Huizuo and Jiang Tengjiao). Mao Yuanxin, arrested with the four in 1976, is not among them; he is tried separately, in 1986. - **20 November 1980 - 25 January 1981.** The Special Court holds sixty-seven days of public hearings at No. 1 Zhengyi Road, Beijing. Its indictment, more than 20,000 words, separates "political errors" from prosecutable crimes — organizing and leading a counter-revolutionary group, conspiracy to subvert the government, counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement, false accusation and framing, and, for some defendants, instigating armed rebellion or homicide — and states that the two cliques' actions led to the persecution of some 750,000 people and the deaths of 34,375, in 1966-76. That count is the prosecution's own figure for both cliques combined, not an independent tally; see [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/) for later scholarly estimates that put the Cultural Revolution's overall toll higher. Sessions are filmed daily for national television broadcast and later documentary release (Qian 2024); the courtroom audience includes selected delegates from every province and victims' relatives, among them the widows of Liu Shaoqi, He Long and Luo Ruiqing.

![Four numbered black-and-white photographs of the defendants in the 1980 Special Court trial](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda-trial-1980.jpg)

*The four defendants at the Special Court trial, November 1980, numbered 1 to 4 (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen), as printed in*Beijing Review*, 1 December 1980, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Gang_of_Four%22_on_trial_in_1980.jpg). Public domain in the U.S. (published without a copyright notice, before 1 March 1989).* - **Jiang Qing's defense.** She is the only one of the four to argue her own case, telling the court she had obeyed Mao Zedong's orders throughout; she is repeatedly defiant, argues with the presiding judge and the chief prosecutor, and is at least once removed from the courtroom for disrupting its order. Zhang Chunqiao refuses to answer the court's questions or enter a plea. Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan confess and express repentance. - **25 January 1981: verdict.** Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao receive death sentences suspended for two years, both later commuted to life imprisonment (January 1983); Wang Hongwen receives life imprisonment; Yao Wenyuan receives twenty years. Chen Boda and the five Lin Biao-clique generals receive sixteen-to-eighteen-year terms. - **27 June 1981.** The Sixth Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee adopts the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China" (see [The 1981 Resolution: how the Chinese Communist Party engineered a single verdict on Mao](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/)), which states the Cultural Revolution "was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses" since 1949, while keeping Mao Zedong's own standing intact: his "merits are primary and his errors secondary." - **Aftermath.** Jiang Qing dies by suicide, an overdose of sleeping pills, on 14 May 1991; Wang Hongwen dies in prison in August 1992; Yao Wenyuan is released in October 1996 and dies in December 2005; Zhang Chunqiao is released on medical parole in January 1998 and dies in April 2005.

## How it works

- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): the 18 October notice and everything that follows attach a label — "anti-Party group," soon shortened in common usage to "the Gang of Four" (四人帮) — to four named people before the campaign presents a single individually charged act. The label does the work the specific charges, filed only four years later, would eventually have to do on their own.
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): government media blamed the Gang of Four, and the already-dead Lin Biao, for the Cultural Revolution's excesses. One bounded group of four people, plus a dead marshal who could not answer, absorbed the blame for a decade in which the top leadership as a body, the security services, provincial party committees and millions of participants across the country took part. Mao Zedong, who launched the Cultural Revolution, chose Jiang Qing for her role in it, and personally endorsed the "capitalist roader" campaigns the Gang carried out, is named nowhere in the indictment as an author of the harm it describes.
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): the indictment's own move — sorting "political errors" from prosecutable "crimes" — drew a line that put everything the party wished not to try on the far side of it. The three "Materials" circulated in 1976-77 present the case for the prosecution only, to an audience that had no access to a defense.
- [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) and [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): the 21 October rallies were announced on the same day, nationwide, by state radio and the press, not reported as they spontaneously arose; a poem "widely circulated" the same week supplied the emotional register in advance. The 24 October Tiananmen rally, with "millions" attending by the party's own account, then offered scale as if it were proof: the Gang's guilt had already been settled before the Special Court sat four years later.
- [Limited hangout](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/limited-hangout/): the arrest, the campaign and the trial released a bounded, survivable truth — ten named defendants, a decade's "excesses" — and used it to close the file. The larger truth stayed shut: how far Mao Zedong himself directed the persecutions described, and how many other officials, security officers and ordinary citizens carried them out. The 1981 resolution performs the identical move at the level of doctrine, repudiating the Cultural Revolution in full while stating in the same document that Mao's "merits are primary" — a formula historians read as designed to let the party keep both the repudiation and the founder (see Positions on the record, below).

## Then and now

The People's Republic has reused the label itself, not merely the method, against new targets. In 2013, mainland state media called the Hong Kong figures Anson Chan, Martin Lee, Joseph Zen and Jimmy Lai a "Gang of Four" over their alleged foreign ties. A pro-Beijing Hong Kong paper turned the same label on establishment figures — Tung Chee-hwa, Leung Chun-ying and others — in 2016. In August 2019, during the Hong Kong protests, state media named Chan, Lee, Lai and Albert Ho "Hong Kong's 'Gang of Four'" over alleged "collusion with foreign forces"; the *Financial Times* and Bloomberg both reported the label as a deliberate echo of the 1976 case, and all four named individuals publicly rejected it.

The mechanism is the same [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) move — a loaded historical label, chosen for its stigma, substituting for a specific charge — run by the same state apparatus, decades apart. The differences are large: the 2019 targets faced no arrest under that label, no indictment naming it, and no trial; the label functioned as a smear inside a much larger information contest over the protests, not as the opening move of a criminal case.

## Positions on the record

- **The party's position at the time (1976-78).** The 18 October notice and the three "Materials" present the four as having "usurped Party and state power" and committed specific "crimes" against named victims. The party's later official history summarizes the case for the campaign: "the 'Gang of Four' had long controlled public opinion, engaged in idealism and metaphysics, formed cliques and factions, and had an extremely bad influence within the Party. If the crimes of the 'Gang of Four' were not thoroughly investigated and their faction was not destroyed, their influence in all aspects could not be eliminated."
- **Contemporary dissent, from the left.** Charles Bettelheim, the French Marxist economist, resigned as chairman of the France-China Friendship Association in 1977, writing that the party's charges against the Gang of Four were "not convincing at all," offered "no Marxist analysis, but only slander and scandal," and amounted to "crude fabrications" — a prominent Maoist sympathizer's contemporaneous verdict that the prosecution was itself a political maneuver rather than an honest accounting.
- **The party's later position (1981).** The June 1981 resolution repudiates the Cultural Revolution as a whole ("responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses") while keeping Mao Zedong's own standing distinct from it: his "merits are primary and his errors secondary." The same resolution is the party's most authoritative statement that a decade of officially sanctioned persecution occurred; it does not put Mao's own direction of that decade before any court.
- **Scholarship.** Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals's *Mao's Last Revolution* (2006) traces the campaign's decisions to Mao and the small circle around him through 1976, and situates the Gang of Four's arrest as the closing act of a movement Mao had directed from 1966. Alexander Cook's history of the Special Court trial (2017) reads it as using legal form to deliver a predetermined historical verdict — the Gang of Four as the era's authors — rather than to test each individual charge on its evidence. Ying Qian's *Revolutionary Becomings* (2024) situates the trial's daily broadcasts within the party's post-1976 effort to present itself as newly bound by law. Historians commonly note, as one summary puts it, that "a key objective... was to condemn the excesses of the Cultural Revolution without implicating its founder, Mao Zedong, thereby preserving the legitimacy of the Party and its historical narrative."
- **What is documented.** The dates and text of the 18 October notice, the three "Materials," the Special Court's establishment, dates and structure, the individual verdicts and sentences, and the releases and deaths listed above.
- **What is contested.** How far Jiang Qing and her allies acted on Mao's explicit instructions, as against their own initiative — even the Wikipedia summary of the group states plainly that "it remains unclear which major decisions were made by [Mao] and carried out by the Gang, and which were the result of the Gang of Four's own planning," and historians differ on the point. The violence of the arrest itself is inconsistently reported, as the Han Suyin and Hsü accounts above show. The reliability and completeness of the prosecution's own persecution-and-death count (750,000 persecuted, 34,375 dead) against later, higher reconstructions of the Cultural Revolution's national toll — 750,000 to 1.6 million dead, by Walder and Su's (2003) and Walder's (2014) archival estimates, cited on [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/) — is also open.
- **Not ruled on here.** Whether each of the ten defendants was individually guilty of the specific acts the indictment charged — a question the trial record and later historians address at length — and whether the wider political program the Gang of Four championed was right or wrong on its merits. This page scores how the arrest, the campaign and the trial were built, staged and used to distribute responsibility, not that underlying dispute.

## Same-method test

The same scoring applies to the Soviet Union's handling of Lavrentiy Beria after Stalin's death, on a smaller and more secretive scale than the public trials this archive covers on [The Moscow show trials: confession, spectacle and consent (1936-1938)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/moscow-show-trials-1936-1938/).

Beria, head of the Soviet security apparatus and a Politburo member seen as Stalin's likely successor, was arrested on 26 June 1953 in a Presidium-meeting ambush organized by Nikita Khrushchev, with Marshal Georgy Zhukov and armed officers waiting to seize him on a signal. He and six subordinates were tried by a special session of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 23 December 1953, with no defense counsel and no right of appeal, Marshal Ivan Konev presiding. The charges — treason, sabotage, "terrorism" covering his direction of the NKVD's arrests, torture and killings, and activity dating to 1919 — laid the security apparatus's abuses onto Beria personally; he and all six co-defendants were sentenced to death and shot the same day, Beria separately. The Presidium members who approved the arrest, Khrushchev among them, had themselves signed off on arrests and executions throughout the Stalin terror; blaming Beria let them avoid a comparable individual accounting, and the Soviet state did not begin a broader public reckoning with the terror until Khrushchev's own "Secret Speech" three years later, in 1956 — itself a closed-session address, not a public trial.

The technique repeats: [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) parks the blame for a systemic, multi-year campaign of persecution onto one bounded figure and his immediate circle; [Limited hangout](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/limited-hangout/) lets the wider leadership that had directed or approved the same abuses avoid individual account. The procedural dress differs sharply: Beria's trial was held in secret and the verdict announced only afterward, where the Gang of Four's was filmed daily for national broadcast; Beria and his co-defendants were shot within hours of sentencing, where the Gang of Four received suspended-death and prison terms and, in three of the four cases, died of natural causes decades later; and Beria was a genuine rival for supreme power whom his colleagues had reason to fear, while by 1976 the Gang of Four's four members controlled propaganda and some militia units but not the army. Same mechanism, different stakes for the defendants and a different degree of public visibility.

## How to spot it

- Ask whether the label — "the clique," "the gang" — arrives before or instead of a specific, individually charged act.
- Check whether the people publicly blamed match everyone who had the standing to give the harmful orders, or only a bounded subset of it.
- Watch for a document that formally repudiates the harm in full while explicitly preserving the standing of whoever sat above the people now on trial.
- Ask what happened to those at the top of the chain who were never charged: retired quietly, reassigned, or promoted.
- Look for celebration announced on the same day as the accusation, before any hearing has taken place — scale offered as if it were proof.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams_fall_gang_of_four.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| CCP Central Committee Notice, Zhongfa [1976] No. 16, 18 October 1976 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E4%B8%AD%E5%85%B1%E4%B8%AD%E5%A4%AE%E9%80%9A%E7%9F%A5%EF%BC%88%E4%B8%AD%E5%8F%91%E3%80%941976%E3%80%9516%E5%8F%B7%EF%BC%89.png), scanned from 中央档案馆 (Central Archives of China), ed., *共和国六十年珍贵档案*, vol. "中" (China Archives Publishing House, 2009), p. 1101, ISBN 978-7-5105-0090-9 | Public domain: PD-PRC-exempt (an official document of a state organ, exempt from copyright under Article 5 of the PRC Copyright Law, so not subject to URAA restoration) |
| The Gang of Four on trial, November 1980 (left to right: Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Gang_of_Four%22_on_trial_in_1980.jpg), *Beijing Review*, 1 December 1980, reproduced from an [Internet Archive scan](https://archive.org/details/beijing-review-1980-48/mode/2up) | Public domain in the U.S.: PD-US-1978-1989 (published without a copyright notice, and simultaneously distributed in the U.S., before 1 March 1989) |
| Hua Guofeng, October 1979 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hua_Guofeng.jpg), Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville, Bibliothèques spécialisées de la Ville de Paris | CC0 (public domain dedication) |

### Image gaps

- **The Huairen Hall arrest itself.** No photograph exists; it was carried out in secret with no press present.
- **The 24 October 1976 Tiananmen Square rally, and 1976-78 denunciation posters and cartoons.** Wikimedia Commons and Chinese-poster archives hold period material, including a poster captioned "Decisively Throw Out the Wang-Zhang-Jiang-Yao Anti-Party Clique!," tagged PD-China. As on [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/), Chinese works still protected on 1 January 1996 had their U.S. copyright restored under the URAA, and none of this poster or rally material was found with a simultaneous-publication or copyright-exemption basis comparable to the two Commons images used above. Unclear U.S. status, so not hosted.
- **Courtroom photographs of individual defendants, or of the full bench and audience.** Widely reproduced, including in the documentary footage discussed by Qian (2024), but no copy with a confirmed open licence and a documented U.S. basis was found in this pass; the courtroom image used above is a single small news-magazine reproduction with a specific, checkable simultaneous-publication basis, not a wire-service or press-agency photograph.
- **Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan or Wang Hongwen, individually, at any date.** Portraits exist on Commons under PD-China tags carrying the same unresolved URAA question; none was confirmed and added in this pass.

## Sources

- Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, *Notice on the Incident of the Anti-Party Group of Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan* (Zhongfa [1976] No. 16), 18 October 1976.
- Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, *Evidence of the Crimes of the Anti-Party Group of Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan*, Materials 1-3, 10 December 1976, 6 March 1977 and 23 September 1977.
- Standing Committee of the 5th National People's Congress, Decision on Establishing the Special Procuratorate of the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Special Court of the Supreme People's Court to Prosecute and Try the Principal Offenders in the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Clique Case, 29 September 1980.
- Special Procuratorate No. 1 of the Supreme People's Procuratorate of the People's Republic of China, indictment, November 1980.
- Communist Party of China, "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China," 27 June 1981: [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm).
- Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, *Mao's Last Revolution* (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
- Alexander C. Cook, "China's Gang of Four Trial: The Law v. The Laws of History," in Devin O. Pendas and Jens Meierhenrich, eds., *Political Trials in Theory and History* (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 263-294.
- Ying Qian, *Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China* (Columbia University Press, 2024).
- Han Suyin, *Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China* (Hill and Wang, 1994), p. 413, for the eyewitness account of the arrest.
- Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, *China Without Mao: The Search for a New Order* (Oxford University Press, 1990).
- Richard Baum, *Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping* (Princeton University Press, 1996).
- Keith Forster, "China's Coup of October 1976," *Modern China* 18, no. 3 (1992): 263-303.
- 当代中国研究所 (Contemporary China Institute), *中华人民共和国史稿* [Draft History of the People's Republic of China], vols. 3-4 (人民出版社, 2012), for the party's own account of the arrest and the campaign that followed.
- Charles Bettelheim, resignation letter to the Association des Amitiés Franco-Chinoises, 1977, reprinted in *编译参考*, supplement (1978), 7-9, for the contemporaneous left dissent quoted in "Positions on the record."
- Andrew G. Walder and Yang Su, "The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact," *The China Quarterly* 173 (2003): 74-99, for the comparative death-toll estimates cited there.
- Andrew G. Walder, "Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1971," *Social Science History* 38, nos. 3-4 (2014).
- Amy Knight, *Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant* (Princeton University Press, 1993), for the "Same-method test."
- Mark Kramer, "The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy Making (Part 2)," *Journal of Cold War Studies* 1, no. 2 (1999): 3-38, on Beria's arrest and trial.