Zhang Chunqiao (1917–2005)

Chinese communist politician, member of the ultra-leftist Gang of Four. Zhang was elected to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo in 1969, became Shanghai party leader in 1971, and in 1975 became vice premier and chief political commissar of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). He began organizing ‘people's militia’ with a view to seizing national power and installing himself as premier and Jiang Qing as party leader on the death of Mao Zedong. This plot was crushed in October 1976, when Zhang and the rest of the Gang were arrested by forces loyal to Hua Guofeng.

Zhang was sentenced to death in January 1981, but this was commuted, in March 1983, to life imprisonment.

Born in Shandong province, Zhang joined the CCP in 1940 and fought against the Japanese in northeast China 1942–43. After the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, he became a party propagandist and radical writer, based in Shanghai from the late 1950s. In January 1967 in Shanghai, with Jiang Qing and other members of the Gang of Four, he seized control of the Shanghai Chinese Communist Party (CCP) machine and established a ‘People's Commune’ on the model of the 1871 Paris Commune.