Yao Wenyuan (1931–2005)

Chinese communist politician, member of the ultra-leftist Gang of Four. Yao joined with other members of the Gang to overthrow, in January 1967, the moderate Shanghai Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee and replace it with a ‘People's Commune’. Yao became a vice chair of this ‘Revolutionary Committee’ and in 1969 a member of the CCP Politiburo. However, in October 1976, after the death of Mao Zedong, the members of the Gang were arrested and in 1980–81 they were tried and found guilty of having contrived an armed uprising in 1976.

Yao was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment and deprivation of his political rights for five years (the most lenient of the sentences given to a member of the Gang). He was released from prison in October 1996.

Born near Shanghai, Yao became a radical journalist, who developed political links with with Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao, the other members of the notorious Gang of Four. As editor chief of the Liberation Daily in Shanghai, in November 1965 he rose to prominence through publishing an article in which he attacked Wu Han's play, Hai Jui Dismissed. This was seen as marking the beginning of the Cultural Revolution of 1966–69, in which so-called ‘bourgeois reactionaries’ and ‘capitalist roaders’ within the CCP came under concerted attack by young, ultra-leftist Maoists who believed in the theory of ‘perpetual revolution’.