Before she was Madame Mao, Jiang Qing was a Shanghai actress called Blue Apple
In 1935 a young actress from Shandong took the stage name Lan Ping, meaning blue apple, chosen for its bluntness rather than any meaning. She later shed it along with her Shanghai scandals. Renamed Jiang Qing in Yan'an, she married Mao Zedong and became one of the most powerful figures of the Cultural Revolution.
Her names track her life. Her father, a carpenter in Zhucheng, picked Li Jinnan, the coming boy, before she was born in March 1914, then settled on the coming child once she arrived. At primary school she chose Li Yunhe, crane in the cloud, because it sounded beautiful. Other aliases came with underground politics and arrest. In Yan'an she became Jiang Qing, river and azure. She was finally buried in Beijing in 2002 under her school name.
Childhood was harsh. Her mother, a concubine, fled a violent husband with her daughter and scraped by in domestic service, and the girl was teased at school for wearing her brothers' old clothes. Her mother died in 1928, and at 14 the orphan ran off to join a theatre troupe until her grandparents paid to bring her back. She then trained at an arts academy, overcoming a heavy Shandong accent to shine in traditional opera roles.
Politics and theatre entwined. Working as a university library clerk in Qingdao, she fell in with the Communist Yu Qiwei, performed anti-Japanese plays and joined the party in February 1933. In Shanghai she taught workers, was jailed for three months in 1934, and won fame playing Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. A turbulent, widely publicised marriage to the actor Tang Na damaged her reputation, and in July 1937, as Japan's full invasion began, she left for Yan'an. There she taught drama at the new Lu Xun Academy of Arts, impressing colleagues with her calligraphy, needlework and fondness for riding wild horses.
She married Mao in 1938. After 1949 she steered cultural policy, attacking works such as the opera Hai Rui Dismissed from Office and championing revolutionary operas. By the late 1960s she sat on the Politburo and effectively led the Cultural Revolution Group, heading the faction known as the Gang of Four. After Mao's death she was arrested, blamed for the upheaval and sentenced to death at a televised trial; the sentence became life imprisonment, and she died in 1991.
Source: Jiang Qing
