The suspended death sentence pronounced on Mao Tse-tung's widow, Jiang Qing, is more lenient than many Chinese expected or thought she deserved. Shouting revolutionary slogans, she was dragged from the Peking court after the Jan. 25 verdict.
But it was this sort of defiance during the "gang of four" trial, and particularly Jiang Qing's unrepentant attitude toward witnesses who had been mistreated on her orders or whose close relatives had died because of such mistreatment, that outraged many Chinese who avidly followed excerpts from the trial on television.
One intellectual, now a leading editor, who had himself been mistreated during the Cultural Revolution, confessed that he lost his cool, detached attitude as he watched Jiang Qing's performance and thought she should be given the death sentence. (A suspended death sentence, which is a peculiarly Chinese practice, means in effect that the criminal will never actually be executed.)
