Chen Boda; Adviser to Mao Before He Was Imprisoned

HONG KONG —  Chen Boda, the onetime No. 4 man in China who advised Mao Tse-tung for 30 years before leading purges during the Cultural Revolution, has died in Beijing of heart failure, the pro-Beijing press said here Friday.

Chen was 85 when he died at his Beijing home on Sept. 20, the Hong Kong China News Service reported. The pro-Beijing newspaper Ta Kung Pao said Mao’s disgraced colleague was cremated Thursday under his original name--Chen Jianxiang.

Chen was one of Mao’s former secretaries and became the head of Mao’s Central Cultural Revolution Group in 1966.

In 1980, he was put on trial along with the so-called Gang of Four, the radical leaders of the Cultural Revolution. The man whom the Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, dubbed the “mad persecutor,” was sentenced to 18 years in jail for “counterrevolutionary activities” and purging innocent people.

Released on Probation

Officials disclosed in early 1988 that Chen had been released on probation for medical reasons. He was believed living with a son in the Chinese capital at his death and quietly pursuing research at the city’s Literature and History Museum.

Chen was born in 1904 in coastal Fujian province and joined the Communist Party in the mid-1920s. He studied in Moscow for four years, returning in 1930 to teach at China College in Beijing.

When the Japanese occupied Beijing in 1937, Chen went west to Yenan, the remote base of China’s Communist Party leaders. He taught at the party school and began his long friendship with Mao.

Over the next decade Chen, as Mao’s personal and political secretary, counseled Mao while writing some of the Chinese leader’s most famous essays and speeches. He played a major role in drafting the new constitution of Communist-ruled China after 1949 and in 1958 became the first editor of the party’s ideological journal, the Red Flag.

Went With Mao to Moscow

He accompanied Mao on his only foreign trips, his 1949 and 1957 visits to Moscow.

In 1966 Mao appointed Chen head of a four-member group assigned to lead the 1966-76 ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution by mobilizing China’s masses to denounce alleged “capitalist roaders” in the party and purge the nation of bourgeois influences.

Chen used the post to orchestrate campaigns against top officials, including party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping. He was regarded as the fourth most powerful person in China, behind Mao, Mao’s designated successor Lin Biao and Premier Chou En-lai.