Kang Sheng - Death and Disgrace

Death and Disgrace

Kang Sheng died of bladder cancer on December 16, 1975. He was given a formal funeral, attended by every member of the Politiburo except Mao, who did not attend funerals at this stage, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, who were too weak to attend. Marshal Ye Jianying delivered a eulogy in which he praised Kang as “a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist theoretician, and a glorious fighter against revisionism.”

In November 1978, Hu Yaobang voiced the first formal criticism of Kang in a speech to the Central Party School. Ruan Ming reports Hu as telling four of Kang’s “anti-revisionist scribblers” that

you four people have played an extremely negative role in the liberation of thought, the role of a brake. As far as I’m concerned, this is because you have come too much under the influence of people like Kang Sheng. … Kang Sheng passed his time reading between the lines looking for “allusions” without taking account of the real subject of articles and the general idea. He made a sort of talent of looking for a particular point he could attack. He had learned this from Stalin, from Zhdanov and the KGB, and acted thus from the time of the Yan'an era.

As fear of Kang subsided following the arrest of the Gang of Four and the return to power of Deng Xiaoping, criticisms of Kang Sheng grew and a special case group was established to investigate Kang’s career. In late summer 1980, the special case group reported to the Central Committee. In October 1980, just in advance of commencing the trial of the Gang of Four, Kang Sheng was posthumously expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and the Central Committee formally rescinded Marshal Ye Jianying’s eulogy.