YAO WENYUAN, the expert propagandist who laid the ideological foundations for China’s Cultural Revolution, has died in Shanghai aged 74. He was the last surviving member of the Gang of Four.

A two-line statement by the official Xinhua news agency described Mr Yao as a “key criminal of the counter-revolutionary group” and said that he had died of diabetes on December 23.

The brevity of the announcement and the delay in making it betray the political sensitivity that still surrounds the decade of turmoil from 1966 to 1976. Any mention of it risks tarnishing the image of the group’s close ally and patron, Chairman Mao, who is still officially revered, and the credibility of the ruling Communist Party.

The Gang of Four was led by Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, a former stage and film actress. As well as Mr Yao, it included the politically astute ideologue Zhang Chunqiao and the worker-turned-militia-leader Wang Hongwen.

The four, with Mao, were the main players in the Cultural Revolution, whipping up an ultra-leftist frenzy, purging tens of thousands of supposed enemies and destroying the lives of millions. The party is still reluctant to allow scrutiny of the events.

A generation of children was deprived of a proper education while their parents, with their careers shattered, were sent to toil in the countryside. China’s intellectuals have never recovered the respect they had commanded for centuries.

The Communist Party now refers obliquely to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as the “decade of chaos”. Its regular warnings against a new outburst of leftist fervour reveal official anxieties that another such ideological tilt too far could result in a similar power struggle and purge.

China has been changed beyond recognition by the capitalist methods so derided by Mr Yao. But the Communist Party is more determined than ever to maintain its grip on power, insisting on its right to rule as part of the legacy of Chairman Mao.

Mao, seen as the founder of modern China, remains a potent Communist symbol. His huge portrait still hangs above Tiananmen Square, President Hu Jintao praised Maoist principles in a new year’s speech and the Government plans to spend millions on a new museum in Mao’s home town.

Unsurprisingly, the party is eager to play down his association with Mr Yao.

In November 1965, Mr Yao was editor of the Shanghai edition of the Liberation Army Daily and fired the opening shots in the Cultural Revolution with an essay, written at Jiang Qing’s instigation, criticising a play written four years earlier. It was a thinly veiled attack on her husband’s high-level rivals — “backstage abetters”, as they became known.

As chief propagandist of the Cultural Revolution, Mr Yao orchestrated armies of young, extremist “Red Guards” who wreaked havoc across China as they hunted down those deemed by the Gang of Four — and by Mao — to be “capitalist roaders” and “bourgeois running dogs”. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents and intellectuals were harassed, beaten and imprisoned.

One government magazine said of Mr Yao in 1981: “His weapon to kill people was the pen.”

Within weeks of Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, the four were arrested in a bloodless coup. Mr Yao was sentenced to 18 years for his propagandist role in the Cultural Revolution and the other three were jailed for life for causing the deaths of tens of thousands of their countrymen.

Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s fourth wife, never repented and hanged herself in 1991. Wang Hongwen died of liver cancer in Beijing in 1992, and Zhang Chunqiao died of cancer in April last year.

Mr Yao began his career in Shanghai as a literary critic and journalist. In April 1969 he rose to membership of the party’s elite Central Committee and was given the hugely powerful job of propaganda chief.

After completing his sentence in 1996, he was sent back to his home village near Shanghai to live under house arrest. He spent his time writing and studying Chinese history. He always said that his most fervent desire was to be reinstated by the Communist Party.

The publication of his memoirs was vetoed in 2001 by Jian Zemin, then the Communist Party chief.

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