Wang Dongxing

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Wang Dongxing (汪東興; born 1916) was Mao Zedong's bodyguard during the Cultural Revolution. As commander of the 8341 Special Regiment, Wang Dongxing was instrumental in the coup d'etat against the Gang of Four immediately after Mao's death.

He was prominent under Hua Guofeng, being one of the five members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China, a committee whose membership varies between 5 and 9 and includes the top leadership of the Communist Party of China. He lost power as Deng Xiaoping rose to supreme power and was deprived of all his posts in the early 1980s.

As a gesture both to his role in the coup d’etat and to signal that political foes would no longer be persecuted, Wang was elected to the very last alternate position of the CCP Central Committee at the 1982 12th National Party Congress.

[edit] Sources

• The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Li Zhisui, Arrow Books 1996
• Mao's Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Harvard University Press 2006.