1976

Gang of Four

Arrest of the Gang of Four

The meeting invitation was a trap. Its announced agenda: a new volume of Mao's writings and the design of his memorial hall.

Huairen Hall, 8:00 p.m., 6 October 1976

On the afternoon of 6 October 1976, Hua Guofeng's allies issued notices for an 8:00 p.m. Politburo Standing Committee meeting at Huairen Hall in Beijing's Zhongnanhai compound, ostensibly about publishing Mao's works and planning his memorial hall.

At roughly 8:00, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan were detained there. Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, was detained separately at her Zhongnanhai residence.

Then the transmitters

At 9:00 p.m., Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying ordered Geng Biao to take control of Xinhua, the central broadcasting administration, national radio and Beijing television.

At 10:00 p.m., an emergency Politburo meeting approved the action and began settling the post-arrest political arrangements. Wang Dongxing's central guard apparatus had supplied the personnel who made the detentions.

The conventional endpoint

Mao's death a month earlier had left a succession struggle between Hua's coalition and the radicals. This was an internal arrest operation, not a battlefield capture, and Deng Xiaoping neither planned it nor took power that night.

The party's 1981 resolution dates the Cultural Revolution May 1966 to October 1976, and the arrests are conventionally treated as its end — though dismantling its personnel, institutions and policies took years, and the public trial did not begin until November 1980.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes Date corrected

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date corrected. The research places this at 1976-10-06.

What the sources leave uncertain

The decisive arrest date is firmly established as October 6, 1976; the year-only date in the listing is unnecessarily imprecise.
Treating the arrests as the exact end of the Cultural Revolution is a conventional and official periodization. The dismantling of its personnel, institutions and policies continued for years.
Because the operation was initially secret, detailed narratives rely on later official histories, participant memoirs and reconstructed contemporary reporting; minor details and exact arrival times vary.
“Gang of Four” is the standard later label, but it also reflects the victorious faction's post-arrest political narrative.