Four of the most powerful figures in the Chinese Communist Party were arrested in Beijing on the night of October 6, 1976, less than a month after Mao Zedong died on September 9. The order came from Hua Guofeng, who had succeeded Mao as party chairman, and it was carried out by the party's own guard unit under Wang Dongxing with the support of Ye Jianying, Li Xiannian and other veterans. Those taken were Mao's widow Jiang Qing and her three closest allies, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen. The four had controlled propaganda and much of the party machinery for a decade.
The alliance was unusual. Hua had Mao's endorsement as successor but little power base of his own, and the generals and administrators pushed aside during the Cultural Revolution wanted an end to a campaign that had run ten years. By the autumn of 1976 the economy was under strain, universities had given no normal teaching for a decade, some sixteen million urban students had been sent to live and work in the countryside, and a large part of the party's own leadership had spent years in detention or internal exile. The four were accused afterwards of plotting to seize power and of persecuting officials in Mao's name.
Nobody knew for two weeks. The arrests were announced on October 21, and the message that came with them was that the campaign was finished. The party expelled the four in July 1977 and formally declared the Cultural Revolution over at its eleventh congress that August. Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were sentenced to death at a televised trial in January 1981, with the sentences commuted to life imprisonment; Wang Hongwen received life and Yao Wenyuan twenty years.
Hua did not last. Deng Xiaoping, purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, returned to work in 1977 and had displaced him by the end of the following year, when the party's third plenum turned the country toward economic reform. The trial of the four was broadcast on television and was the first time most people in China had seen senior leaders held publicly to account. No official verdict has been revisited since the party issued its own in 1981, and that one still stands.