Wang Dongxing was Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

's principal bodyguard during the Cultural Revolution

Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...

.

As commander of the 8341 Special Regiment, Mao's personal elite bodyguard force, but was dismissed by Mao for excessive protection, and sent to a labor reform camp. He later was reinstated. Wang Dongxing was instrumental in the coup d'état against the Gang of Four

Gang of Four

The Gang of Four was the name given to a political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and were subsequently charged with a series of treasonous crimes...

 immediately after Mao's death.

He was prominent under Hua Guofeng

Hua Guofeng

Su Zhu, better known by the nom de guerre Hua Guofeng , was Mao Zedong's designated successor as the Paramount Leader of the Communist Party of China and the People's Republic of China. Upon Zhou Enlai's death in 1976, he succeeded Zhou as the second Premier of the People's Republic of China...

, being one of the five members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China

Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China

The Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China is a committee consisting of the top leadership of the Communist Party of China, whose membership varies between 5 and 9 people. The inner workings of the PSC are not well known, although it is believed that decisions of the PSC are...

, 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

Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese politician, statesman, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy...

 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 CPC Central Committee at the 1982 12th National Party Congress.

Sources

• The Private Life of Chairman Mao
  The Private Life of Chairman Mao
  The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician is a memoir by Li Zhisui, one of the physicians to the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, which was first published in 1994. Li had emigrated to the United States in the years after Mao's death...
  
  , by Li Zhisui
  Li Zhisui
  Li Zhisui was Mao Zedong's personal physician and confidante. After immigrating to the United States, he wrote a biography of his experiences with Mao entitled The Private Life of Chairman Mao .Weeks after he announced on a TV interview that he was going to write another memoir, Li died of a...
  
  , Arrow Books 1996
• Mao's Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar
  Roderick MacFarquhar
  Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar is a Harvard University professor and China specialist, British politician, newspaper and television journalist and academic orientalist...
  
  and Michael Schoenhals, Harvard University Press 2006.