Soon after the orchestra's visit, Zhou Enlai's health failed. He was hospitalized in 1974 and died in early 1976. When Mao Zedong died a few months later in September 1976, Jiang Qing and the other members of the Gang of Four were no longer under his protection and found themselves at odds with Zhou Enlai's successor, Hua Guofeng. Hua and others in power blamed the Gang of Four for the preceding decade of civil and social unrest. Public opposition to them mounted, and by the end of 1976 they had been expelled from the Communist Party and arrested.

At her trial in 1980-81, Jiang was accused of spreading civil unrest during the Cultural Revolution, but she was unfailingly defiant and denounced the country's new leaders. She received a suspended death sentence, which in 1983 was commuted to life imprisonment. She died in her cell in 1991, an apparent suicide.