Yao Wenyuan, the last remaining member of China's notorious Gang of Four led by Chairman Mao Zedong's wife, has died of diabetes, the official Xinhua news agency said on Friday. He was 74.
Yao was jailed for 20 years in 1976, and released in October 1996, Xinhua said in a brief despatch. It said he died on December 23 but gave no further details.
The Gang of Four were arrested in a bloodless coup one month after Mao's death in September 1976, ending a decade of ultra-leftist fervour whipped up by his wife, Jiang Qing.
It was one of the most sensational events in the power struggles that wracked the Communist Party in the decades after it won power in 1949.
Chinese official media rarely mention the Gang of Four because the issue of their guilt and close links to Mao - who is still officially revered - embarrasses communist officialdom. The four have been relegated to the darkest of corners.
Zhang Chunqiao, another member, died of cancer in April, Xinhua said in May, in the first official word in decades on a man previously widely thought to have been long dead.
Jiang Qing, leader of the cabal that wielded supreme power during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, was blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands during that period and sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in 1981.
Jiang never repented but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The former Shanghai starlet, dubbed a witch by state media after her downfall, hanged herself in Beijing in May 1991.
The fourth and youngest gang member, Wang Hongwen, died of liver cancer in a Beijing hospital in 1992 while serving a life sentence.
Yao was the only member to complete his sentence.