by Philip Short
There had been a number of straws in the wind.
Rumours had been spreading that Jiang Qing was in disgrace: whether or not Deng was responsible for them, they had started on his watch. He had also taken the initiative to forward her September speech to Mao. Although the Chairman dismissed it as Jiang's ‘farting’, the two things, taken together, showed that Deng and Jiang were squabbling again, ignoring his demands for unity.122
But the crucial input came from Mao's nephew, 34-year-old Mao Yuanxin, the son of his brother, Zemin, whom the Chairman had brought up in his household after Anying's death in Korea. Yuanxin had prospered during the Cultural Revolution, becoming a rebel leader in the north-eastern province of Liaoning and later Political Commissar of the Shenyang Military Region. When he met Mao on September 27, he let rip with a litany of complaints against Deng's policies. Deng was bent on integrating China into the world capitalist system, promoting exports despite shortages at home; he was emphasising economic development in place of the anti-revisionist struggle; and purging Party radicals whom the Cultural Revolution had brought to prominence in the provinces. More generally, Yuanxin told his uncle, Deng ‘hardly mentions the Cultural Revolution's achievements or criticizes Liu Shaoqi's revisionist line’. Mao listened but did not take a position. Two weeks later, however, he appointed Yuanxin to act as his liaison officer to relay instructions to the Politburo, a necessary role as Mao's health continued to deteriorate.123
By then Deng began to sense that the political mood was changing. He told a group of senior cadres: ‘Some say [we represent] … the old order … Let them say whatever they like … The worst that could happen is you could be overthrown a second time. Don't be afraid. If you've done a good job it's worth being overthrown for it!’124
At that point a dispute blew up at Qinghua University, where the Party secretary, an ally of Jiang Qing, had been under attack from moderates who, citing Mao's desire to correct the 30 per cent of Cultural Revolution mistakes, sought to restore elements of pre-Cultural Revolution educational practices. Education was one of the fields in which Mao took special interest and Qinghua was a radical model. Unwisely, Deng had agreed to forward to Mao two letters from the moderates seeking the Chairman's support. On October 19, the Chairman rendered his verdict. ‘The motives behind the letters are impure,’ he wrote. There was a struggle between two lines and ‘the spearhead … is pointed at me.’ Deng, he added ominously, was taking the moderates’ side.
The harshness of Mao's reaction took everybody by surprise. There was still no suggestion that Deng was in serious trouble. Mao said his aim was merely to ‘correct mistakes and restore party unity’. Yet there were hints that something more was at work. That month, his staff noticed, the Chairman was restless and irritable.125
The root of the problem was that Mao was beginning to doubt Deng's willingness to maintain Cultural Revolution policies. Yet the last thing he wanted was to have to address the succession issue again. He was too old, too ill, and had too little time left.
Through November, Deng's position gradually unravelled. When Mao Yuanxin, at the Chairman's request, held a private meeting with him to try to persuade him to admit his errors, he refused. Two weeks later, Mao instructed the Politburo to draw up a formal resolution, setting out the Cultural Revolution's achievements and failings, and proposed that Deng be in charge of drafting it. Again he refused.126
Why he did so is unclear. He must have realised that Mao was offering him a way out. Perhaps he felt that the political risks involved in having to stand in judgement on every contorted incident in that tumultuous upheaval outweighed any possible benefit. Or, more plausibly, with Mao's life ebbing away, he was reluctant publicly to endorse a movement to which he had been viscerally opposed: it was, after all, one thing to promise not to criticise the Cultural Revolution, quite another to proclaim that it had been correct.
Deng phrased his refusal as delicately as he could, declaring: ‘[I] was living in the peach blossom grove and did not know of the Han dynasty, let alone the Wei and Jin’ – a reference to a well-known story by the fifth-century poet, Tao Yuanming, which Mao himself had quoted a week earlier to defend the failure of old cadres to understand the current situation. The analogy was to survivors of the Qin dynasty, who in the third century BC retreated into an isolated grove, where they and their descendants lived for centuries cut off from the outside world. Deng's meaning was that, during the Cultural Revolution, he had been out of the loop. Mao did not press the point. But afterwards he told his nephew: ‘[Among] some senior comrades … I discern two attitudes to the Cultural Revolution: one is discontent; the other is … denial.’127
From there, it was a small step for Mao to endorse the radicals’ claims that ‘the capitalist-roaders are still on the capitalist road’.128 In December, after Deng made two rather tepid self-criticisms before the Politburo, Mao rejected his request for a meeting. They would not see each other again. While insisting that Deng's problem was ‘not antagonistic’, which meant that he might still redeem himself, the Chairman had become convinced – rightly, as events turned out – that Deng could not be relied upon to preserve his legacy. ‘There are some people’, he informed the Politburo, ‘who are not satisfied with the Cultural Revolution [and who] … want to settle accounts with it and to reverse the verdict’.129 It was the signal for a new campaign against ‘the Right deviationist wind of reversing correct verdicts’, with Deng as the principal target.130
By the end of the year hints of the new line were beginning to appear in the press, and for all practical purposes Deng had been stripped of most of his responsibilities.131 Yet again, Mao's succession strategy had foundered. Wang Hongwen was a broken reed, and Deng, left to his own devices, had proved untrustworthy.
At this juncture, Zhou Enlai died.
Like many long-expected events, when it came it had profound and immediate consequences. Politically, the choice of a new premier could be delayed no longer. Emotionally, the mass outpouring of grief that the news of his passing provoked – as though the flood walls of cynicism, which, since the Cultural Revolution, had held back genuine popular feeling, had abruptly sundered – signalled an attachment to Zhou personally, to the values he was thought to represent and to the policies he had promoted, which the regime would ignore at its peril. From January 9, 1976, when his death was announced on radio and television, the people of Beijing took wreaths and white paper flowers to the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square in a spontaneous gesture of respect. Two days later, when the cortège carried his body to be cremated, a million people lined the streets to bid him a last farewell.
Mao had never felt any personal affection for Zhou, and shed no tears at his death. The staff in Zhongnanhai were forbidden to wear black mourning armbands and attempts were made to discourage them in the country at large. There was no official lying-in-state. Foreign countries were told not to send representatives. Press coverage was kept to a minimum, and factories and work units were discouraged from holding memorial meetings.132
At the funeral ceremony, in the Great Hall of the People, on January 15, Deng was allowed to give the eulogy, but it was to be his last public appearance that year. Mao sent a wreath but refused to attend. ‘There is no way to bridge the gap between me and the Premier’, he told his nephew, adding that the mourning activities were merely ‘a cover for [capitalist] restoration’, a message that he asked to be conveyed to the Politburo.133
The next step was to name Zhou's successor. The population at large, along with the rest of the world, unaware that a new campaign was brewing, confidently expected Deng to be appointed. The radicals, better informed, pinned their hopes on Zhang Chunqiao.
Mao named neither man.
Instead, on January 21, he informed his nephew that he intended to appoint Hua Guofeng.134
This was not quite as astonishing a move as it was made out to be at the time. Mao had tapped Hua as a possible successor – should Wang Hongwen fail to come up to h
is expectations – in the spring of 1971. Two years later Hua had joined the Politburo, and in January 1975, Mao had named him one of China's twelve vice-premiers. He was an amiable, phlegmatic man, who had shown himself a capable government administrator, and had the talent – rare in the upper ranks of the CCP hierarchy – of getting on well with his colleagues. No less important, as Mao had recognised when he had asked him to chair one of the meetings at which Deng had been criticised the previous November, he was neutral. Unlike Wang and Deng, Hua might prove capable of remaining above the factional strife.
Nevertheless, the Chairman proceeded cautiously. When the public announcement of Hua's promotion was made on February 3, it was only on an acting basis. Deng was still officially First Deputy-Premier. Although a full-scale movement was under way to criticise him as an ‘unrepentant capitalist-roader’, he had not been publicly identified by name as its target – and Mao had made clear repeatedly that he viewed his case as fundamentally different from those of Lin Biao and Liu Shaoqi.135 Hua, Deng and the radicals all remained part of the succession equation. Deng would probably now be confined at best to a supporting role. But in the opening months of 1976, Mao had still not decided exactly how the pieces would fit together.136
To Deng, that spring, there was a curious air of déjà vu. Ten years earlier, in the opening months of the Cultural Revolution, he had been in a very similar situation – nominally still a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, yet under fierce radical attack, while Mao, inscrutable and sardonic, held his fate in his hands. This time, however, there was a crucial difference. In 1966, Mao had been still vigorous, masterminding an immense upheaval which would change China for ever. In 1976, he was dying.
The Chairman's mind was clear. But his health deteriorated sharply again in February. He could no longer stand unaided; his right side was partly paralysed, and he could barely speak.
Nixon, who visited him that month, wrote that ‘it was painful to see him’ as he uttered ‘a series of monosyllabic grunts and groans’.137 Zhang Yufeng had learned to lip-read. But on bad days even that was no help, and Mao had to scribble his thoughts on a notepad before she could grasp his meaning.138 She afterwards wrote a moving description of how they celebrated his last Chinese New Year:
There were no visitors, no family members. Chairman Mao spent his last Spring Festival with those who served him. I had to feed him his New Year's Eve dinner with a spoon, since he could not use his hands. It was hard for him even to open his mouth and swallow. I helped him from the bed to the sofa in his study. For a long time, he rested his head on the chairback without uttering a word … Suddenly, from somewhere in the distance, we heard firecrackers. In a low, hoarse voice, Mao asked me to explode some for him … A faint smile crept over his old and weary face when he heard the firecrackers in the courtyard.139
The realisation that Mao's death could only be months away convinced Deng to stand firm. Where, in the autumn of 1966, he had admitted his errors and made a full self-criticism, he now showed his accusers his contempt. At a Politburo meeting called in March to criticise him, he turned off his hearing aid and refused to answer, claiming that he could not hear what they were saying.140
The stalemate was finally broken by those whom Mao had always claimed were the true heroes moving history forward, but whose wishes he had so often ignored – the people. They were no longer quite the same people as they had been before the Cultural Revolution. The constant injunctions ‘to rebel’ and ‘to go against the tide’ had finally succeeded in undermining the tradition of blind faith in authority that had characterised earlier generations of Chinese.
At a time of mind-numbing propaganda campaigns, effete political movements and unreadable newspapers, Zhou Enlai had been, for many, an authentic popular hero, the more cherished precisely because he had not been imposed by the regime but had won a place in their hearts by his own perceived merit. In the spring of 1976, there was widespread anger in China at the cursory treatment given to his funeral in the press and the brevity of the official mourning. The result was a spontaneous movement, beginning in late March, to honour Zhou's memory at Qingming, the Festival of the Dead, which falls in early April.141 As a precautionary measure, the radicals ordered the closure of the cemetery where he had been cremated, and commemorative activities were officially discouraged.
The flame to ignite this tinderbox was supplied on March 25 by the Shanghai newspaper, Wenhui bao, which published a front-page article that was interpreted as accusing Zhou of having been a capitalist-roader.142
That provoked demonstrations in several Yangtse Valley cities, including Nanjing, where hundreds of students pasted up slogans attacking Zhang Chunqiao and honouring the memory of Mao's first wife, Yang Kaihui, in a none too subtle jibe at Jiang Qing. They were quickly covered up and the perpetrators accused of ‘counter-revolutionary restoration’. The official media were forbidden to mention the incident. But the students had daubed slogans on railway carriages and long-distance buses. On March 31, news of their action reached Beijing, where unofficial memorial rites were already in full swing in Tiananmen Square. From then on the eulogies and poems became increasingly hostile, attacking not only the ‘mad empress’, Jiang Qing, and the ‘wolves and jackals’ who were her allies, but also, indirectly, Mao himself. The city authorities announced a ban on wreath-laying. It was ignored. By Sunday, April 4, the day of the Qingming festival itself, so many thousands of wreaths had been laid in memory of Zhou that they formed a vast mound, burying the base of the Monument to the People's Heroes and reaching 60 feet up its sides. That day an estimated two million people visited the square.
In the evening, the Politburo met.
For the first time since 1949, the Party – and its leader, Mao – were being challenged by the masses. Deng was present but apparently remained silent. The Mayor of Beijing, Wu De, proposed letting matters rest until the festival was over and then transferring the wreaths to the Babaoshan military cemetery. Jiang Qing erupted furiously, accusing him of having been infected by ‘Deng Xiaoping's poison’. With Hua's reluctant agreement, the meeting declared the public mourning ‘a counter-revolutionary incident [prepared] by Deng Xiaoping’ and ordered the square cleared. Mao was not consulted – a measure of his physical decline. But early next morning, after being briefed by his nephew, who insisted that Deng was directly responsible – a charge which Mao refused to believe – the Chairman set out guidelines for handling the crisis. It was indeed, he said, a ‘counter-revolutionary incident’; force, but not firearms, should be used to subdue it; and Deng's role should be further investigated.
By then a sullen, mutinous crowd, numbering several tens of thousands, had gathered outside the Great Hall of the People, to demand that the wreaths be returned. As the day wore on, the mood grew uglier. A police van was overturned, and several jeeps and other vehicles set on fire. A building which the police were using as a command post was also burned down. At 6.30 p.m., Wu De broadcast an appeal over the loudspeaker system, urging people to disperse. Many did. But about a thousand irreductibles remained. Three hours later, the floodlights were suddenly turned on, and as martial music played over the loudspeakers, police and troops moved in, making a number of arrests.143
Two days later, Mao handed down his decision.
The rioting was condemned as ‘a reactionary event’. Deng was stripped of all his posts. But Mao rejected Jiang Qing's demand that he be expelled from the Party. Deng should be allowed to keep his Party membership, the Chairman said, ‘to see how he will behave’.144 He instructed Wang Dongxing to move him to a secure residence in the old Legation Quarter of Beijing, where he spent the next three months in enforced isolation but safe from the radicals and their supporters who were unable to locate him.145 Mao had evidently not entirely abandoned hope that Deng might one day play a useful role again.
But the most important decision was that Hua Guofeng was confirmed as Premier and appointed First Vice-Chairman of the Party. Mao's mind was finally
made up. Hua would be his fourth, and last, choice as successor.
Three weeks later, on April 30, 1976, the Chairman sanctified the new arrangement with a scribbled six-character phrase, which Hua would afterwards cite as his legitimation: Ni banshi, wo fanxin – ‘With you in charge, I am at ease’.146
The next four months were a death-watch.
On May 12, after a brief meeting with the Singapore Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, Mao suffered a minor heart attack. He recovered, and two weeks later received Pakistan's Premier, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, for a few minutes. But he looked exhausted, his face expressionless, with half-closed eyes. Afterwards, he decided there should be no more meetings with foreign leaders.147
Sometime that summer, probably in June, he summoned Hua, Jiang Qing and several other members of the Politburo to his bedside. There he told them, as if delivering a last testament:
In my life, I have done two things. First I fought Chiang Kai-shek for several decades, and drove him to a few small islands … We fought our way to Beijing, and at last to the Forbidden City. There are not many people who do not recognise those achievements … The second thing I have done you all know. It was to launch the Cultural Revolution, which now has the support of few and is opposed by many. But this matter is not ended yet. It is a legacy which must be handed down to the next generation. How should it be handed down? If not in peace, then in turmoil. If this is not properly handled, there will be bloodshed. Heaven alone knows what you will do.148
At the end of June, he had a much more serious heart attack, which left him semi-conscious for much of the time, drifting in and out of a coma. From then on he was unable to play any political role. On July 6, Zhu De died, at the age of eighty-nine. Three weeks later came the great earthquake at Tangshan, in which a quarter-of-a-million people perished. Beijing was shaken. Apparently unaware of what was going on around him, Mao was moved to a more modern building nearby which was said to be earthquake-proof.
