Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes

by James Palmer

  Like every other Chinese regime before it the PRC struggled with the problem of earthquakes. Fortunately, they were relatively few and far between in the post-war period. Two magnitude 8 quakes – thirty times as powerful as magnitude 7 – had smashed isolated parts of Tibet in 1950 and 1951, but the worst quake, a relatively low 6.8, had been in Xingtai, in southern Hebei, on 8 March 1966. It had killed 8,000 people and wrecked nearly five million homes.

  Another significant quake had happened in the Bohai Sea, near Tangshan, on 18 July 1969; it had caused a small tsunami but done relatively little damage.

  The Xingtai quake prompted Zhou Enlai to form a working group on seismology, which eventually became the State Seismological Bureau in 1971. The atmosphere of the times, when ‘people’s science’ and ‘cooperation with the masses’ were ideological imperatives, meant that from the start the emphasis was on mass observation carried out by local enthusiasts. Over 100,000 amateurs were recruited to monitor possible signs of earthquakes, using methods based on both foreign experience and the reports from Xingtai.

  Earthquake prediction is the most frustrating, bitter and unrewarding part of seismology. As one Chinese seismologist commented to me, ‘People spend their whole lives trying to find a method for it. Then in their old age, they just give up and turn to the I Ching instead. In all honesty, fortune telling is about as good as any other method we have.’

  The mass observation method was actually an eminently practical one, especially given the pseudoscience that pervaded academia elsewhere in China. Observers were trained to look for a variety of signs, most critically the sudden dropping of water levels and strange behaviour in animals.

  The first is a well-attested forerunner of quakes, but the validity of the second remains in question. More often than not, animals behave weirdly for no reason – as I write this, my dog is running up and down the stairs of my apartment for, as far as I can tell, his own amusement – but usually we just ignore it. It may well be that supposed animal signs of earthquakes are only heeded in retrospect. Usually, howling dogs or chickens that refuse to go into the coop are simply ignored. Only when followed by disaster do they suddenly become remembered as dire warnings.

  An important lesson learned from Xingtai was that a series of small quakes often foreshadowed a major one. It was this lesson that saved the small city of Haicheng in southern Liaoning province, a few hundred miles north-east of Tangshan. On 1 February 1975, reports of minor tremors started pouring in from all over the province. Three days later, on 4 February, the Seismological Bureau issued an official prediction that a major earthquake was likely, and the Liaoning Revolutionary Committee, the chief authority in the province, warned the whole area to take precautions. It was bitterly cold, but nevertheless work was shut down, over a million people evacuated from their houses, and medical teams and supplies kept ready. When a 7.3 magnitude earthquake hit the same evening, thousands of buildings were destroyed, but only 1,328 people were killed, and 16,980 injured.

  Haicheng was a remarkable achievement, and one much trumpeted in the Chinese press as proof of the nation’s heroic scientific progress, but it was no guarantee of future success. Sharp foreshocks had shaken the whole area, and people were already fleeing their homes prior to the evacuation warning. It was the clearest earthquake indicator possible, but it had little to do with the ‘people’s science’ constantly touted in the press. The extent of success at Haicheng was also played up for propaganda. The toll of dead and injured was kept secret, and the public told that ‘very few’ had been killed. The propaganda convinced many among the public that the problem had essentially been solved, and that earthquake prediction was a simple business.

  At an event congratulating those involved in Haicheng, Hua Guofeng had shaken the hand of every seismologist in the Bureau and asked them, ‘After today, do you think you can predict earthquakes over magnitude 5 twenty-four hours in advance?’10 They couldn’t, and they knew it, though for months one group of seismologists within the Bureau was convinced that a serious earthquake was due to hit the Beijing – Tianjin area. The signs had been many, if hard to read: slow changes in water levels, frequent microquakes, and a long drought. The link to the last was a contentious theory mooted by one of the seismologists, Geng Qingquo, that high-magnitude quakes were connected to periods of drought.

  Their report only predicted a magnitude 5 to 6 quake, but it also noted:

  Based on the historical pattern of major earthquake activity, the study of regional seismicity, the influence of the Western Pacific seismic belt and those earthquakes with focal depths of 400 – 500 km on North China, some comrades believe that North China has accumulated enough seismic energy for an earthquake of magnitude 7 to 8.11

  The scientists went on to hedge their bets, though, saying that others regarded it as unlikely, given the historically long gap between earthquakes in north China, that there would be a quake at all.

  The language of the document, however, reminded the provincial leaders of their first priority, stating, ‘We look to you to pursue the movement to “criticise Lin Biao and Confucius”, and, at the same time, to carry out the central government policy of forecasting and precautionary work.’ Politics still took precedence over scientific theory, although the rest of the document urged (along with some boilerplate language on the leadership of the Party and the role of the masses) ‘careful attention to the work of seismic experts’ and that ‘every aspect of seismological work must be intensified’.

  Document 69 undoubtedly helped save lives in Haicheng, but in many places it didn’t mean that much. The provinces had a long history of ignoring central policy documents, especially at a time when local leadership was still fractured and divided by the legacy of purges and civil war. After all, this was the sixty-ninth policy document issued that year. Some rural counties didn’t even receive the document until more than six months after it was issued. The first central policy documents of the year were traditionally important, but others could be neglected or ignored without serious consequences.

  Earthquake education throughout Tangshan had been spotty. Later writers would exaggerate the extent of it for dramatic purposes. The usually excellent journalist Qian Gang, for instance, claims:

  In almost every house a wine bottle was placed upside down on the table, the theory being that if it fell this was the sign of an upcoming earthquake. Families with babies placed milk powder and feeding bottles near the door, so that they could be swiftly snatched up as they made their escape. The parents of slightly older children sewed money into the lining of their clothes.12

  Perhaps this was the case for a relatively well-informed urban elite. Milk powder and feeding bottles weren’t even available in the countryside, where kids were often breast-fed until six or seven. Some survivors talk of buying goldfish in anticipation of the quake, like the young He Jianguo watching for signs of their agitation as a warning to leave the house. But most people, at least according to their accounts today, paid very little heed to earthquakes. Some remembered a short film on earthquake preparation being shown, but that was all. The Haicheng earthquake rattled a few, but only in the way that most people react when reading about natural disasters: a few moments of speculative fantasy on what they’d do if it happened to them, then pushing it to the back of their minds and getting on with more immediate concerns.

  One county near Tangshan took far greater precautions. Qinglong was a rural county, high up in the mountains, about 185 km north-east from Tangshan as the crow flies, but a good five or six hours by car. It was a rugged place of winding roads and isolated villages. China’s infrastructure was still terrible, and one in three villages in the country couldn’t be reached by road; in Qinglong and similar mountainous areas it was more like half. Technically it was a minority region, though the practical differences between the Han and the northern Manchu peoples had been erased by intermarriage, the disappearance of the Manchu language, and Han settlement for decades.

  Qinglong
’s Party head, Ran Guangqi, was a driven, self-educated leader, a veteran of dangerous propaganda work in Japanese-occupied territory in the 1930s. He’d only just been appointed to the position in 1974, and he took Document 69 seriously enough to start teaching himself about earthquakes. In November 1975, Ran made an enthusiastic 21-year-old administrator, Wang Chunqing, head of a disaster management team; he set up earthquake monitoring sites, ran slide-shows in schools and villages and distributed thousands of posters and leaflets on earthquakes.

  But even in Qinglong many villages only a dozen miles or so away from the county centre remained completely unaware of the earthquake awareness programmes. With most people trudging through the mountains by foot, many village heads simply didn’t bother turning up for meetings in the county centre, and educators frequently skipped smaller or harder-to-reach settlements.

  By 1976, the Seismological Bureau was also finding it hard to concentrate on its work. The Bureau’s head, Hu Keshi, was not a scientist, but a political ally of Deng Xiaoping. He’d been a deputy to Hu Yaobang, a prominent Party liberal, in the Communist Youth League and had been beaten and mocked alongside him in 1966.

  The Red Guards had marched them on to the third-floor balcony of the Youth League building every quarter of an hour to be jeered at by the crowds. After years of exile, Deng’s return had carried Hu Keshi back into government in late 1973, and, despite his lack of education, he had begun to establish himself as an authority on scientific matters.

  But now that position was being challenged. In January the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the parent body of the Seismological Bureau, held a contentious meeting where the supposed swing to the right was fiercely criticised. Hu was publicly named as one of the rightists, a clear sign that he was being targeted. Understandably, he was fretful, and so was the rest of the Bureau. A new wave of purges was clearly about to be unleashed, and Deng Xiaoping and his friends were standing right in its way.

  3 Tomb-Sweeping Day

  It was a cold Beijing morning when the cavalcade of cars bearing Zhou Enlai’s body set out from Tiananmen Square, but that didn’t stop the crowds. Over a million people had turned out to see their premier on his last journey. They lined the 10 kilometres from Tiananmen Square to the Babaoshan Cemetery, at that time beyond Beijing’s western outskirts.

  The route and the timing were supposed to be kept a secret, but had soon leaked out. At Babaoshan, Zhou’s body would be cremated, an idea the crowds objected to, at one point swarming the cortege and protesting that he should be buried, as was the tradition. It was only when Deng Yingchao, Zhou’s widow, stepped out and told them that her husband had wanted his ashes scattered over the country that they calmed down and let the cars drive on. Incongruously, Zhou’s body was carried in a large white coach of the kind used to ferry holidaymakers to the seaside. White was the traditional colour of mourning, though on the coach it was offset with revolutionary red flowers.

  The crowd’s faces were contorted with fearful grief. Clad in dull overcoats and furry hats, they wiped away cold tears. Everyone, young and old, was crying. Teenage girls clutched at each other, their faces snotty with tears, and howled their grief.1 At Babaoshan, mourners lined up to buy pictures of Zhou, openly weeping as they handed over the money.

  Before the cremation, the memorial ceremony had taken place in the Great Hall of the People, on the western edge of Tiananmen Square, the flag outside lowered to half-mast. His body had lain in state, with the hammer-and-sickle draped over it. One by one, liver-spotted old comrades came in to pay their respects, clutching at the hands of his widow and bowing their heads to his painfully thin corpse. Soong Qingling, the widow of Sun Yat-Sen, hailed as China’s first president and a pre-Communist revolutionary hero, embraced Deng Yingchao, kissing her on both cheeks.

  Inside the hall, Deng Xiaoping delivered a memorial address in his heavy Sichuan accent. Wearing a dark Mao jacket, he was dwarfed by the white floral tributes piled on each side. Every political figure of consequence in China, save Mao himself, was there, but Mao’s wreath was the most prominent, with those of Zhu De and Ye Jianying, two old generals and military comrades of Zhou’s, just behind. Deng’s speech was not stirring stuff – ‘He will be mourned by the military, the country, the people . . . he faithfully carried out Mao’s doctrine’ – but it still moved the audience to tears, old politicians and generals snuffling into hankies.

  In Tangshan, He Jianguo watched the funeral on her factory’s flickering colour TV along with her workmates. At first, all of them were crying, but as the camera panned over the lines of dignitaries, there were angrier words. ‘Look at her,’ one of the older men at the factory said, pointing at Jiang Qing, ‘I don’t know what she’s doing there, the old sow.’

  A chance to see the leaders in such intimate detail was rare, and audiences nationwide had harsh words for Jiang. She was accused of keeping her cap on, a clear sign, it was claimed, of disrespect – though several of the other dignitaries, including those close to Zhou, had done the same in the cold hall. Her ally Zhang Chunqiao was blamed for embracing Deng Yingchao too warmly, which was felt to be foreign and affected. It was acceptable for Soong Qingling to do it, but seen as inappropriate from a man, especially one of the Premier’s enemies.

  The funeral procession began in Tiananmen Square, the most politically resonant location in China. It was here, on 4 May 1919, that students had gathered to protest the handover of German colonial territories in China to Japan, rioting against a government they saw as complicit with the imperialist powers. It was here that Mao had overseen the mass gathering of Red Guards in 1966, commanding them to go out and overturn the old order. And it was here that Mao had proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. His portrait now hung there permanently, usurping the imperial gate.

  Tiananmen was named after the entrance to the Forbidden City on its northern edge, the ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’. In 1976, though, the Forbidden City, the home of generations of emperors, was an overgrown park, closed to the public. The Red Guards had threatened more than once to burn it down; it had been Zhou sending army units there that had saved it, preserving one of the most beautiful parts of China’s imperial heritage for generations to come.

  Beijing was a fraction of its current size in 1976. Areas which are now one continuous urban sprawl were then fields and villages; the two universities of Tsinghua and Beida, now well inside the city boundaries, were isolated countryside campuses, surrounded by hemp fields. The modern city stretches beyond its Sixth Ring Road; the city then would comfortably fit within the Third.

  Although there were many Soviet-style concrete blockhouse flats, many Beijingers still lived in hutongs, tangled alley complexes with numerous houses around cramped courtyards. They were a sign of the city’s past, and the urban authorities disliked them, not least because, like backstreets and alleys everywhere, they were impenetrable to outsiders, and to the power of the state. The Party preferred vast avenues and squares, after the pattern of Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris. These were designed both to overawe the public and to provide routes through which soldiers could march and crowds could be channelled.

  The square itself was unimpressive. Theoretically the world’s largest, it didn’t feel like it, because, unlike the Kremlin, on which it was partly modelled, it wasn’t closed off on all sides, instead disintegrating into monumental buildings and alleyways. It looked like a stony field, though when Richard Nixon flew into Beijing for his groundbreaking 1972 visit,2 Tiananmen had been covered with potted flowers, a blaze of diplomatic colour in a grey city. Within days of his departure, Beijing citizens stole them all, sparking a rare fit of temper from Zhou Enlai.

  The great flower theft represented a simple truth: the public was desperate for beauty. It was the same reason people plastered propaganda posters on their walls. No matter how banal the message, the pictures, with their bright colours and vivid action scenes, were the closest to art many people were going to get.


  The conflict between the demands of politics and the hunger for art was acute in every field. Before the Red Guards denounced Western music, the radio regularly broadcast classical composers. In the early sixties, Chinese factories churned out (relatively) cheap violins in vast numbers for ambitious parents who knew that music, like sport, was one of the few specialisations that could potentially mean a way out of the farm or the factory for talented kids. But classical music came to mean far more than that.

  As Red Guards burnt violins and smashed records, people, even those whose only experience of music had been as spectators, started to construct their own violins. One boy, exiled to a farm at thirteen, patiently plucked a single hair from a horse’s tail every day, so as not to be noticed. It took him six months to build his own instrument.3 Thousands like him spent hours practising every day, but had to do so in secret, for fear of being criticised, beaten or even murdered for their love of foreign decadence. Hidden caches of sheet music were passed on by defiant teachers, or copied by hand. By 1976, foreign instruments were just about politically acceptable, though they had to be used for revolutionary songs.

  But domestic Chinese music, too, had fallen victim to political fervour. The most prominent example was the Chinese national anthem. Although never officially chosen, the de facto anthem before the Cultural Revolution was ‘The March of the Volunteers’, a Marseillaise-inspired piece originally composed in 1934 for an anti-Japanese film from a Shanghai studio.