by James Palmer
Zhang Chunqiao watched the crowds from behind a window in the Great Hall of the People. ‘It was like watching the Hungarian uprising unfold. I could see it all clearly through my binoculars. To his face, I cursed Deng Xiaoping, calling him Nagy. He stuck to his odious attitude but had no choice but to nod his head in silence.’27
Deng knew the protests put him in danger, especially if he could be blamed for them directly. He told his family to stay far away from Tiananmen, however badly they wanted to honour Zhou. If one of them was seen, it could be the end for all of them, he cautioned.
That morning the Gang of Four had held an angry discussion, with Zhang calling for more force, and the other three, nervous of the consequences, for relative restraint. ‘No weapons?’ Jiang sneered at Wang, ‘Aren’t you hindering our militia and soldiers in stamping out counter-revolution?’ ‘You can have weapons if you want!’ Wang responded, ‘You can open fire if you want too! But I won’t be responsible for this crime!’28 It was an odd restraint from a man who had happily led killing mobs in Shanghai ten years earlier. Perhaps there was something about the sincerity of the crowd, a reminder of his own heady days of leading protests, that touched Wang. Or, perhaps, like the others, he was just worried about the consequences of a massacre in the very heart of the capital.
In the end, restraint won out. At 6:30 that evening, the voice of Wu De came booming from the public address system, calling on the ‘revolutionary masses’ to leave the square immediately and not be duped by ‘bad elements with ulterior motives’. He blamed the ‘right-deviationist wind’ – a reference to one of the common slogans in the campaign against Deng. It’s unlikely that anybody had a sudden moment of revelation (‘Why, yes, I am being duped by bad elements. Well, time to go.’), but it was enough of a warning for most people to leave quickly, nervous of what might happen if they stayed.
By 9:00, only a rump of a few hundred hardcore protestors was left, clustered in the dark around the Monument to the People’s Heroes. At 9:30, the floodlights were suddenly turned on and over 10,000 militiamen, 3,000 policemen, and five army battalions poured into the square, carrying sticks, clubs and iron bars. Outnumbered by about 75 to 1, the crowd didn’t even try to fight back, Instead they clung to the monument, shouting out revolutionary slogans, as they were dragged off and viciously beaten. The beatings went on even after the protestors were already shackled, mobs of militiamen taking turns to batter people, mostly young men, into unconsciousness. While bones were broken, it seems nobody died. In the end, only fifty-nine of those arrested were imprisoned, with the rest being dispatched, bruised and bloodied, back to their homes.
Despite the relative restraint, the crushing of the crowd stirred up many Beijingers’ blood. The next day a crowd of several thousand people broke through the barricades erected around the square and milled around for a while, tutting at the still-visible bloodstains while the police eyed them warily. They cleared out soon enough, unwilling to risk pushing their luck.
On direct orders from Mao, People’s Daily published a condemnation of the rioters on 8 April, composed chiefly by Zhang and Yao, entitled, ‘A Reactionary Political Event in Tiananmen Square’. It blamed the events on ‘a handful of class enemies’ and ‘a few bad elements wearing spectacles’. But it also unwittingly gave away the sheer size of the demonstration, and prompted people outside Beijing to try to find out exactly what had happened.
On 12 April, People’s Daily received a letter in response from a worker who claimed to have witnessed the Tiananmen Square incident. Magnificently, it was signed ‘To Mr Goebbels, Editor’. (References to the Nazis were surprisingly common among Chinese dissidents, for whom William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was considered a key text.) It cheerfully condemned the paper as a ‘fascist mouthpiece’, claimed that ‘Jiang’s little court’ had deliberately provoked trouble in Tiananmen in order to create a ‘Reichstag fire incident’, and finished by calling for the overthrow of Zhang, Jiang and Yao. The letter was not published.
Jiang Qing informed Mao in person about the crushing of the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ on the evening of 5 April. Afterwards, she left his room jubilant, and invited his medical staff to join her in a celebratory toast. ‘We are victorious!’ she declared, ‘I will become a bludgeon, ready to strike!’29
The reason for her cheerfulness was that the Tiananmen incident offered the perfect chance to intensify the campaign against Deng Xiaoping. Jiang and the others accused him of masterminding the crowds – they may even have actually believed it – and absurdly asserted that the mob had been planning to storm Zhongnanhai, seize Deng, and put him in power. Deng vigorously defended himself, but he was stripped of his Party and government posts. It was a much-savoured victory for the Gang and their allies; now, it seemed, Zhou’s legacy was permanently done for.
For the Gang, the lessons learnt were clear. Staying up late on the night of 7 April, Yao Wenyuan wrote:
The three basic lessons learned from crushing this counter-revolutionary coup d’etat are to act in the interest of the proletariat, to smash all bourgeois democratic conventions and fetters (like convening a plenum and having an ‘election’, or obtaining the approval of the ‘National People’s Congress’, etc.), and to take decisive organisational action to get rid of bad people.30
The fallout from Tiananmen wasn’t anywhere near as beneficial for the Gang of Four as they hoped. Mao used Deng’s expulsion from the Politburo to appoint Hua vice-chairman and Premier. In a conversation with Wang Dongxing, Mao noted Hua’s breadth of experience, honesty, loyalty and generosity as reasons for his choice. ‘Some people claim his understanding of political theory isn’t great, but I’d rather have somebody who knows he doesn’t understand.’ According to Wang, Mao went on to slate the Gang of Four, noting Wang Hongwen’s greed, Yao’s inability to do anything practical, Zhang’s reluctance to take responsibility and his being ‘very active with his mouth but not with his hands’ and that Jiang ‘loves to purge people and give them a hard time’31 but was ignorant of everything else.
And critically, the ultimate humiliation, on Mao’s specific order, was spared Deng. His Party membership was not taken away. Indeed, the official announcement of his disgrace, issued nationwide on 8 April, specifically mentioned that ‘on the proposal of our great Chairman Mao’ the Politburo was allowing Deng ‘to keep his Party membership so as to see how he will behave in the future’. In order to protect Deng from physically being seized by the radicals, Mao even acquiesced to Wang Dongxing’s suggestion that Deng be secretly moved to a new location.
Wang shifted Deng and his family to an old embassy villa, and placed them under close watch by his men – both as a form of house arrest, and in order to protect them. He didn’t tell the rest of the Politburo where they’d been shifted to, although the Gang spent a great deal of effort trying to find out, even resorting to tailing Wang himself. Many people became convinced Deng had been spirited away down south, under the protection of Ye Jianying.
The Gang of Four tried to associate Ye with the Tiananmen events too. In fact, they had rather more material to work with here than with Deng. While Deng had carefully stayed away, Ye had sent people, including his family, to go and check out what was going on in the square, and had even secretly driven down there himself, watching from behind dark glass. But the old marshal was too slippery, and could too easily plead age and infirmity, for any of the mud they threw to stick.
Why did Mao pull back from throwing Deng to the wolves entirely? Probably for the same reason he had half-protected him in 1966 – 8; Deng was simply too talented a man to be wasted. Sacrificing him would have taken a powerful potential playing piece off the board for good. Deng had never turned against Mao, and his loyalty over the Great Leap Forward still counted for something. It would also – and this was perhaps more important – have given the leftists the idea they could get anything they wanted, and risked alienating Deng’s political allies. As his appointment of Hua showed, Mao was ke
en to make sure his ideological attack dogs had somebody to restrain them.
There are persistent rumours that Mao gave much stronger support to the Gang of Four than the record indicates – support later erased from the record by Hua and Wang Dongxing. He certainly seems to have envisaged the Gang as a support group for Hua’s leadership, keeping him on the right track, and may have told Hua ‘consult with Jiang Qing in important matters’ and even that the Politburo should ‘help Jiang Qing carry the red banner forward’. He probably suggested a leadership team with a heavy leftist representation, including his nephew Mao Yuanxin.
Visiting Mao on 30 April, Hua found he could barely understand the leader’s slurred speech. Mao grabbed some scraps of paper and scribbled three lines on them – his previously elegant calligraphy was shaky, but just about legible – that would prove critical in Hua’s career. They were ‘Take your time, don’t be anxious’, ‘Act according to past principles’, and most importantly of all, ‘With you in charge, I’m at ease’. Hua would pitch these as the Chairman’s personal blessing and instructions to him for the future of China, a formal blessing in his last days. But it was far more likely that Mao was simply talking about the immediate subject of the conversation, Hua’s work in calming down the south-western regions that, yet again, were resisting efforts to criticise local favourite Deng Xiaoping.
Hua’s work in the south-west and elsewhere had some effect. A month after the Tiananmen incident, things appeared relatively quiet. There had been sporadic incidents of further protest across the country, and many provinces were still in a state of acute political tension. Local wars that had been running for nearly a decade had been fuelled by the new wave of protests. In Baoding, formerly the capital of Hebei province, a long-running factional struggle was still exploding in violence every few weeks, which was why the capital had been moved to the unlovely railway city of Shijiazhuang.
Compared to a few weeks beforehand, the authorities’ efforts had done their job. There were no more gigantic protests for the moment, only the usual riots, strikes, factionalism, scandals, attacks, and the occasional murder. On 12 April Zhou Rongxing, the former minister of education removed from power as part of the anti-Deng campaign in late 1975, suffered a heart attack while being ‘struggled’ and died the next day. He would be the only high-level fatality of the movement.
The crackdown on the 5 April movement, as it was later known, had gone nationwide. The figures on how many were persecuted are even dodgier than usual, ranging from hundreds to millions, but an estimate of thousands arrested and tens of thousands more interrogated or criticised seems plausible. Being arrested usually meant being tortured too, most commonly through ‘education by stick’ or water-boarding. May began with a wave of executions, and anything from 500 to 1,000 people were killed across the country. Families were caught up in the arrests, with children as young as ten being imprisoned separately from their parents.
In Beijing, the public security forces, convinced that there had been ‘wire-pullers behind the scenes’,32 went out looking for the authors of pamphlets, slogans and poems, as well as for the purveyors of counter-revolutionary rumours. The guiding principle for the crackdown, they were told, was ‘Loyalty to Chairman Mao! Death to the enemy!’ They put together a file of over 100,000 documents related to the Tiananmen incident alone.
Numerous mass rallies were held to condemn Deng. Normally these were a chore to be endured, or sometimes an opportunity for a group outing, but this time they took place, especially in areas that had seen serious protests, in an atmosphere of great fear and tension. In Nanjing, 50,000 people were forced on to the streets in one rally, surrounded by soldiers manning machine-gun posts on rooftops. Another 10,000 attended a rally to condemn six ringleaders of the protests, but the crowd thinned out halfway through, leaving behind only a few hundred to hear the litany of charges.
The investigators often operated on a favourite saying of the Cultural Revolution, ‘Wrongly killing a hundred people is better than letting a single guilty one escape.’ This was best exemplified in the crackdown in Niulang, a remote village in a Hmong minority area of Guizhou province. Niulang had been put on the political hit list back in January, after a spectacular fart among a group of workers. One of them was a shy young man called Long Zhengyun, from a ‘landlord’ family, and the others began to accuse him teasingly of having been the culprit. He started crying, and so they kept bullying him, until he suddenly burst out ‘I’ll kill two of you!’33 This was reported to the village police head, Long Baoyin – Long was one of the village’s clan names – who hung Long Zhengyun upside down and beat him until he wildly blurted out that his father, uncle and cousin were also planning to kill people. After they were arrested and beaten, they claimed that another distant relative was actually planning to lead 2,000 people in a mass riot against the Party.
It was obviously ridiculous, and the case was put aside for weeks, until Long Wenfei, the local Party secretary, wanted to prove himself during the anti-Deng crackdown. He announced that ‘Deng Xiaoping’s feet have stepped into Niulang!’ and put Long Baoyin to work torturing more confessions out of random villagers, until the planned riot had expanded to 7,000 – 8,000 people, and forty-five villagers had been arrested as counter-revolutionaries. One of them named a farmer in a nearby town, and so Long Wenfei sent the local militia to expand the investigation there. They beat the farmer black and blue and then shut him in a barrel and rolled it around until he gave them more names, eventually implicating an impressive fifty-six counter-revolutionaries in the town.
With the campaign going so well, Long Wenfei was making a name for himself, and had no intention of stopping anytime soon. He put over 400 men from the police and militia on to the witch-hunt, setting up interrogation units which soon turned into torture chambers. Long Zhengyun’s father was racked, but refused to give out any more names, until he grabbed a rock and smashed it against his head while crying out ‘Long live Chairman Mao!’ When his torturers found he wasn’t dead yet, they buried him alive.
Another elderly farmer was burnt to death after he confessed to having destroyed a supposed list of counter-revolutionaries in order to save his son. Long declared an 8:00 p.m. curfew on pain of death and set up machine-gun posts around villages to fire on anyone seen moving in the fields at night. He threatened to turn his men on the local public security units if they didn’t go along with him. The end result of one fart in a small village was 1,300 arrests, 32 executions, and 263 people left permanently injured by torture.
Yet elsewhere the authorities’ efforts were met by an indifferent or actively hostile public. Poems, pamphlets and posters from the time were buried in the fields for safe-keeping or passed around samizdat fashion. In Beijing, there were more than a hundred incidents of protest against the persecution, and dozens more in other cities. Many individual areas went along with the crackdown for appearances’ sake, but made no particular effort to arrest or persecute anyone. Outside of isolated cases like the sadistic ambition of Long Wenfei, there was little of the wild enthusiasm for persecution shown in the late sixties; people were simply sick of it, and of the kind of society it had created. They were determined to wait it out, hoping that something would change.
On 11 May, that waiting got a little shorter. Mao was in the middle of an argument with Zhang Yufeng, his ex-mistress and current personal assistant, when he started sweating and gasping for air. He had suffered a small heart attack. Hua took charge, designating himself, Wang Dongxing, Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao as the team in charge of Mao’s health. In case of emergency, Hua was to be the first to be told.
Mao was soon stabilised, and remained conscious, but the paralysis of his throat was getting worse. His attendants could only get him to swallow very small amounts of thick broth. The medical team gave him glucose injections to compensate for his lack of food, but were worried about overburdening his heart. In a 15 May meeting with Hua, Zhang and the two Wangs, his doctors explained that the Chairman
needed a nasal tube.
Everyone was hesitant about the idea. Sticking plastic up the Chairman’s nose seemed inherently degrading, and it was unlikely that Mao himself would accept it. The four members of the health team agreed that they would undergo the procedure themselves, so that they could explain it to Mao and demonstrate that it was perfectly normal. All of them save Hua backed out of the promise. Hua went through with it, finding it uncomfortable but bearable, and appeared before Mao with the tube stuck up his nose to demonstrate the relative harmlessness of the procedure. But his attempts at persuasion were met with grumpy resistance.
Mao was equally reluctant to let his medical team run any tests save taking his pulse, dropping into the understandable unwillingness of an old sick man to be further prodded and poked. Unlike most dying pensioners, he still held absolute power over his medical team. After he fainted again on 30 May, the doctors quickly took the opportunity to run an electrocardiogram and insert a feeding tube, but he woke up to find them clustered around him, yanked out the tube, and ordered them out of the room, shaking his fist. They eventually persuaded him to let himself be fitted with an electrocardiograph, with three doctors monitoring his heart twenty-four hours a day.
By now, the Politburo was sending him only occasional reports, unwilling to stress him further. Mao passed most of his days watching imported movies. His favourites were Hong Kong martial arts flicks – it’s somehow pleasing to imagine him curled up in bed, fixated on Enter the Dragon. There were Western movies too, but the Great Helmsman’s opinion of Love Story and The Sound of Music has been lost to posterity.
