by James Palmer
Tensions around him were high. The doctors, the politicians and Mao’s assistants continually snapped at each other, all of them worried about Mao’s fragility and the chances of another heart attack. Mao had always been a mover, and he couldn’t bear lying in one place for too long, so, on Jiang Qing’s suggestion, another bed was put in his room and his attendants would lift him between the beds and the sofa whenever he felt restless.
Jiang’s attitude towards her husband would be portrayed later as utterly callous, even jubilant at the thought of his passing. She actually seems to have been quite attentive, frequently visiting his bedside, going over his medical reports, and eventually moving back to Zhongnanhai to be close to him. Li Zhisui, Mao’s physician, attributed sinister motives to her attempts to intervene in Mao’s medical treatment by massaging him and administering traditional remedies. Many loving but stubborn Chinese wives still clash with their husbands’ doctors over such practices today.
Jiang’s concern was political play, too, since her entire claim to power rested on Mao’s authority and her ties to him – which is what makes the stories of her indifference unbelievable. It would have been quite exceptionally stupid for her to show him anything but close attention. And, after all, they had lived as husband and wife for a long time. However thin a thing their marriage had become, perhaps there was still some real feeling there.
On 26 June, at 7:10 p.m., the doctors on watch saw Mao’s heart rate spike, then drop dramatically. The whole medical team rushed to help, as the Politburo members milled around anxiously. By 4:00 a.m., they had him stabilised, but his condition was far worse. He was unconscious most of the time, despite moments of occasional lucidity and awareness. The death watch tightened, with an army of nurses and doctors on standby at all times.
Word of Mao’s sinking condition soon spread. The government issued a notification to senior Party officials that he was seriously ill, but soon enough it leaked to the general public. (About two-thirds of those I talked to recalled knowing that Mao was dying.) With Zhou’s death and the aftermath fresh in people’s minds, the fear – of what would happen when Mao himself was gone – grew. Would Jiang take over? Would there be a fresh wave of persecution?
The sense of a bad year was worsened by yet another passing. On 6 July, Zhu De, another of the great revolutionary generals, died. It was hardly surprising, since he was eighty-nine, a former opium addict who’d nonetheless risen to become one of the country’s foremost tacticians. He’d played no major role in politics for years, having been ousted in 1966 and protected by Zhou Enlai’s support. His death aroused nowhere near the level of emotion felt for Zhou, but he was one of the founding figures of the PRC, and his death was widely taken as a bad omen. What disaster, people wondered, would strike the nation next?
4 Four hundred Hiroshimas
On the morning of 12 July 1976, China’s foremost experts on earthquakes gathered in Tangshan. The administrators and scientists of the State Seismological Bureau were attending a week-long conference on earthquake preparedness, and to hear presentations on the disturbances in the region. It was a fairly routine affair. Seeing the signs held up to greet the arriving scientists, passers-by asked, half-jokingly, ‘What’s up? Is Tangshan going to have an earthquake?’1
There was a shadow over the conference. On the same day, back in Beijing, the Party leadership of the State Seismological Bureau were holding their own meeting. It was part of the purge going on against Deng’s supporters, in this case the unfortunate Hu Keshi, the Party head at the bureau. The conclusion was:
. . . keeping close step with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, Hu Keshi has persistently pursued a revisionist line; in this rightist trend to reverse verdicts, he is clearly acting as a capitalist roader. Hence it is no longer suitable for him to lead the bureau’s Party leaders. He should be removed from his position as head of the leading group, write a self-criticism, and subject himself to mass criticism.
Hu wasn’t formally removed from his post, but was immediately ostracised by the rest of the Bureau, eager to disassociate themselves from a man who was now political poison. Liu Yingyong, the state head of the Bureau, commented later, ‘Every day I was weighing what to say, what not to say, which document I had to read, and which I could pass on . . .’2
On 17 July, the Tangshan scientists began the ‘Meeting for the Exchange of Ideas on Mass Forecasting and Precautionary Work’, discussing upcoming forecasts for the north-east. A sense of political tension pervaded nearly every agency in China at the time, and the bureau was no exception. Today, the people involved prefer not to talk about it directly, instead falling back on standard circumlocutions. ‘You know what the political situation was at the time . . .’ News of Hu being ousted rapidly reached the scientists, who fretted about their own futures.
But they still got on with their work. Various predictions were discussed at the meeting, and everybody was concerned about the same possibility that had kept coming up since the start of the year: an earthquake in the Beijing – Tianjin – Tangshan area. Different teams concurred; the odds of an earthquake of magnitude 5 or higher were still high, some time in July or August.
One of the most fretful scientists was Wang Chengmin, the head of the Beijing – Tianjin section of the Analysis and Prediction department of the Bureau. He’d received a phone call from the Beijing seismic monitoring team three days before, warning of eight serious anomalies that could indicate a quake, including change in atmospheric electricity, drop in the water table, high levels of radon in the water, and deformations in the earth. He’d come to the conclusion that there was a serious risk of an earthquake in the next year or two, and, given the frequency of high-magnitude quakes worldwide in the previous year, it could be a big one.
Wang proposed intensive monitoring work, especially around Tangshan and in the nearby counties, which he considered the highest-risk area. Unable to find a place in the meeting’s already tight schedule, he instead gathered people during breaks and handed out forms for them to fill in and report further anomalies.
Among those listening most intensely to Wang’s words was Wang Chunqing, the young official who headed Qinglong County’s disaster management team. He’d come on his own initiative, and he found Wang Chengmin’s warnings deeply worrying. He went back to Qinglong, and took his worries to his immediate boss Yu Shen, the deputy head of the county’s science committee.
Together they took the alert further up the political ladder, until it reached Ran Guangqi, the far-sighted local Party leader. His own obsessive interest in earthquakes made him all too eager to hear Wang’s account, and he ordered him to check every one of the local monitoring sites and report back. When Wang returned on 23 July, he bore grave news – four sites showed signs of serious seismic activity.
Both of them agreed that the situation called for the same measures taken at Haicheng – intense monitoring and, where possible, complete evacuation. Ran was going to an agricultural conference, and so told Wang and Yu Shen to call a meeting the next day with the other important officials in the county. In this politically tense atmosphere they needed everybody on board when taking a step as big as this, especially since they were basing it on their own studies and intuitions about the earthquake rather than a direct warning from the Bureau of Seismology.
The 24 July meeting was heated, as the officials involved worried about loss of credibility, the possibility of public panic, and the reliability of the predictions. Yu and Wang argued their case strongly, backed up by Ran Guangqi’s authority, but it was Document 69, the central government’s earthquake preparation circular of 1975, that gave the committee the confidence to go ahead. The stamp of central government approval meant at least some political protection if their concerns turned out to be overblown.
The Qinglong team then went into a frenzy of work, mobilising local officials to press people to evacuate their homes, watch for signs of an earthquake, and set up basic warning systems. It was an example of the power of the soc
ialist state at its rare best, using all the available resources of militias, committees, village heads and Party educators.
Ran set a personal example, moving from his office into a hastily erected plastic tent. Wang had sold the case well, working the committee members into a frenzy, especially as other possible signs of an upcoming earthquake – sudden changes in the temperature of well-drawn water, the stiflingly hot weather, nocturnal animals skittering around in the daytime – began to come in.
Some of them didn’t sleep for three days, driving round the county and making phone calls – both activities harder than they sound, given the poor hill roads of the area and the terrible telecommunications network, where only the big villages had phones and misplaced calls were common. They evangelised lower-level officials with the gospel of the coming quake, telling them to send messages out by foot to remote settlements that couldn’t be reached by car or phone. People were encouraged to evacuate if they could, and, if they had to stay indoors, to keep doors and windows open and place upturned bottles to warn them of tremors.
How seriously the warnings were taken varied from village to village. In one, every family kept somebody awake at all times, in another, the villagers moved into hastily built sheds in the fields, with tarp-drawn roofs designed to collapse easily and harmlessly. They set up patrols to prevent anybody sneaking back into the buildings – both for safety, and out of fear that the greedy or hungry might take advantage of the inhabitants’ absence.
Back in Beijing, Wang Chengmin was so worried that he pinned two big-character posters to the door of the Bureau’s managing director:
Hu Keshi had lost his authority. Wherever I turned to, nobody took responsibility. I had to do something, but I was young then and could not shoulder the burden . . . I didn’t use any extreme language, I just wrote down what the situation was and hoped the leaders would take notice.3
Nothing happened as a result of Wang’s warnings. Later, the Seismological Bureau would forthrightly accuse the Gang of Four of having interfered in their work, using the Qinglong measures as an example of what could have been achieved. A document issued by the Bureau on 8 November – well after the demise of the Gang – bluntly claimed, ‘Because the Gang of Four interfered with the Seismological Bureau and with the forecasting work, it caused severe damage.’4 This vastly overstated the case, and can be attributed to the general mood of the country at the time, when the Gang of Four made convenient scapegoats for every failure of the past decade.
The Bureau also wanted to cover itself, especially after having made such bold promises after the Haicheng earthquake. Personal clashes and differences of scientific opinion, such as those between Wang and other team leaders, also contributed to the atmosphere of recrimination. One side later wanted to claim that their warnings, issued in broad terms and covering a large area, had been fatally ignored; the other wanted to pretend the warnings had never existed.
The Gang of Four, unsurprisingly, had nothing to do with interfering with prediction work, though they were part of the political atmosphere that meant that what warnings there were went unheeded. Tangshan’s name came up repeatedly in the predictions, but there’s no evidence that the Tangshan political authorities, unlike the Qinglong team, actually looked at the information about possible earthquakes.
Qinglong was unusual in having both close cooperation between government agencies and local Party leaders keenly interested in seismology, which was the reason Wang Chunqing had been at the meeting in the first place. For the Tangshan authorities, on the other hand, reports from the Seismological Bureau were just more sheets in piles of paperwork, easily stuffed back into an in-tray or binned. Without the intense focus of the Qinglong staff, the Tangshan municipal authorities were distracted by a hundred daily worries, as well as by the political uncertainties of the time. The warning voices would have had to be far clearer, more certain, and backed by heavier political weight to gain attention.
The remarkable intuition of the Qinglong team aside, the evidence simply wasn’t there to justify warnings of an imminent massive earthquake. The quake prediction teams were mostly predicting an earthquake of magnitude 5 or 6 somewhere in the region, over a timescale of weeks or months. The possibility of a high-magnitude earthquake was raised, but not emphasised. And nobody envisaged the apocalyptic potential of a quake directly beneath the centre of a major city like Tangshan.
Students enjoy a summer day at the Tangshan Public Library, 1962. Tangshan City Museum
Tangshan’s railway station, among the first in China, in the 1930s. Tangshan City Museum
A clock at the Tangshan Coal Power Station shows the exact time the earthquake hit. Chang Qing
Ruined factories in Tangshan, July 1976. The bottom of the picture has been cropped out to remove piles of corpses. Chang Qing
Aerial view of the ruins, August 1976. Chang Qing
Local Party committee members hand out food, July 1976. Chang Qing
A political message survives atop the damaged sailor’s club in Qinhuangdao, August 1976. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
Tangshan’s rail track was the first in China. It was destroyed by the quake, August 1976. Chang Qing
In these two photos, one probably real, the other clearly staged, PLA soldiers hurry to aid the stricken city, July 1976. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
PLA soldiers haul rubble in Tangshan, July 1976. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
Tangshan residents make their way through the ruins of Xiaoshan, once the city’s major shopping district, while rescuers work to the side, August 1976. Chang Qing
The People’s Liberation Army struggles to recover survivors, August 1976. Chang Qing
Survivors walk through a cleared path in early August 1976. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
Children study in an open-air classroom among the ruins of Tangshan, October 1976. Chang Qing
Clothing hangs among reconstructed houses in Tangshan, October 1976. Chang Qing
In an improvised classroom in autumn 1976, Tangshan students learn ‘Father is good, mother is good, but Chairman Mao is best.’ Tangshan Earthquake Museum
Hua Guofeng is applauded by city officials on a visit to Tangshan, 1978. The photographer was reluctant to give me images of Hua’s visit in 1976, as they show too many officials who were later purged. Chang Qing
Part of the problem was that Haicheng had inflated people’s faith in the abilities of the Seismological Bureau. The public believed that the code of earthquakes had been cracked. The vague possibilities enumerated by the Bureau’s scientists didn’t match people’s expectations of the miracles that socialist scientific development could deliver.
A document issued by the Kailuan mining board on 14 July 1975 captures the politically correct tone of earthquake prevention work well:
According to Document 69, earthquake work has to focus on taking preventative measures. Kailuan mine has taken this doctrine and criticised the theory that ‘earthquakes are a mystery and anti-earthquake measures are useless’ and set up a doctrine that ‘earthquakes can be prevented and can be detected’.5
Yet even if a clear warning had been issued, it’s uncertain just what the Tangshan authorities could have done about it, other than general earthquake-awareness programmes. The kind of evacuation carried out in Haicheng and Qinglong was unthinkable. Haicheng had the clearest warnings possible, and was a minor town. Qinglong was a political and industrial backwater, while Tangshan was the industrial crucible of the north-east. Shutting down production on the vast Kailuan mine alone would have cost the country 5 per cent of its coal, and brought numerous other factories to a standstill.
And if no earthquake came, what then? It would leave the local leaders critically vulnerable to attack, accused of being fools at best and saboteurs or traitors at worst. Much of the Tangshan leadership had risen to where they were by brutally purging the men there before them on the flimsiest of grounds; they were the last people to risk handing political ammunition to their many enemies.
>
The fate of one high-level politician illustrates the political dangers of a failed prediction. Qiao Guanhua was China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, but a relatively minor political player. After the Tangshan quake, he read predictions from the Seismological Bureau that Beijing might suffer severe aftershocks, and ordered the evacuation of many foreign diplomatic personnel. In the aftermath of Mao’s death, while Qiao was struggling to keep his place, his enemies accused him of showing ‘a reckless spirit and a lack of faith’ in ordering the premature evacuation.
Back in Beijing, on the same day the Tangshan meeting finished, Hua Guofeng gathered Mao’s medical team for a Politburo meeting. It had been three weeks since the Chairman’s last heart attack, and he was stable, but critical. His heart, lungs and kidneys could all fail at any moment.
According to Li Zhisui, Mao’s doctor, Jiang Qing was furious with the medical team, accusing ‘us of exaggerating the gravity of Mao’s condition in order to escape responsibility for our inability to treat him’. She insisted that Mao had just a case of bronchitis, that his lungs had been good, and that never before had he suffered kidney problems. ‘You make everything sound so awful,’ she said, ‘I think you have not been properly reformed. In bourgeois society, doctors are the masters and nurses the servants. That is why Chairman says we should accept only a third of what doctors say.’6
