by James Palmer
Tangshan residents had already done their best to clean up the carrion fields, stacking bodies in basketball courts and lorry parks. Now the army dumped bleaching powder on the tens of thousands of remaining bodies, then moved them to graveyards five kilometres outside the city, where they buried them a metre deep. Rightly fearful of disease, sterilisation teams spread out throughout the ruins, gas-masked figures in sealed white coats spraying powder from tubes like scenes from a science fiction movie.
To combat the hordes of flies and mosquitoes, planes flew across the city, dousing it with pesticides, while thousands of pest sprays were distributed to ordinary soldiers who lost their concern for good karma and set out on a happy programme of insect genocide. They hated the mosquitoes, in particular, with the fury of the extremely itchy. The efforts succeeded, and there was no epidemic, though flu, encephalitis and dysentery were common among the survivors. (According to one doctor, the rates of certain types of cancer today among those alive at the time of the quake are unusually high, around double the normal rate for China. Given the amount of heavy industry in the city, blaming this on the pesticides may be a stretch.)
As news of the quake spread, tens of thousands of desperate Tangshanese working elsewhere began trying to make their way home. Mr Zhang had been working on the railways in Shanxi, normally a twelve-hour ride from his home and his wife in the town of Fengnan, near Tangshan, when a workmate woke him up with the news. He jumped on a train to Beijing with another Tangshanese comrade. This was normally an easy journey, but it took them a whole day and night just to reach the capital on a clogged rail system. Arriving in Beijing, they were told that there were no trains to Tangshan. Some people were even saying that Tangshan didn’t exist any more, and that it had been drowned by flood waters from broken dams.
They took a train to Chengde, and from there walked for three days to his friend’s home village, which had been relatively unaffected. Exhausted and terrified at the thought of his family’s fate, he borrowed a bike and pressed on without rest. All along the long road to Fengnan, he saw bodies on both sides, and when he got to the village, there was nobody there, only flattened remains. The only thing left standing in Fengnan was a red police box.
He wandered around for several hours, convinced that everybody had died, until two young women who had come back to find water told him that the survivors had taken refuge in a large temple near the village – which, like many old buildings, had weathered the earthquake. There he found his children and his wife; she’d been badly hurt by a falling tile, but the local doctor had used his last bandage to bind her wound before he ran to check on his own family.
Pockets of survivors like this were common. With government efforts entirely concentrated in the city, the countryside had to fend for itself. Temples, schools and hospitals became common focus points for shattered communities. One of the strangest was formed around the derailed No. 40 train. It was the only remaining shelter in a devastated countryside, and the 800 passengers huddled inside for three days, living off unhusked rice scavenged from the fields. They sent rescue teams out to help dig through the ruins of nearby villages and improvised a bathhouse by draping a sheet over a culvert near the tracks with a stream in it.
At night, the train’s electric lights, powered by the surviving engine, were a small beacon of hope and life in a black landscape. It was three days before the passengers were picked up by coaches driven from Tianjin and put back into the railway system to continue their brutally interrupted journey. The train staff stayed, and when the rails were mended, cleaned the train and drove it back to Qiqihar
But the experiences of one middle-aged teacher working away from home were, sadly, more typical of the grim end of return trips to Tangshan. ‘The train couldn’t get through, and I had to run a dozen or so miles to get home. By the time I got there, our village was rubble and corpses. The corpses were all relatives and friends. I knew them all.’13
More corpses were being added to the pile. Two weeks after the earthquake, the army conducted its own tribunal, sentencing 367 ‘guilty of the most heinous crimes’; twenty-six of them were executed on the spot by military firing squads, while the rest were sent to hard labour. Army statistics, admittedly incomplete, recorded a total of nearly 10,000 crimes, while the people’s militias recorded the theft of 67,695 items of clothing, 48,638 metres of cloth and 1,149 watches.
Individual institutions also dispensed their own forms of popular justice. Zhu Yinlai, freshly recovered from his four-day ordeal under the rubble, took part in one such trial. Out of the ten girls in his class, only two had survived. One of them had been caught by the army stealing watches and clothes from the dead. They had tied her to a tree while they carried on searching for survivors. Afterwards, the surviving members of the university gathered to ‘criticise’ her. Unlike most public criticisms, there was little violence, just a relentless barrage of insults. She wept in the middle of the circle as they flung accusations and ripped up her student papers. At the end they shouted at her ‘Go! Get out of here!’ ‘Where shall I go?’ she asked, ‘Where shall I go?’ In the end she walked the 800 miles back to her home town of Handan. There, Zhu heard later, she became a policewoman.
Those areas reached by the PLA were genuinely grateful to the army. The efforts made to restore some kind of normal life in the days and weeks after the earthquake were astonishing. The roads between Tangshan and Beijing, which normally saw around 3,000 vehicles a day, were now carrying 20,000 vehicles daily as water tanks, food trucks, bulldozers, mobile power generators and cranes moved to help rebuild the city. Traffic jams became common as trucks tried to force their way through the ruins.
Some 75,000 tons of food was shipped to the city over the next four months, along with vast quantities of other goods – 40 tons of steel piping, 2,620,000 reed mats, 410,000 pairs of shoes, 6,110 cases of matches. Goods were given to survivors for free, leading some in Tangshan to speculate that this was, in fact, a preparation for a new stage of communism to be implemented across the rest of the nation, although the reopening of small stores and the banks might have been a clue that this wasn’t the case.
Unsurprisingly, little of the aid made it to the countryside, although some trickled through or was requisitioned by ingenious local leaders. When aid did come through, the distribution was often caught up in local politics. One survivor remembered how the emergency rations – a few bags of crackers – were given out. ‘Everyone went to stand in line, but the production brigade said the crackers were only to be given to the poor peasants.’ These were not the poorest people in the village, but those whose families had been labelled ‘poor’ and therefore deserving twenty years or more earlier, in contrast to the ‘rich peasants’ whose tainted background made them untrustworthy:
People like us who had ‘problems’ were not allowed to receive any crackers. My wife went, but they sent her home empty-handed . . . Such a simple thing had clearly divided people into two classes. Villagers who had crackers would never give you any; you had to slink off to one side like a dog. But neither would they eat them in front of you. Why do you think that was? Because they were afraid you’d ask for some if you saw them eating? Or because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to withstand the urge to share a little with you, and would therefore be punished by the production brigade?
Many of the goods that arrived were donations collected by individual provinces, cities and factories. These ‘donations’ involved a large element of coercion. In many cases, how much each work unit was expected to donate would simply be decreed from the top. (Social pressure still plays an important role in modern Chinese disaster relief; after the Yushu earthquake my office displayed a list of the donations made by each staff member – in order of size of donation and rank, which magically corresponded. Each section chief, for instance, had spontaneously decided to give exactly 400 yuan.) But the public also felt genuine empathy and horror at the earthquake. Although official media played down the victims’ suffe
ring in favour of stories of socialist triumph, ordinary Chinese knew all too well what it was like to live in the aftermath of disaster.
With all the rhetoric of triumph and struggle, there was very little room for grief. No national day of mourning was announced, and no real acknowledgement was made of the dead. Survivors were left to cope with their losses on their own amid devastated communities where, with losses in every family, comfort other than shared grief was in short supply. People numbed themselves. ‘It was six months before I cried for my roommates,’ said He Jianguo. ‘Before then, that part of my heart was closed off.’ Contemplating the sheer scale of loss was too much for most people.
The language of struggle did comfort some. It gave a purpose to the tragedy, made it into part of China’s long battle towards self-reliance and perfect communism. As sketches of a rebuilt Tangshan were drawn up, the new landmarks were named ‘Anti-Earthquake Square’, ‘Anti-Earthquake Boulevard’.
The press to get the mines and steel factories back up and running began within a couple of days of the earthquake. It showed the regime’s priorities: industrial production, or at least the appearance of industrial production, came before everything else. Tangshan mattered because of the mines and factories, not because of the people.
But restarting work was an important psychological lift for many Tangshanese. It might seem inhumane, but, with the industrial mania and Stakhanovite cults of China, work was vital to people’s sense of self. Besides, it was a mining city, and their civic pride was rooted in their ability to produce. Thirty years later, it still stirred former miners. ‘Three days after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, and we were working again! They couldn’t do that nowadays!’
Tangshanese and outside engineers alike worked twenty-hour days to get the mines – so critical to the industrial functioning of the region – up and running again; on 9 August, the first reopened, and within another week seven of the eight major mines were functioning, albeit with drastically reduced production.
It was the reopening of the mines that saved the last survivors of the earthquake, five miners who had been wandering in a closed mine, gradually working their way back towards the surface and surviving on the water that had flooded in, when they stumbled upon the lights of a team returning to the coalface. ‘Two bloody weeks!’ their rescuers exclaimed. ‘We figured you’d died a long way back.’14
One of the few beneficiaries of the disaster was Hua Guofeng, who played the situation like a master. He was the only high-level figure to visit Tangshan, and pictures of him meeting earthquake victims were widely publicised. Chang Qing, the photographer, was one of those snapping him, and praised him for his kindness, engagement and ability to connect with ordinary people.
‘He was easy to get along with. A little soft, not a hard man like many of the politicians. And he never insisted on the official tunes being played when he arrived; he just walked into the room and started talking to people.’ Chang watched him as he left Tangshan, taking a picture of him waving goodbye to eager crowds from the door of the train. ‘When he came,’ he said, ‘it was the first time I really felt hopeful about the future of our city.’
6 You die, I live
For months after Tangshan, people lived in fear of another quake. As far away as Anhui, villagers slept in tents outside until winter made it impossible. (Geographically, this is akin to people in London abandoning their homes after an earthquake in Inverness.) In Beijing, people rigged plastic shelters over beds out in the street, now packed with families. Space was so scarce that people had to take turns sleeping.
Deng Xiaoping’s family built a shelter in their living room, placing the wooden frames of their beds on the tables to create cover and sleeping on mattresses underneath. But Deng’s prostate meant he had to get up often in the night, and he kept bumping his head, so they moved out to a courtyard shelter, two heavy tarpaulins over the family’s beds. Lights were rigged up, along with the family’s television set.
Even under house arrest, that was a pleasant lifestyle compared to most people. In the ruins of Tangshan, the army shipped in immense quantities of tarpaulin and wood, and people improvised shelter around the ruins of the city. There were fights about who got to use the remaining walls as one side of a home. Did they belong to the people who lived there before (and if so, which floor had priority?) or to those who had camped there first?
Tangshan itself, oddly enough, ate better than most of the country. The food distribution teams meant that people were getting enough to eat, while, for the rest of the country, it was a hard autumn. The good done by Deng’s previous reforms and the rapidly improving state of agricultural science was counteracted by a growing population and the political turmoil of the summer. Eggs were in particularly short supply, and city-dwellers made trips out to the countryside just to buy them.
The Seismological Bureau worked overtime, setting up new local monitoring teams and jumping at every report of a plague of frogs or a boiling spring. The same list of tricks Qinglong had given out was distributed across the nation; families everywhere watched upturned glasses nervously for a sign of imbalance.
With the anti-Deng campaign still being drummed into people at every opportunity, the quake fears added another layer of tension to an already stressed society. These worsened after another, much smaller, earthquake hit a remote part of Sichuan on 16 August, killing forty-one people. China’s mountainous southern belt often suffered such quakes, but the timing naturally unnerved the public even further.
Sichuan was dominated by Zhao Ziyang, another survivor of the mid-sixties purges who had been rehabilitated by Zhou Enlai in 1972. He was one of the most radical reformists in the Party, and was already experimenting with the market economy in Sichuan, as a result of which agricultural production in the province had soared. After he went up into the mountains to oversee the disaster relief efforts that August, landslides blocked the road down and he spent a week in the wrecked highlands coordinating aid. Unsurprisingly, he was another bitter enemy of the radicals, who spread rumours that he was ‘hiding in the mountains’ in order to avoid taking part in the anti-Deng campaign.
Apart from fear of earthquakes, the other public obsession that summer was the dying Mao. It was a gross faux pas to talk openly about the Chairman’s impending death, though everyone knew it was coming. The official announcement that he was seriously ill had gone out, and those who had this ‘secret’ information were busy spreading the news among their friends and relations. Others traced his physical condition through pictures; months had gone by without a photo of the Chairman – the last one issued had appeared in May 1976, showing him slumped in his chair during a visit by Kaysone Phomvihane, the Laotian Communist Prime Minister.
Mao was drifting in and out of consciousness. He could still be remarkably focused, but only when he cared. Jiang Qing tried to bring him anti-Deng documents to sign, but he showed no particular interest in them, or her. Appropriately enough, the last official document he read was a report on the Tangshan earthquake, delivered to him by Hua Guofeng on 18 August. Otherwise he spent his time sleeping, watching movies and being fed pap by his attendants. Zhang Yufeng, his ex-mistress, was on hand to translate and attend to him, faithful to the last.
Mao was off the political board, but he still dominated it. Nobody was willing to move while the Chairman was still on the scene, even bed-ridden and half-conscious. For thirty years he had built a system that centred around himself, smashing any challenger and pitting potential successors against each other. Everyone around him was still caught by his power. Hua and the others had considered doing away with the Gang of Four long before Mao’s death. But even half-comatose, Mao’s disapproval was too awful to risk. The danger that he might rise from his bed and condemn whoever acted too rashly hung over all their heads. The government was in stasis, waiting for the heart of an 82-year-old man to fail. Wang Hongwen passed his time riding his motorcycle, shooting rabbits in the fields and watching imported Hong Kong movies.
Jiang Qing was in Xiaojinzhuang, the ‘model village’ in Hebei she had carefully cultivated as a political example, when the news came, on 5 September, that she should return to Beijing immediately. She’d spent the past few days ranting about Deng to farmers: ‘[He] wants to consign me to hell! He’s far worse than Khrushchev ever was! The man wants to get himself crowned, to declare himself emperor!’1 She rushed back to Beijing, shouting at the Zhongnanhai staff with frantic concern for her husband. She set herself up in the offices of the Xinhua official news agency, calling reporters and editors to prepare to spin the news, then made herself a nuisance for Mao’s medical team. The official accounts talk constantly of her callousness towards Mao and her belief that he was the last obstacle to her power, but, yet again, this is rubbish; Mao wasn’t the obstacle to her power, but the bulwark of it.
During the deathbed vigil, there was a moment when Mao seemed to recognise the names of his colleagues, but was unable to speak. As Ye Jianying was about to leave the room with other leaders, Mao gestured for him to come back, then grasped his hand and stared intensely into his eyes. Ye believed Mao was trying to communicate something to him, but couldn’t tell what. He decided afterwards that Mao had been saying ‘I entrust Hua Guofeng’s well-being to you.’
