by James Palmer
Just before midnight on 8 September, the doctors gave Mao an injection of ginseng to stimulate his heart. It gave him a temporary boost, but he was sinking fast. Mao’s chief doctor remembered the scene:
Hua Guofeng pulled me aside after we administered the injection. ‘Dr Li,’ he whispered as . . . Zhang Chonqiao and Wang Dongxing strained to hear, ‘Is there anything you can do?’ . . . The air was frozen. The whirring of Mao’s respirator was the only sound in the room. Then I shook my head. ‘We have done all we can,’ I whispered hoarsely.2
In those last moments, virtually all of the senior leadership was crowded into the room, pressed up against the medical team. The doctors and nurses hadn’t slept properly for days, and the politicians weren’t in a much better state. At ten minutes past midnight, Mao exhaled deeply, and the line on the monitor went flat.
Jiang Qing clutched at the body. ‘Doctors! Quickly! Save the Chairman! Why can’t you save him?’3 She then turned to comfort Zhang Yufeng, who was bemoaning her fate with Mao gone. Mao’s two former lovers embraced each other. ‘You can work for me now,’ Jiang Qing told her. Then she turned conspiratorial, ‘From now on, don’t allow anyone else into Chairman’s bedroom or living room. Collect all the Chairman’s documents, keep them in order, and deliver them to me.’4
Wang and Hua gathered the Politburo for a meeting in the swimming pool building nearby, where Mao had been housed until the earthquake. Not much could be accomplished, since the members kept breaking down, weeping openly. In the face of such grief, they managed to agree on the official announcement of the death, but little else.
The public reaction to the news, which went out at 4:00 that afternoon, was muted. People mourned, but not with the same depth of feeling as for Zhou. One observer described it as, ‘Many people only remembered the disasters he had caused. The prevailing feeling throughout the nation was more one of concern than sorrow.’5 One Beijinger put it bluntly: ‘I didn’t give a fart when Mao died. It wasn’t like the premier. He never cared for us, so why should we care for him?’ In Tangshan, the reaction was mixed. ‘Some of the kids cried more for Mao than they did for their real family,’ an orphaned survivor reported, ‘Maybe they really loved him. But some of the people looking after us didn’t like it if you cried for your real family too much, and the kids would pick on you. But you could cry for Mao, because everyone was crying.’
Adult survivors remember a more subdued response. Most Chinese can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard of Mao’s death. It’s the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 of their era. But among Tangshanese, who were still traumatised by the earthquake and struggling to find basic necessities, the memories are much less clear.
Many people elsewhere felt a sense of affected grief, of tears being shed because everyone else was crying rather than out of real feeling. Everyone was given ample opportunities to cry. Daily rallies were held to mourn and honour the Chairman, and tears were virtually compulsory, at least if you wanted to keep up appearances. Several dissidents write of forcing themselves to tears, and then wondering whether those around them were doing the same.
Even though the personality cult had been toned down in the last few years, Mao’s death brought back a resurgence of that personal faith for some. This is always a minority, as in any country, for whom whatever the authorities say is true, and whose faith in the righteous leader can’t be shaken by mere reality.
Women tended to show the most intense personal grief for Mao, including some who had always projected distinctly nonpolitical feelings on to the Chairman. I was once invited to listen to Mao’s poems by a devout, unmarried Maoist in her fifties, who would have been a young woman when the Chairman died. She put on a cassette for background music and began to sing a setting of one of Mao’s poems in a high tremble, her eyes closed and her face contorted in an expression half-religious and half-erotic. Stalin used to receive explicit letters from Russian women looking to bear his child; there may well be a similar cache of epistolary erotica somewhere in China’s central archives.
Even among the disillusioned, many felt some sense of loss. Whatever else he had done, Mao had, at one stage, been a genuinely unifying figure. People still remembered the sense of swelling pride when the new republic was declared and the excitement of the early years when everything was in flux and a renewed, modern and socialist China seemed within reach. The image of Mao on top of Tiananmen, proclaiming the new republic, resonated with many who could recall the years of chaos, division and bloodshed that had preceded it. It was a shame that years of chaos, division and bloodshed had followed.
The media – newspapers, television, radio – were full of Mao. A series of impressive lies about his personal life accompanied the reiteration of his political achievements. He had kept blankets, cups and shoes, the public was told, worn thin from use. During the ‘difficult period’ of 1959 – 61 he had eaten nothing but simple food. The only parts of this hagiography that were true were his occasional acts of thoughtfulness for his guards and personal staff – a hallmark of most dictators, who tend to be the kind of people who can congratulate themselves over giving somebody a week off to see their family at the same time as they sign the death warrant for an old comrade. Mao, unlike Zhou, had never shown even a trace of regret or guilt over any of the numerous past allies and friends he had disposed of, or for the millions of people his politics had destroyed.
Mao’s doctors struggled with an unexpected decision by the Politburo. Mao was to be preserved, for eventual placement in a mausoleum of his own. It went against years of Chinese Communist tradition, where deceased leaders had been cremated, a decision intended to set an example in a country burdened, as the Communists saw it, by the weight of the dead, where cemetery space was in short supply. Cremation was also seen as scientific and modern, in contrast to the superstitious funeral rites of the past. Mao himself had said, in 1956, when approving the cremation policy, ‘After people die they shouldn’t be allowed to occupy any more space. They should be cremated. I’ll take the lead. We should all be burnt after we die, turned into ashes and used for fertiliser.’
Mao had not been joking. During the Great Leap Forward, the bodies of famine victims had been boiled down and sprinkled on the fields. But nobody felt comfortable using Mao’s body like nightsoil. The closest models they had for what to do with a deceased revolutionary hero were Lenin and Stalin, both of whose bodies had been embalmed and put on display – though Stalin’s had since been quietly removed, and his remains buried. But the techniques used for both had been experimental; and embalming hadn’t been taught at any of the foreign medical schools Mao’s medical team had mostly attended.
At first they tried injecting Mao with a massive dose of formaldehyde, using a formula found in a Western journal, but all it achieved was to make his body puff up, so that he looked like a drowned man, his arms and head bloated and his skin shiny. They massaged his limbs, hoping to force the liquid back down into the body. Eventually they got him looking acceptable, but left bruises on his arms and legs that had to be covered with make-up. With the formaldehyde squeezed into his chest, however, it was so swollen that they couldn’t button his jacket, and had surreptitiously to slit it and his trousers to fit his deformed size. It would do for the moment.
The formal funeral arrangements were far more elaborate than for Zhou. Mao’s body lay in state in the Great Hall of the People, in a glass-topped coffin with a red carpet before it and white memorial wreaths to either side. Foreign and Chinese dignitaries alike lined up to pay their respects, greeted by a reception line of the top leaders. The diplomatic editor of Time magazine, Jerrold Schecter, was among them. He noted of Hua that ‘the immensity of the challenge he faces was etched into his features, lines of tension and shock betraying deep emotion and pain’, and was more impressed by Wang Hongwen, who – judging him in fine journalistic style through a five-second handshake – he described as ‘radiating the charisma of a leader; he moves with flowing, athletic
grace and there is the feel of fine steel and energy in his handshake. He seems ready, even eager for the challenges and testing of power.’6
Some time that summer, Mao had summed up his life’s work to Wang, Hua and Jiang:
I have accomplished two things in my life. First I fought Chiang Kai-Shek for a few decades and drove him to a few islands. After eight years of war against the Japanese, they were sent home. We fought our way to Beijing, at last entering the Forbidden City. There are not many people who do not recognise these achievements . . . The second matter you all know about. It was to launch the Cultural Revolution. On this matter few support it, many oppose it. But it is not finished, and its legacy must be handed down to the next generation.7
It was true that nobody would doubt his first accomplishment, though future Chinese generations would place more emphasis on fighting the Japanese than fighting Chiang. Yet Mao was right to stress the former. In the later years of the war, after Pearl Harbor, he’d called off major operations against the Japanese. With his eye for the long-run, he recognised that the US entry into the war meant that Japan was doomed, and that using Communist soldiers and resources against them would leave him with fewer forces to confront the Nationalists after the war.
Having won the country wasn’t enough; he was determined to leave his own stamp on it for good. Mao had wanted, above all, to preserve the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Yet his final political moves had set up the game board in such a fashion as to make that impossible. His vision seems to have been of Hua Guofeng at the head of a leadership group in which the leftists played a major role, with Deng sidelined and eager to be brought back to apply his skills after he’d shown due repentance.
But Mao was the only factor keeping the leadership together. After ten years of mutual hatred and purges, did he seriously expect it to be sustainable? Or was the very instability of the arrangement deliberate? Mao had always thrived on chaos, upheaval and tumult. He loved to turn things upside down, even those of his own creation. Maybe the idea that after he was gone there would be another period of chaos, giving birth to yet another new order, pleased him.
For the moment, the leadership was determined to send out a message of unity. The top leaders posed together for photos around Mao’s body, and for one long photo, with heads bowed, at the funeral service in Tiananmen Square. The square was packed with crowds again, but carefully selected this time.
Hua Guofeng’s funeral address was not destined to go down in the annals of rhetoric, not least because it had been written by a committee two days before. It started with the usual lies:
It was under Chairman Mao’s leadership that the Chinese people who had long suffered oppression and exploitation won emancipation and became masters of the country. It was under Chairman Mao’s leadership that the disaster-plagued Chinese nation rose to its feet. The Chinese people love, trust and esteem Chairman Mao from the bottom of their hearts.
(There’s always something desperate about the overstatement in communist rhetoric. Imagine having to hear this kind of thing day in, day out, for forty years.)
His conclusions for the future were equally banal. ‘Deepen the struggle to criticise Deng Xiaoping and repulse the right deviationist attempt to reverse correct verdicts, consolidate and develop the victories of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, combat and prevent revisionism . . .’ Hua’s words contained no hint of change. He did place unusual emphasis, though, on another instruction from Mao Zedong. ‘Unite, don’t split. Be open and above board, don’t intrigue and conspire.’ These were the words Mao had used when chastising Jiang and the others the previous year.
After the ceremony, Mao’s doctors kept puzzling over how to handle his body. They looked for clues in ancient Chinese and Egyptian tracts, and even sent a team from the embassy in London to Madame Tussauds to study the wax figures there. (They were decidedly unimpressed.) They badly wanted to ask the Soviets how they had managed Lenin, but relations were so poor that it was unthinkable. The closest example they had was the Vietnamese, who had preserved Ho Chi Minh after his death in 1969. The two doctors sent to Hanoi were stonewalled, however, until one of the Vietnamese shamefacedly confessed that Ho was already beginning to rot, and his beard had fallen off.
They eventually settled on a variation of ancient Egyptian methods, removing all of Mao’s organs save his brain – they were fearful of cracking open his skull – then filling the cavities with formaldehyde-soaked cotton. Just in case something went wrong, a perfect wax duplicate was made by the Institute of Arts and Crafts, and kept close by the original corpse. The work was done in the vast catacombs built beneath the city in case of nuclear attack from the Soviets – in, naturally, the special section reserved for the leaders, which came complete with a four-lane underground highway and a full hospital. There, deep underneath the capital, Mao’s body rested in a cold chamber.
Above ground, things were heating up. Two days after Mao’s death, Hua was already looking to build his alliance against the radicals. His fears that they were plotting something themselves had started upon hearing news that Wang Hongwen had asked the provincial authorities throughout China, during the funeral, to contact his office directly when they had questions about directives from the Party centre. He hadn’t cleared this with Hua, and Hua saw it as the first step towards undermining his authority.
Hua’s main priority was to reach out to Ye Jianying, but he had do so as quietly as possible, since being seen with Ye would raise the suspicions of the Gang. Phone calls had to go through a central operator, and were all recorded, so everything had to be done face to face.
He picked another Politburo member, Li Xiannian, as his go-between. Li was another grizzled survivor of the attempt to stop the Cultural Revolution in 1967; unlike Ye, he’d actually had to do hard labour for four years at a timber mill near Beijing. On 11 September, Hua said he was feeling ill while he was supposed to be keeping vigil at Mao’s coffin, and claimed he had to leave. Li had pled sick to avoid the morass of Politburo struggles, and was taking refuge at his house. Hua visited him there and asked him to reach out to Ye.
Li agreed, but he was nervous of being spied upon. He concocted a plan whereby he would go to the Fragrant Hills botanical garden three days later, ostensibly for sightseeing, and if he was certain he wasn’t being followed would then be driven to Ye’s residence nearby. The gardens were quiet that day, and on 14 September he met Ye for the first time in months.
Both were tense, and fearful of being bugged, and the conversation was conducted mostly by writing notes to each other. Li passed Ye a list of possible conspirators, and Ye scribbled a question mark next to both Wu De and Chen Xilian, cautious of their previously good relationships with the radicals and the fact that, despite their shared military background, he had no real connections with them. Li assured him that both were trustworthy. No definite plans were made, but a vital link between Hua and Ye had been established.
Coups featured strongly in communist historical memory, both public, glorified seizures of power, such as the October Revolution in Russia, and the quieter, deadlier backroom coups pulled off in internal Party struggles. The type that preoccupied the plotters was definitely in the second category. It concerned the career of the despised Khrushchev – in fact, it was his moment of greatest triumph. (His final fall had also involved a coup, but one conducted with such simple efficiency and total complicity among the rest of the leadership that it hardly set a good example for Hua’s schemes.)
In the struggle after Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev had seized power through two brilliant moves. The first was the arrest and rapid execution of Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief, who had energetically positioned himself as the frontrunner in the succession stakes. Khrushchev had spearheaded the plot against Beria, in conjunction with the army, represented by the war hero Marshal Zhukov. Khrushchev had kept Beria convinced he was on his side even as he schemed against him, right up to the moment Beria walked into a meeting to find a
gun against his head and a stone-faced committee of five, led by Khrushchev, reciting his crimes against the Party.
The second move had been Khrushchev’s gradual undermining and final dismissal of his surviving chief rival for the leadership, Malenkov. There had been no sudden strike this time; instead Khrushchev had gradually built up his own power base in the wider Party, allowing him to override his relative weakness in the Politburo, and eventually, again with the support of the military, have Malenkov humiliated and demoted.
In a meeting between Hua, Li Xiannian and Wu De on 27 September, they mulled over Khrushchev’s example, wondering whether the Gang could be eliminated through something as simple as a vote in the Politburo. They speculated on the likely votes, but decided that the result they wanted was probable, but not certain. They worried about the possibility of the leftists stirring up support in the lower Party ranks. So soon after Mao’s death, getting rid of his wife would require more than just a vote. Her elimination had to be more decisive, a clear-cut message to her supporters elsewhere that their time was over.
Where was Deng in all this plotting? The official accounts, particularly his daughter’s, go to such lengths to deny any involvement or even knowledge on his part that it’s tempting to assume the opposite. There are stories of him meeting with Ye, Li and others to give advice. It certainly seems very unlikely that he couldn’t have known something was going to happen, given his closeness to Ye in particular. So, if he did play any role, it was a minor, advisory one at best. He couldn’t risk putting his head out of hiding. Mao, who had repeatedly condemned him, had also been his shield; ultimately it had been his hand that stopped the attacks on Deng from turning physical. Now he had to rely on Wang Dongxing and his men for protection.
