by James Palmer
The circle of those involved was relatively small. The chief players were Hua and Wang Dongxing, with Ye acting, in the marvellous phrase of Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, as ‘consigliere’ (like Tom Hagen in The Godfather) to the pair. They were backed up by Chen Xilian, Li Xiannian, Wu De and a few others. Only about half of them, such as Ye, were clear enemies of the leftists in the past; many had, in fact, allied with them at various times. (Hua, Wang Dongxing, Chen and Li had all pushed for the line about ‘Don’t intrigue and conspire’ to be included in the funeral speech, which should have been more of a clue to the Gang about who was out to intrigue and conspire against them.)
In the small world of Chinese elite politics, personality mattered. One factor that can’t be overstated in the decision of many leaders, including those, like Chen Xilian and Wu De, who had not suffered politically from the leftists’ manoeuvres, was just how irritating Jiang Qing was. Robert Muldoon, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, had sat beside her at a football game once, and afterwards commented, ‘It was easy to see where Jiang Qing got her reputation as a “nagger”.’8 Even the other members of the Gang would sometimes advise people quietly just to let her finish.
She had a habit of suddenly turning on people, even those relatively close to her, with great vehemence. She would carry on about ideological or personal failings, and toss out wild accusations of people being Nationalists, spies or counter-revolutionaries. When Hua took over leading Politburo meetings, she undermined and jabbed at him at every possible opportunity, despite Hua not even being a political enemy as such. At the least provocation, she’d launch into strident feminist rants, mixed with attacks on her political opponents – ‘Men are simple. All they have is sperm. When I talked this way at the Politburo, they laughed at me. The Politburo members are influenced by Deng Xiaoping’s male chauvinism.’9 Amid a political elite still nearly entirely dominated by men, many of them born at the turn of the century, this was never going to be popular.
It had been Jiang’s status as Mao’s wife that protected her. With him gone, she was an obvious target. But the plotters were more than happy to take the other three out with her. Some of them had maintained relatively cordial relations with the rest of the Gang, if not Jiang, but they were political parvenus, catapulted to power by the Cultural Revolution. They hadn’t put in their time at the coalface of the revolution. Without Mao’s blessing, Zhang and Yao would have never been more than Shanghai scribblers, and Wang nothing more than another petty provincial firebrand.
Those involved were conscious of another possible benefit from the purge of the Gang. The last decade had broken the country; if there was to be any kind of recovery, somebody had to be found to take the rap. It couldn’t, for obvious reasons, be the actual instigator of the chaos, Mao himself. The Gang of Four were not only political enemies, but also splendid potential scapegoats for everything that had gone wrong.
This was the reason Hua was so crucial to the coup: he offered a direct link to Mao’s legacy, and the claimed continuation of his policies, while at the same time being able to disassociate himself from the damage these policies had done. He had come to the centre when Zhou and Deng were trying to put the country back together, after the worst period of the Cultural Revolution was already over. If the plot had just been made up of the ‘old revolutionaries’ like Ye and Li, it would have seemed like a challenge to the whole premise of Maoist succession. Hua’s legitimacy made him the pivotal figure; with him in play, the coup could be spun as a righteous cleansing rather than an outright attack on the system.
It seems astonishing that none of the Gang of Four recognised the precariousness of their position. Their sole source of authority had just disappeared, and the public mood had swung against them long ago. Jiang was especially blind to this, claiming, in the wake of the Tiananmen incident, that the public was ‘happy, elated, and feel that Deng should have been dragged out long ago’.10 Zhang had got an inkling of public feeling as he watched the crowds in Tiananmen from the safety of the Great Hall of the People, but he still blamed the usual ‘counter-revolutionary forces’ and ‘Petofi clubs’ rather than accepting the obvious: people no longer wanted what the Gang of Four were selling.
With Mao gone, their only chance of continuing in power was to claim the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. They were ideologically committed to the vision of constant, purging revolution as well – or at least Zhang and Yao were – but by now that was, perhaps, less important than ensuring the safety of their own positions.
In politics in any society, the higher you climb, the narrower your vision becomes. Washington insiders stop believing in a world outside the Beltway, while French politicians barely acknowledge the existence of anyone but the Parisian elite. As responsibilities widen and reach increases, the ruling elite’s contact with everyday reality diminishes rapidly. The members of the Gang of Four had almost no contact with the everyday realities of Chinese life.
Chinese politics suffered from an extreme case of this syndrome, for several reasons. One was the size of the country, and the appalling communications infrastructure. It was touch-and-go whether any phone call would get through to its destination, and the countryside, as seen during the Tangshan disaster relief effort, was another world entirely. Then there was the insular nature of Beijing politics itself, where the elite lived cheek-by-jowl with their allies and enemies, went to the same few places for entertainment, and their whole lives revolved around Zhongnanhai and its environs. Some leaders, like Ye Jianying, were able to escape tunnel vision by keeping up their own regional connections, returning regularly to cultivate local alliances. But the Gang of Four suffered from being connected only to Shanghai, China’s other great metropolis and a peculiar political realm of its own.
The worst problem was that the political atmosphere they created was at odds with reality. Shooting the messenger is a danger in any hierarchy, but literally so in Maoist China. Nobody wanted to say that a programme didn’t work or a policy was causing riots when it had been put in place with the centre’s approval. During the early stages of the Great Leap Forward, this kind of delusion was pervasive. Staged photos were published of fields of wheat so thick that children could stand on them; and wildly exaggerated numbers were sent up to the centre at the same time as harvests failed and people starved.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and a man who knew something about self-deception, described the phenomenon perfectly in his memoirs:
In normal circumstances, people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them. In the Third Reich, there was no such corrective, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world.11
Tangshan showed how removed the Gang was from the concerns of most Chinese. Later accounts claimed that, in private, they made remarks like, ‘The earthquake in Tangshan affected only one million people, of whom only a few hundred thousand died. It’s nothing compared to the criticism of Deng, which is a matter of eight hundred million people.’12 Yao supposedly improvised a poem that proclaimed, ‘Mountains topple and the earth cracks. These are but ordinary happenings. The more hardships we endure, the stronger is our will.’ But these are probably just part of the black legend that accumulated around the four ideologues later. However, it was certainly the case that, while Hua Guofeng was visiting the disaster site and building his image as a national leader, the Gang took no such steps. It made it easy for their opponents to suggest that they cared as little for Tangshan as they did about the rest of China.
What the Gang didn’t expect was that Hua would play so critical a role in moves against them. He wasn’t an obvious enemy, like Wang Dongxing or Ye Jianying, men with whom Jiang, in particular, had been clashing for over two decades. They saw him as essentially a placeh
older, a nonentity pushed by circumstances to the top who could be manipulated or ignored. Jiang, backed by her supporters, had alternately patronised and sniped at him in Politburo meetings. Hua hid his own feelings about the Gang of Four well, placating them at meetings and appearing as a willing peacemaker between the two sides. He gave no inkling of having already cast his lot against the leftists weeks before Mao’s death.
In the closed meetings and whispered conspiracies during those tense weeks, one phrase occurred again and again on both sides. It was, as Zhang and Yao reassured each other, ‘kill or be killed’. Hua said the same words to Wang Dongxing. In Chinese, it’s very blunt: ‘You die, I live. I die, you live.’ The game was being played for the very highest stakes. And, the plotters had a crucial advantage over the Gang of Four. They were cohesive, knew their enemies, and had a clear goal. The leftists, on the other hand, were scattered and lacked a single-minded aim.
The narrative of the Gang of Four’s actions put forward by their enemies later goes like this. After Mao’s death, the Gang immediately moved to try to seize power. Jiang, mad with ambition, was convinced that she could now wield authority as her heroine, Wu Zetian, had done after the death of her husband. They began plotting before Mao’s body was cold, and it was only the heroic actions of Hua, Wang Dongxing and Ye that nipped their plot in the bud. It bore an obvious parallel with the accusations levelled against Lin Biao in 1971, save that the chances that Lin actually was putting concrete plans for a coup in motion are much higher.
It’s true that Jiang may have been thinking in those terms, at least on occasion. She loved grandiose language and fantasies about being an empress, after all, even if it seems inconceivable that she didn’t recognise how hugely unpopular she would be as a leader. For the moment, the Gang seemed to be moderately content with the idea of a pliant Hua in charge, allowing them to work towards long-term control. They backed him from the start in meetings of the leadership, and, even among themselves, talked about him with condescension, not enmity. In their discussions, such as they were, they obsessed yet again over getting Deng Xiaoping thrown out of the Party, ignoring the threats much closer to them.
Even the earthquake was turned to political ends. ‘Be alert to Deng Xiaoping’s criminal attempt to exploit earthquake phobia to suppress revolution! Solemnly condemn the capitalist roaders who use the fear of an earthquake to sabotage the denunciation of Deng!’ A 200,000-strong rally was held in Chengdu to ‘condemn the capitalist roaders who try to hamper the criticism of Deng Xiaoping under the pretext of engaging in earthquake relief work’, while a People’s Daily editorial warned that disasters were often an excuse for counter-revolutionary forces to attempt to topple the righteous government.
The Gang of Four still weren’t thinking in terms of seizing power, but intended to purge critical long-term opponents like Ye Jianying, and dispose of Deng Xiaoping for good. They intended to work through Party institutions, not midnight seizures. Ten years of being on top, shielded by Mao, had made them soft, and only half-aware of the danger they were in.
It didn’t help that the Gang wasn’t much of a gang at all. Wang was convinced of his own revolutionary integrity and the loyalty of his supporters in Shanghai. Jiang was a flailing hysteric certain she was the true inheritor of her husband’s legacy, and the tightly knit duo of Zhang and Yao were simultaneously fanatics and opportunists. While they were closer to each other than to anyone else at the centre, and Jiang, in particular, could exert a hypnotic grip over Wang, they actually met, with the exception of Zhang and Yao, relatively rarely in those days.
The narrative put forward later by Hua and his collaborators wasn’t entirely self-justification. They genuinely believed, it seems, that the Gang were planning their own coup. After all, it was how Wang, Zhang and Yao had climbed to the top in the first place, seizing the grand chances offered to them by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. And, as Hua and the others knew, the leftists’ position at the centre was dangerously weak.
A seizure of power would be their only chance. Political signals were so confused in China at the time that the appearance of control would have made a huge difference. Even if the majority were against them, the possible consequences of acting, without having any way of knowing that others would back you, were so dire that even an unpopular faction like the Gang could have taken the reins of government, at least for a while. But this would have required an immediate and theatrical seizure of power, not the bureaucratic manoeuvring that the Gang seemed convinced still mattered.
To the Gang’s opponents, it simply made no sense that the leftists weren’t plotting. As a result, Hua and Wang Dongxing became locked into a paranoid interpretation of the Gang’s actions. It was like a chessmaster playing a vastly inferior opponent he thinks is ranked at the same level. Small events and petty political moves were elevated into grand plots, ready to be sprung at any moment.
The irony of the Gang’s incompetence was that a spectacular coup had propelled them to power in the first place. Wang Hongwen had come to power during the January Storm in Shanghai, when his faction, backed politically and intellectually by Zhang and Yao, had seized power from the old guard of officials, ruthlessly eliminating both them and other radical factions that threatened their power.
The heady rush of that Shanghai winter was a long way away, though, and it had been chance and charisma, rather than scheming, that had left Wang Hongwen, rather than any of his numerous competitors, sitting on top. Zhang and Yao, meanwhile, still longed for the rush of having the crowds on their side. They dreamed of a popular uprising, but 1976 was very different from 1967. There were no crowds waiting to hurry to their side, no hordes of Red Guards looking to overthrow the old order. In their conversations, they kept going back to the Paris Commune, when the citizens’ militia had seized power in Paris in 1871 and established a radical government. But the Beijing crowds, as the events of April had so vividly shown, were sick of radicals.
There are three stages to a successful coup. The first is secrecy and intelligence-gathering. The second is seizing the centre and eliminating opponents. The third is presenting the outcome as both inevitable and a moral imperative. A failed coup leaves its forces reeling and vulnerable, able to be rolled up with perfect justification by the putschists’ foes.
When it came to intelligence, the Gang failed miserably. The Gang’s chief mistake here was failure to identify Hua as their enemy. They were also blind-sided by the involvement of Chen Xilian, with whom they had no particular quarrel, and whose own rise in the military had been helped by stepping on the backs of purged leaders. Nor had they any strong differences with Hua. They supported his confirmation as leader-for-the-moment, even if they thought of him as a figurehead. There were plenty of clues that Hua was pushing for his authority to be more clearly recognised, though, such as his quarrel with Jiang Qing on 21 September over her attempts to claim Mao’s papers for herself. He told her clearly that they belonged to the Party, not to her, and had them put under lock and key protected by Wang Dongxing’s men. This wasn’t enough to put the Gang on guard against him.
The Gang of Four’s inability to sniff out the plot against them was quite remarkable, especially given that rumours of it seem to have leaked widely. In Anhui, for instance, one formerly high-ranking Beijing doctor, exiled deep in the countryside in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, received a letter from an old friend in early September, advising him not to worry overmuch, as the leftists would soon be arrested.
The man they had most clearly identified as their enemy was Ye Jianying. He had been a political opponent of the radicals since 1967, and his staged retreat from Politburo affairs in support of Deng only worsened their mistrust of him. Their attempts to keep tabs on him largely consisted of Wang Hongwen moving to a house in the Western Hills that overlooked Ye’s residence. For several days he peered down whenever he had a chance, trying to see who was visiting Ye. Then he discovered that in fact Ye had moved to a different home as soon as he had heard
about Wang becoming his neighbour. Most of the other spying attempts were similarly clumsy, a case of leaning round doors or interrogating drivers as to where they’d taken their bosses.
Both sides worried about bugs. (As far as the record goes, there’s no sign that they were ever justified in doing so; most of the intelligence-gathering seems to have been based on simple questioning and gossip. But the side most likely to use electronic methods would have been Wang Dongxing’s men, and they would have an obvious interest in leaving it out of the story afterwards.) They ran showers to cover up discussions, wrote out conversations on paper and burnt them afterwards, or traced characters on each other’s hands. Standing over Mao’s deathbed, Chen Xilian had apparently communicated to Wang Dongxing ‘via hand gestures’ that they should arrest the Gang of Four immediately, prompting Wang’s reply that they should wait until Mao’s death; they must both have been fantastic at charades.
It was in matters of simple physical security that the radicals botched things worse. Unit 8341, the elite guards controlled by Wang Dongxing, ran every aspect of security around Zhongnanhai and the other imperial buildings. They controlled the gates, chauffeured the leaders and provided the bodyguards. Wang Dongxing, although not politically opposed to the Gang, was a bitter personal enemy of Jiang Qing’s, and had been for decades. Entrusting every aspect of their lives to a group run by him was ridiculous.
They were exposed, too, by their dependence on Shanghai as a power base. Shanghai was a long way from Beijing – a two-hour flight or an overnight train ride. And any time they visited there to butter up allies or prepare the military, they risked losing touch with goings-on in the capital. Their very absence could be turned against them, making it seem they were scheming to build their strength in the provinces – the same thing they had accused Zhao Ziyang of doing in Sichuan.
