by James Palmer
The biggest problem was Shanghai, the Gang’s power base and the second most important city in China. The Shanghai leadership had been worked up by Wang and Zhang into a fine state of justified paranoia. When Ma Tianshui and Zhou Chunlin, respectively head of the Shanghai Garrison Command and head of the Revolutionary Committee, were called to Beijing on 7 October for a meeting, it was a clear sign that something was up, since usually Wang or one of the others contacted the Shanghai leaders to let them know about important meetings beforehand. Anxious phone calls to the capital were in vain, and they had been unable to reach any of the Gang of Four or their allies.
The Shanghai bosses devised a code to let Ma and Zhou inform them about any threats, since their phone lines would invariably be tapped. ‘My ulcer is acting up again’ meant ‘the rightists have gained the upper hand’, ‘good health’ meant everything was OK, and ‘a heart attack’ indicated an actual coup. Ma and Zhou were kidnapped by Unit 8341 virtually as soon as they landed, and subjected to an intimidating series of meetings where they were told of the fall of the Gang of Four and bombarded with an impressive array of ideological reasons for the correctness of the new regime. Ma’s secretary, meanwhile, managed to call the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee at noon on 8 October and inform them of the dire state of his ulcer, which prompted them to send another delegate to Beijing to investigate. He called back at midnight, with worse news; his mother had suffered, he said meaningfully, a ‘heart attack’.
The Shanghai leaders panicked. They put the militia on high alert, and started distributing weapons, setting up command stations, and commandeering motorcycles, cars and a patrol boat. The next morning, they got a call from allies in Beijing that Hua had been officially appointed Chairman, but, more critically, they finally got through to Ma Tianshui. They asked him what was going on, and he assured them that everything was fine, and that ‘I’ve seen [Zhang, Yao and Wang], they’re all quite well, though rather busy and unable to talk to me one on one.’17 The militia were stood down, and the Revolutionary Committee concluded that Hua must have the leftists’ blessing, and that somebody else had been the victim of a brief internal struggle.
Ma, of course, was sitting in Beijing with a gun to his head – more or less literally. He was severely stressed by the sudden reversal of political fortunes, and later suffered a serious mental breakdown. Two other members of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee went up to join him, and were promptly grabbed, told of the new reality, and given very little option but to conform. None of them had any stomach for a fight. In the meetings in Beijing, the coup had been presented to them as a fait accompli, and they had no desire to throw their lives away. They were no longer the young men who had bloodily seized power in 1967, but comfortable officials at the top of the totem pole, and they were keen to make their accommodation with the new order.
A couple of days later, news of the arrest of the Gang, though still not official, was now so widely rumoured that the Shanghai leaders became agitated again. In a last-ditch burst of rhetoric, one hardline supporter called, at a meeting on 12 October, for serious action:
Let’s begin right now! Before six tomorrow morning, let’s blow up all bridges, destroy all railways and highways, stop the armed troops of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces from entering Shanghai, and bring the industrial production of Shanghai to a halt. We should occupy the key departments. As soon as the action starts, we’ll put up posters, create public opinion, and raise the slogan ‘Release Jiang Qing! Release Chunqiao! Release Wenyuan! Release Hongwen!’
We’ll also occupy the broadcasting station and issue a letter to the people of the entire country and the entire world! We’ll be resolute to fight to the end. We’ll fight like the Paris Commune members. If we can hold out for a week, we are bound to get the support of people of the entire country and the world. Even if we lose the battle, we shall have given a lesson in blood to later generations. But if we do not fight now, we’ll leave only shame in the future.18
This was the kind of speech which, in 1966 or 1967, could have thrown a city into chaos. If the plan had been carried out, it would have been a huge political crisis for Beijing, and possibly provoked uprisings by hardcore supporters of the Gang elsewhere. But although people cheered, nobody showed any willingness to take to the barricades. Within a few days, the news of the Gang’s fall was met with such widespread jubilation that any thoughts of a people’s stand were abandoned.
The first ordinary Chinese came to know about the coup was on 15 October, when wall-posters started going up. The politically well-connected had known about it days before, of course – the UK Daily Telegraph reported it on 12 October, and anyone with connections knew about it in Beijing by the 10th. But although most people had heard that something had happened at the centre, just who had won out was still uncertain. People watched as the first characters were put on to the wall-posters. ‘Down with . . .’ – they strained their necks to see the next words. Down with whom? ‘The Gang of Four!’ This left most people scratching their heads; the ‘Gang of Four’ could be anyone. Mao’s label for the leftists had been confined to the inner circles of the Party. Then the names went up.
The list of the Gang’s crimes given to the public was extensive. They were accused of:
. . . keeping a nation of 800 million living in constant fear, ruthlessly attacking Party members, nearly destroying an economy, threatening civil war, committing national betrayal, hampering foreign trade, ruining the educational system, and preventing a single poem or play from being printed much less published without their approval.19
In a classic case of over-kill, some gossip was thrown in for good measure. This last was mostly about Mao’s personal relations with Jiang, mixed in with some sexual scandal of the type often thrown at deposed and unpopular consorts.
For the public, the nature of the crimes showed clearly that this wasn’t just the end of another set of leaders; it was, to one degree or another, the repudiation of the whole of the last ten years. That hadn’t been Hua and Wang’s intention: they were still determined to follow Mao’s instructions to hew to the spirit of the Cultural Revolution, despite its mistakes. But people read the events nonetheless as the beginning of a new era.
The country heaved a sigh of relief. Foreign students in Beijing at the time remember a sudden openness on the part of their Chinese counterparts, a willingness to discuss things about which they’d been previously reticent or merely parroted a Party line. On 21 October, there was a mass parade in Tiananmen Square; in contrast to the lifeless anti-Deng parades in April, people flocked to join it, laughing and singing and setting off firecrackers. Many stores sold out of alcohol. People pinned up caricatures of the Gang, or defaced existing posters, with Jiang Qing being the most frequent target; one of the crudest and most common showed her with a speech bubble saying ‘I suck dick.’
A certain amount of bandwagon jumping was going on, but the contrast between the jubilation with which the fall of the Gang was greeted and the hostile response to the campaign against Deng in April was enormous. Across China, local politicians scrambled to react. There were isolated clashes between die-hard leftists and the security forces, but they involved little beyond stone-throwing and shouting slogans. The vast majority of the Gang’s supporters proved fair-weather followers, quite ready to adjust to the new order as long as it meant keeping their positions. After all, they could reassure themselves, the new leadership had promised to maintain the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Surely their hard-won positions weren’t in danger?
Cartoonists were allowed to unleash their most vicious satirical style, which they did with relish; the Gang were shown as fleeing demons, as rats and pigs, being trampled under children’s feet in New Year’s games, as three slaves led by a dominatrix-like Jiang Qing, having their photograph taken with Lin Biao, holding flags covered in swastikas, the Nationalist flag, and the rising sun of Japan, as gremlins sabotaging factories, as cackling goblins dancing round a bonfire of scientific t
extbooks and literary classics, and as tyrants forcing the great men of the past to kneel before them. Their infamy spread to every level; when one American, just arrived that winter from Detroit to work in Harbin, asked her young children what game they’d been playing that afternoon with their Chinese friends, they said ‘Moooom! Smash the Gang of Four, of course!’
Among those who could afford it, a popular meal that autumn was crabs. Invitations were sent out. ‘Please come and join us to celebrate the elimination of the “sideways-walkers” .’20 In Chinese stories, crabs were depicted as bullies, blocking the road for other creatures with their sideways scuttle. If possible, diners ordered one female crab and three males. The original four crabs themselves were now locked up in Qincheng Prison, a notorious institution near Beijing; it was the same jail that had once been used to hold many high-level political prisoners that the Gang had helped imprison.
As with the death of Mao, the fall of the Gang made little impact in Tangshan. ‘We were pleased,’ Chang Qing recalled, ‘Of course, we were pleased. And I was very happy that Hua was now Chairman. He was a good man and I trusted him. But it wasn’t a big concern.’ They had nothing to spare for celebration, and much more immediate priorities.
National industry continued to override the needs of the Tangshan people. The limited electricity available was being used to fuel industry, not heat or light homes, and the still greatly reduced output of the coal mines went to factories elsewhere in Hebei.
Official media coverage of the disaster had dropped to almost nothing. Images of internal refugees and shanty towns didn’t blend with socialist triumph. Propaganda about Tangshan’s rebuilding reached delusional levels. The public was told that Tangshan citizens, thanks to the Party, were living better lives after the earthquake than they had ever done before. ‘The number of restaurants and shops in the city has increased by 30 per cent,’ proclaimed one report. After the initial fund-raising campaign, there were no channels for public donations. Word of the real extent of the devastation spread by mouth, prompting many to send private gifts to relatives or friends in the destroyed city, or to use their connections to arrange for their families to be moved to other provinces.
The winter cold was beginning to set in, and hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless. Even those who had shelter were reluctant to use it, terrified of the roofs over their heads. Families slept en masse, both because of a lack of bedding and to share body heat. The price of blankets, coats and fuel soared.
As people shivered in Tangshan, the Politburo made its final decisions about how to dispose of Mao. On 24 November, the first ground was broken on Mao’s vast mausoleum, situated right in the centre of Tiananmen Square. Hua inscribed the calligraphy on the memorial stone, signing off on Mao’s legacy for himself. Come the next May, the mausoleum would be opened, and Mao would be enshrined inside in a crystal coffin, ready for the crowds.
On 19 December 1976, in the back of a prison van on a frozen morning in the northern city of Changchun, a young man stared into the barrel of a gun. A couple of years earlier, in October 1974, Party organisations across the city had received leaflets denouncing Mao’s personality cult. ‘Even the leader of the Party is a common Party member! Oppose blind loyalty! Oppose individual worship! The CCP does not need a Party Emperor! The so-called Cultural Revolution is nothing but extreme leftist politics going out of control!’21 A poster went up in the centre of town expressing the same sentiments.
The resulting investigation involved 300 detectives and 6,300 supporting staff. The leaflets had been reported to Beijing, where Wang Hongwen had expressed his serious concern, and signed off on the investigation with the rest of the Gang of Four. They were expecting to find a veteran cadre or other potentially juicy political opponent behind the affair, and were disappointed when it turned out to be Shi Yunfeng – an ordinary, if idealistic, worker at an optical instrument factory. Only twenty-six years old, his protests arose from nothing more than close reading of Marxist texts and his own sense of fairness.
Shi lingered in prison for months. As the day of his execution drew close, Shi’s mother desperately petitioned the provincial Party headquarters. ‘Why has the Gang been smashed, and he is still to be killed?’ But the local Party boss, Wang Huaixiang, had been a keen supporter of the Gang,22 and was now determined to protect his own shaky political position by demonstrating his loyalty to the Chairman’s memory.
Shi was dragged out before a mass rally, wearing a billboard announcing his crimes, but he wouldn’t play along. He kept shouting ‘Unfair!’ until his hands were bound, anaesthetic injected into his throat to stop him from speaking, and, for good measure, his mouth stuffed with cotton balls and his lips sewn up with surgical thread. He was bundled into a prison van, where his executioner drew a pistol and fired several shots into his forehead. Even months after the Chairman’s death, criticising Mao could be fatal.
7 Aftershocks
Hua Guofeng emerged triumphant from the ruins of 1976. His picture went up next to Mao’s on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, smiling down benevolently at the morning crowds at the daily flag-raising ceremony. The propaganda machinery began churning out posters of him in familiar Maoist poses, inspiring factory teams or being touched worshipfully by the simple folk of China’s ethnic minorities.
A second series of posters revealed Hua’s essential vulnerability. They showed him in a position Mao never assumed, performing routine chores, and drawn in a pencilled low-key style very different to the bold colours and square-jawed socialist supermen of early posters. Here was Hua cleaning a countertop at a pharmacy, or serving dinner in a communal hall. The attempts to project a leader with the common touch, immersed in everyday duties, showed up the cult-like nature of the other posters.
Hua’s first problem was that, having been pitchforked to the higher levels of the Party only in the 1970s, he didn’t have anything like the base of power or connections that Deng and his allies possessed. Besides, he didn’t carry himself like a leader. His affability and skill as a social and political chameleon had been a big asset in his sudden ascent, but he lacked the kind of charisma, bite and insight needed to hang on at the peak of power. He never lost the look of a man who didn’t quite know what he was doing in charge of 800 million people.
Hua’s greatest failing was his inability to distinguish himself from the Cultural Revolution, and to embrace the deep-rooted desire for change. Nothing new was being offered here, only a watered-down version of the same old thing. Mao’s blessing had carried him into power, but now, with the Chairman’s heritage his chief source of legitimacy, he found himself trapped in a dead man’s shadow.
The only new slogan Hua had to offer up was the ‘Two Whatevers’, one of the most feeble ideological efforts in Chinese political history – as well as sounding oddly like Valley Girl slang in its English translation. (It’s narrowly rivalled only by Jiang Zemin’s later ‘Three Represents’, a set of slogans of such extraordinarily deadening dullness and obscurity that even in Chinese they sound like they’ve been badly translated from a foreign language.) What bold words would carry China into its new era? ‘We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave!’
The prospect of a continuation of Maoism had no appeal either for a public desperate for change or for a political elite who had spent the last decade under the Chairman’s thumb. The Two Whatevers were dead in the water.
It wasn’t entirely Hua’s fault. The same allies who had helped him plot the coup against the Gang of Four, especially Wang Dongxing, pressed the policy upon him, demanding guarantees both of their own political – military power bases and of the ultimate legitimacy of the Cultural Revolution. They were derisively labelled the ‘Whateverists’, and the public were all too aware of the close ties many of them, like Chen Xilian and Wu De, had had with the disgraced Gang of Four.
Hua’s attempts to invoke the talismanic power of Mao only served
to remind people of his singular lack of leadership skills. His attempts to build up his own personality cult were not only another reminder of Mao’s excesses, but came across as presumptuous and unearned. As Mao’s clouded mental state during most of 1976 came to light, the blessing he gave to Hua started to carry less weight.
Meanwhile, Deng waited in the wings. The strange thing about his return was how inevitable it felt. For a man who had been the subject of a massive vilification campaign just a year before, and who had been stripped of all his positions, he returned to the top of Chinese politics with amazing speed. Deng was soon released from house arrest and given back his title of vice-chairman. The consensus was that the campaign against him had been an embarrassment best forgotten, a last spasm of the Gang of Four. From his new apartments in Zhongnanhai, he began to rally his allies and move against Hua.
It was a striking testament to his talent, to the ability of the Chinese public to shrug off propaganda, and to the propensity of many officials to shift with the Party line in order to keep their own privileges. Despite the big talk of guerrilla campaigns, very few of the one-time radicals were willing to risk their lives, or even their careers, in opposing Deng’s rise. By the late seventies many local politicians who had once been fanatical leftists had calcified into political realists, and with the radical push from the centre gone, no new enthusiasm for revolutionary adventures was coming from the grassroots.
Deng didn’t mince words when dealing with the ‘Two Whatevers’. ‘It will not do,’ he said bluntly, ‘In accordance with this doctrine, my rehabilitation is unjustifiable, and it is likewise unjustifiable to affirm that the activities of the broad masses of people at Tiananmen Square in 1976 were “reasonable”.’1 He pointed out that Mao, like other Communist luminaries from Marx to Stalin, had never claimed infallibility, and brought up the 70 – 30 doctrine that Mao liked to apply to his own efforts; ‘70 per cent correct’ would soon become a standard verdict on Maoism, and especially on the Cultural Revolution itself.
