The Death of Mao’s China

It’s a sobering reminder of your own mortality when you pick up a book of history which deals with events at which you were present and even a participant. It’s particularly sobering when the author, no longer a young man, was born two years after the events he describes. Such were my thoughts when dipping into James Palmer’s Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes, a book which describes the events of China’s cosmic year, 1976.

Yes, I was there. I was thrown violently from my bed at 3.42 a.m. on July 28, 1976, as the earth shook in Tangshan, only sixty miles away as the crow flies. I watched Beijing’s makeshift tent cities and the police sidecar motor bikes armed with machine guns patrolling the streets. I was in Tiananmen Square during the first Tiananmen incident of April 1976. A week before, I’d gone through factories in Shanghai where almost everybody wore a white mourning flower in defiant memory of Zhou Enlai and, by implication, in opposition to Mao and the leftists. Hey, wasn’t Shanghai supposed to be the stronghold of the ultra-left?

I saw the wreaths commemorating Zhou piled fifty feet high on the Memorial to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. I watched the would-be rebels reciting subversive poems against Jiang Qing and even Mao himself. I was unceremoniously removed from the square by burly militia men in enormous navy blue padded cotton coats. I watched late at night as the police moved through the square wielding batons and clearing the rioters. I watched as the people of Beijing were marshalled like children and marched in enormous circles to the beating of gongs and cymbals, chanting anti-Deng Xiaoping slogans. I even have a vivid memory of exactly where my train was in Guangdong province when the death of Zhou was announced on the train PA system. We were in the “soft” cadre section of the train, so we could turn the loudspeakers down but not off. Any Orwell memories there?

Now I won’t say that James Palmer’s is a bad book. It’s lively and readable and you should be able to knock it over in one session. The problem is that there’s really nothing new in it. Everything he says is from public sources and those sources are very flawed. The events of 1976 are still fresh in many minds and the interpretation of them matters politically. Palmer also repeats stuff which is just wrong, when even a quick scan of Wikipedia would have sent him back looking for more material. These events are pivotal in modern Chinese history and deserve better.

Take for example the case of Hua Guofeng, who seemingly out of the blue was “chosen” by “Mao” to be Acting Premier after Zhou’s death and then, after the Tiananmen riots and the second smashing of Deng Xiaoping, Premier. Palmer recycles several myths about Hua. There was a rumour at the time that Hua was Mao’s son—there certainly was a superficial resemblance. Palmer repeats the uninformed rumour and says that Hua, like Mao, was Hunanese. I met Hua on a couple of occasions, and his accent was definitely not Hunanese. If Palmer went to Wikipedia he would have discovered that, although Hua spent time in Hunan in various official capacities, he was actually born far away in Shanxi. When your author gets such basic things wrong you start to pay more careful attention to the rest of what he’s saying.

There’s also the matter of how Hua came seemingly from nowhere to suddenly become Premier. Yes, there was a lot of confusion at the time amongst people who claimed to know. It doesn’t do much for your reputation as a China “expert” when suddenly the top government position in the country on which you are supposedly an authority is taken by a person you’ve never heard of. There was a lot of shuffling for position and rewriting of advice in a lot of places on that day. The line which covered a thousand arses was that Hua was a “compromise” between factions, a line that lives on until this day, when Palmer once again repeats it.

My own thesis is that Hua’s rise was due to his position as Minister of Public Security. The Minister of Public Security controlled substantial armed forces. The conventional armed forces, the Army and Navy, were paralysed because of a stand-off between right-wing and left-wing forces. A person who controlled a large neutral force was able to seize power.

Why did Western observers not pick this up at the time? It was because they wanted, indeed had, to believe that China was better than its Stalinist reality. You have to remember the political position of the West at the time. The USA and its allies had done a complete political volte-face. Kissinger and Nixon had visited China and suddenly the Maoists, who had so recently been our bitter enemies, had become our friends. We mentally smoothed over things about communism which might previously have caught our attention. We forgot about the gulags and the secret police. Acknowledging their presence raised too many questions about consistency of thought and principle behind the anti-Soviet alliance which we were contemplating with China. We were linking up with the Chinese to beat the Soviets because the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian state with gulags. But what if China was a more-evil totalitarian state with even bigger gulags? These questions were quietly swept under the rug and we chose to believe that China was the new utopia where nobody stole or spent their time thinking about possessions.

The fact of a Minister of Public Security, a Chinese Andropov if you will, seizing power sat uncomfortably with that mindset. Hua controlled an enormous army. He had the police, the gendarmerie, the border guards and many others. One group of troops theoretically under his command, a crack group, was the 8341 Unit, Mao’s personal guard. You might reasonably say that as minister his control was theoretical because Wang Dongxing, the head of the 8341, was a powerful man in his own right who didn’t easily answer to anybody other than Mao himself. But there is ample evidence that Wang was very close to his minister and may have been involved in his elevation to premier. 

My suspicions as to the importance in the mid-1970s political balance of the forces under the Minister of Public Security are strengthened by the military standoff of the early and mid-1970s and the manner in which Tiananmen Square was cleared on the evening of April 6, 1976, after the first Tiananmen Incident, the massive demonstration during which one million people rioted against leftist control of China.

It was fashionable amongst the commentariat during the 1970s to quote Mao’s dictum, “The Party controls the gun, not the gun the Party”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even today, if you want to control the Party you have to be able to control the army. The problem in the mid-1970s was that no one person or faction did. After the 1967 “Million Heroes” rebellion in Wuhan when a large part of the military rebelled against the Cultural Revolution, the military took over many government functions. However, the military was split between left-wing factions headed by Lin Biao and right-wing factions headed by Ye Jianying in Canton. Ye’s faction controlled whole government departments and there was a general military stand-off. In Beijing you could see evidence of it. Even as late as 1976, Beijing looked like a city under martial law. The nature of the troops in the city was constantly changing, which to our mind seemed to reflect constant manoeuvring for position. At one stage in 1976 we even saw truckloads of sailors being driven round the city. Seemingly somebody felt that a naval presence would give them an advantage.

If we accept the premise that nobody controlled all of the military, Hua’s position as Minister of Public Security suddenly becomes very important. Compare the 1976 and 1989 Tiananmen incidents. In both cases you have elements of public rebellion mixed in with a base of intra-party struggle (if you doubt the intra-party struggle element of the 1989 incident, read Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs). Both threatened to topple the Party and national leadership. And yet in the case of the 1976 incident, no troops were involved in putting it down, probably because the factions in the army reflected the left-versus-right struggle which was being played out in the Square. Which troops would be mobilised? Would their rivals support the pro-right faction? Civil war was a possibility.

If you read the People’s Daily of April 7, 1976, the day after the suppression of the incident, it lists the units involved: the People’s Police, Unit 8341 and the militia. Most troops involved in the suppression reported either in practice (militia and police) or in theory (Unit 8341) to the Minister of Public Security. On the evening of April 6, I had just finished dinner at the Beijing Hotel and I watched them wielding their batons and clearing the Square. There are a lot of rumours current in China that large numbers were killed that evening and Palmer repeats them. I didn’t see anything to support these rumours.

The factions had no doubt as to Hua’s potential role in suppressing them. On April 6, I was at an official lunch in Beijing’s Xinqiao Hotel with senior staff of the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Suddenly the Times Beijing correspondent, David Bonavia, burst into the room and announced that they had “burnt a car and a building”, almost unbelievable news at the time. Palmer recounts this story, but in the officially accepted version of a “small building at the south-west of the Square”. Later that day I went and had a look at the damage. Actually it was in the south-east of the Square. This may seem a minor detail but it wasn’t. In those days for security reasons there were very few signs indicating who occupied that building. Many years later when the signs went up we discovered that this building belonged to the Ministry of Public Security, whose headquarters were nearby. It was no random attack. 

Let me explore another difference between the ways in which the 1976 and 1989 Tiananmen incidents were suppressed. In 1976, non-conventional forces were used. In 1989 the army was used. One possible explanation of this was that in 1976 the level of social control was so total that military force wasn’t necessary. By 1989, with reform, the level of social control had dropped substantially.

In 1976 China was a Stalinist totalitarian state. Every aspect of ordinary people’s lives was controlled by their work unit, which was controlled by the Party apparatus. Your unit handed out your food and clothing ration tickets, you lived in accommodation provided by your unit, you went to weekly or even bi-weekly political meetings at your unit, and at any time any one of your work colleagues could denounce you for any number of political mortal sins. They often did. This level of control of life and death is not conducive to spontaneity. The 1976 incident was a highly organised intra-party struggle for power where the masses were mobilised as troops. Clearly there was enormous dissatisfaction with the party and government. Subsequent events after the overthrow of the Gang of Four proved that conclusively. But it is a giant step from there to saying that everything was spontaneous. Organised resistance without Party faction support was almost impossible. Once the deals had been done in the back rooms, and by a tiny number of people, only batons were needed to clear the Square. The system had reduced dissent to lone voices crying in a wilderness.

The 1989 incident took place at a time when a much smaller proportion of the population was covered by official work units. The private and semi-private sector was already the biggest and fastest-growing part of the economy (I include fake “joint ventures”, where state enterprises “joint ventured” with their own Hong Kong companies). People who worked for these companies were already outside the state’s control net. Both the 1976 and 1989 incidents were essentially intra-party struggles with large elements of popular dissent. The difference in 1989 was that many people were no longer dependent on the state for their daily living. They dared to act. When the leaders of the factions at party and government headquarters at Zhongnan Hai (Zhao Ziyang and others) showed in public that they had reached the traditional compromise, nobody was prepared to leave the Square. The people mattered. At that stage the Army became the only option.

It is clear why reactionary forces are nervous about the possibility of dissent in twenty-first-century China where even the so-called state enterprises are in the market economy and have private and foreign shareholders. Social control in modern China is a distant memory, indeed you could make a case that, in 2013, the average Chinese citizen has much less interaction, for good or bad, with the government than the average Australian has with the Australian government. 

There was a poignant reminder of the level of social control on the evening of, if I recall correctly, April 7, 1976. Remember that the day before the Square had been filled with a million angry rioting people. The crowd was so thick that it was almost impossible to make your way through it. Then the deal was done. Deng was deposed. Every work unit in the city, and I mean every unit, organised its workers in military formation and marched them round the city in a very long line shouting slogans to the accompaniment of gongs and drums, the sound of which I can still hear. This was the first time that Deng was denounced by name—for the previous year he had been hinted at as the “Right Deviationist Wind to Reverse Correct Verdicts”. Beijing in 1976 had three million people, so at least a third of them the previous day had been yelling angry slogans against the leftists. Now they were reduced to kindergarten children marching to gongs and drums. That evening we were having dinner with the Vice-Minister for Foreign Trade, a ministry controlled by Ye Jianying and subsequently one of the vanguards of reform. We asked the Vice-Minister what he thought of the riots. He replied, somewhat sadly we felt, that it was “part of our great democracy”.

As for the earthquake, it was something which for various reasons had a big effect on my life. By pure coincidence I had been in Tangshan only three days before the earthquake. It was a city of low-rise houses built in crazy stone, notoriously dangerous in earthquakes, which may explain the loss of life, enormous even if you believe the official figures, which are probably understated. I visited Tangshan again four years later and was shocked at how little progress had been made in reconstruction. Palmer’s description is probably reasonably accurate, mainly because he seems to rely quite heavily on a good Chinese book about Tangshan, The Great Chinese Earthquake by Qiao Gang.

For the description of the coup d’état against the Gang of Four, Palmer follows an orthodox and probably accurate line. There’s a lot of information about what actually happened in those fateful days. If you know Chinese, one of the best-informed accounts is a DVD series of short programs on Hong Kong-based Phoenix Satellite TV, which has excellent political sources in the Chinese government. One thing which is abundantly clear in all accounts of this event is that it was a military coup d’état led by Ye Jianying, with the active support of Mao’s chief bodyguard, Wang Dongxing.

So I recommend that you give Palmer’s book a go, even if only because of the paucity of other material in English about this important period of Chinese history. But don’t think that you’re seeing anything new, or that all of it will stand up to scrutiny. That book remains to be written.