by James Palmer
Mao had also promoted Deng Xiaoping, a hated rival of the Gang, back into positions of power, beginning with his restoration to the Central Committee in 1973. Meetings of the Chinese Politburo had been convened to reassess developments of the last nine years, working on Mao’s stated formula that the Cultural Revolution was to be judged as ‘70 per cent positive, 30 per cent negative’.
Deng had launched an ‘overall rectification campaign’ in early 1975 that targeted regional factionalism and incompetent new officials, restored some of the old classics, and attempted, with some success, to kick-start a stagnant economy. But now the pendulum seemed to be swinging back towards the left, and the Gang of Four were once again in the ascendant. Zhou’s death was a happy moment for Jiang and her allies. Jiang had been a major instigator of the ‘Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius’ campaign. She saw Zhou as an enemy, the epitome of the old guard who had to be torn down, gloating after one meeting in January 1974, ‘We pushed Premier Zhou to his wits’ end! . . . In the campaign of criticising Lin Biao and Confucius, I stand at the front line of attack.’21
She had used Zhou’s patronage of traditional art to attack him, displaying hundreds of paintings in an ‘Exhibition of Vicious Art’ at the Ministry of Culture, with the introduction, ‘The emergence of these black paintings was the result of a certain person’s encouragement and support.’22 In articles about Confucius, the writers were again instructed to model him on ‘a certain person’. It was a fine example of the insinuating style of politics at the court of Mao, a long, vicious campaign to wear out Zhou physically and mentally and send the signal that his power was fading.
It would take more than that to wear out Deng, however. The Gang recognised his power and endurance. In 1975, Wang Hongwen had warned visitors to Shanghai that, if Deng didn’t fall, they would need to start another civil war to stop the counter-revolutionaries seizing the nation. Deng was the ultimate survivor. He belonged to the first generation of revolutionary leaders, which in itself was a source of massive prestige, although it hadn’t saved the lives of many of his former colleagues. Revolutionary and wartime credentials were important, especially in a political culture that was constantly harking back to the past, whether to praise or condemn.
From a well-off gentry family, Deng had joined the Communist Party while a twenty-year-old guest worker in France, and then proceeded to Moscow. There he had studied at the ‘University of the Toilers of the East’, an institution mainly designed to churn out anti-colonial troublemakers in Asia and elsewhere. He had held his first Party position at twenty-three, gone on the Long March, commanded battalions against the Japanese, and been a member of the national leadership since 1949. He had, in short, a splendid revolutionary pedigree.
Barely five foot tall and portly, he looked like a mischievous but wise gnome. He had survived successive exiles from the start of the Cultural Revolution, when he had been condemned as a rightist and repeatedly forced into the countryside. For three years he lived in an abandoned military school, raising chickens, playing bridge and reading in the evening. Several of his political allies, such as Liu Shaoqi, had been killed, as had his youngest brother, Deng Shuping, a local politician in Guizhou province, who had been driven to suicide by the Red Guards in 1967.
In a way his exile provided some relief from the attacks he and his family had experienced in Beijing, of which the worst had been the fate of his son, Deng Pufang. After months of humiliations, a torture session at Beida University ended with him being thrown from a fourth-storey window, leaving him a paraplegic. Anti-Deng posters contrasted the ‘great red banner’ of Mao Zedong thought with the ‘rotting black counter-revolutionaries’ Deng and Liu Shaoqi.
Deng himself was protected by his contacts in the military where he had a strong enough power base to make attacking him directly politically risky even for Mao. Mao had never been able to dominate the military completely. There was no equivalent in China of the NKVD, which had thoroughly penetrated the Soviet Red Army.
Organised secret police forces were very small in China, where the machinery of repression operated through mob rule and local police and militia, though for many years outside observers, confused by the system’s surface resemblance to the Soviet Union, vastly exaggerated the role of intelligence agencies and policemen. The closest equivalent was the Central Committee Examination Group, established in 1966 and used to direct persecutions against the top leadership by Mao’s intelligence chief Kang Sheng, who had died in 1975.
And after a quarter century of continuous warfare, from 1927 to 1953, first against the Nationalists, then the Japanese, and then the Americans in Korea, the army had a very well developed sense of its own identity and rights. The military was armed and ready to defend itself. Its leaders looked down on the fanaticism of the Red Guards, sneered at the Gang of Four as parvenus, and protected their own.
Deng had also been protected by Mao himself. Unlike most of the other top leaders eliminated in the first years of the Cultural Revolution, Deng had never opposed Mao over the Great Leap Forward, which, for Mao, had been the ultimate test of loyalty. In a rambling attack on the rest of the leadership given in 1959, Mao had named every single politician present, with the sole exception of Deng, as having opposed him and been proven wrong.
Deng’s own speeches in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward show a mixture of guilty conscience and dogged loyalty. Speaking in 1961, after millions of his fellow Sichuanese had died in the famine, he said, ‘In the past, procurements were too heavy in some regions, for instance in Sichuan, where they have been heavy for quite a few years, including this year, but there was no alternative. I approve of the Sichuan style, they never moan about hardship, we could all learn from Sichuan.’23
Deng had other allies. Many believed that he must be a member of the Hakka, the ‘guest people’ of south-west China,24 since he was so closely supported by a number of prominent Hakka, particularly the army marshal Ye Jianying. In fact, he was a Han Chinese from Sichuan province, where feelings ran strong in defence of the local boy made good.
No amount of propaganda could wear away Sichuanese loyalties to Deng. When Deng had fallen in 1966, farmers and townspeople across the province had rallied against the attacks on him, even burning local Party buildings in protest. The protests were put down by militia units led by newly promoted Party members who weren’t part of the networks Deng had built up over the years, but the old attachments still lingered.
For Deng, revolution had always been a means to an end. Like many of the 1920s generation, he saw communism as a way of achieving both national strength and personal prosperity: a chicken in every pot and a tractor in every shed. In a country acutely conscious of its own humiliations over the past century, and where much of the population was cripplingly poor, it was tempting to follow the path the Soviets claimed to have forged to material prosperity. To Deng, as to many others, the value of communism didn’t lie in abstract principles of justice or moral values, but in tangible success – and when policies didn’t work, they could be changed. The famous line, ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice,’25 wasn’t original to Deng – if, indeed, he ever said those exact words at all – but it precisely summed up his pragmatic approach to government problems.
Deng’s flexible communism contrasted sharply with the ideology of his chief enemies, the Gang of Four. They practised the usual hypocrisies, especially Jiang Qing, who denounced pets, foreign music and foreign luxuries, while keeping songbirds, dancing to jazz and stocking her Zhongnanhai apartment with movie projectors and refrigerators, but they were still revolutionary purists. For Jiang Qing and the others, communism was a process of continual revolution and self-purging, both nationally and personally. A true communist state would constantly cleanse itself, lest counter-revolutionaries and right-wing deviators destroy it. For them, the Chinese people were a means to an end; for Deng, the good of the people was an end in itself.
They believe
d that the soul of the revolutionary state was far more important than its material success. The obsession with revolutionary purity had a long pedigree in both the European left-wing tradition and Chinese culture. Young Chinese, meanwhile, had been fixated on the elusive quality of chengyi, ‘sincerity’, since at least the 1890s. The older generations lacked sincerity, and thus only the pure hearts of the young could carry through revolution.
That revolution had been frustrated by Deng’s re-emergence and the general cooling down of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-seventies. Now, however, they saw themselves as being on the brink of seizing power. It was obvious that Mao had months left at best, and Jiang Qing followed his medical reports closely. Yet Deng still stood in the way. The day after Zhou’s death, Wang Hongwen telephoned colleagues in Shanghai, advising them, ‘You should turn grief into strength. Criticising Deng is the first priority.’26
Before 1975, Deng and Zhou had never actually been that close. Indeed, Deng had signalled his loyalty to Mao, during his own return to power, through a few carefully acid remarks aimed at Zhou. But over the course of the year, Zhou had come to see Deng as his only possible successor, and a reliable bulwark against the Gang of Four. Mao, in turn, had come to see Deng as a potential threat once more, launching in December a propaganda campaign, ‘Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend’,27 aimed at taking him down again.
Now, Deng was asked to give Zhou Enlai’s funeral oration. This was an honour, but also a risk. Although the terms he planned to use were boilerplate honorifics, with no hint of internal politics, it squarely placed him as the heir to Zhou’s policies, and right in the firing line of the Gang of Four – and Mao himself, if he turned his mind to it. Chatting to his daughter, one of his closest confidants, Deng expressed his own nervousness and fear. This would be a bad year, he thought, but it might turn out well in the end.
2 Living in coal country
Yu Xuebing was one of the seven black elements, and she wasn’t happy about it. Her family had been branded as class enemies a long time ago, during the Anti-Rightist campaign of the 1950s, and the label had stuck. Being ‘black’ made it hard for her to find boys willing to go out with her – and although she was only fourteen in 1976, she liked boys. And if they weren’t too scared of her family’s reputation, they tended to like her.
Unusually, she was an only child, with elderly parents; her mother was already sixty. She had four cousins, though, who in the Chinese fashion she called sisters and brothers. Space was cramped in their house, so quite often they slept over at hers.
Her family had been harassed in the last ten years, because they had once been rich. In the 1950s they had even owned a private car, which at the time was about equivalent to owning your own yacht. Her uncle, however, had got drunk and driven it into a ditch in the early sixties. Nobody in the county had been able to fix it, and it was left to rust by the side of their house.
In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, her uncle had been driven mad after being dragged out of his home for daily public criticism and beatings. Some of her relatives were in Taiwan now, having fled in 1949; her father sometimes wished aloud that he had gone with them.
During the first few years of the Cultural Revolution, Yu had lived in constant fear. She was only a small child at the time, but she picked up on the terror of the adults around her. She was disturbed by pictures of Liu Shaoqi’s wife being humiliated in public, since the same was happening to her family. The local Red Guards broke into their house several times, looking for signs of bourgeois wealth that they could steal. They stripped the floorboards and the roof for hiding places, and came away with a gold bracelet, a gold ring and 90 yuan. They also took the family’s precious sewing machine. After Deng’s rectifications of 1974, power in the village shifted, and her family was compensated for the lost cash, but they never saw the jewellery again.
Yu lived in a small village about a dozen miles outside Tangshan, with thirty-three other families. The road was still lined with crude effigies of Lin Biao, put up there in mockery after his ‘flight’ to Mongolia, along with more recent political slogans like ‘Earnestly study the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat’. For her, Tangshan was the city – it had a cinema, a library, a theatre, even a university. Going there was a rare treat. To outsiders, though, Tangshan was a backwater, overshadowed not only by Beijing but by the neighbouring city of Tianjin, an hour’s train ride away.
Tangshan was indeed a backwater, but it was also a powerhouse of heavy industry, nicknamed the ‘Coal Capital’ of China. Tangshanese coal drove Chinese industry, which was recovering strongly after years of decline. The first railway in China, only 7 km long, had been built in Tangshan to haul coal. Tangshan was still a major producer of rolling stock for China’s ever-expanding rail system.
It was a mining town, founded with British and Belgian money in 1877 to exploit the massive coal deposits nearby. They, like other foreign powers, had even won the right to station troops there after the Boxer Rebellion, though only the Japanese ended up sending soldiers there. After the foundation of the PRC, nationalisation had transformed the mines from an outpost of colonial power into a symbol of the new China’s industrial might.
The Kailuan mining complex, China’s first coal company, produced 5 per cent of the whole country’s coal. It had been designed by Herbert Hoover, later to be US president, during his stint as a mining engineer in China. Tangshanese liked to boast that, with about a million people, they were only a thousandth of the population of China, but produced a hundredth of the output. Economically, a single Tangshanese factory worker or miner was worth ten farmers. Pictures of new Tangshan industrial plants were among the first propaganda images produced by the PRC.
The city centre was on a low-lying plateau. Like most of Hebei, it was dry land, and in the spring winds choked the air with sand and dust. A few miles from the centre the hills started, scored with quarries and vast slag heaps that formed an eerie grey desert. Heavy trucks trundled across worn roads, bearing Tangshan’s coal to fuel the cities and steel factories of northern China.
Tangshanese prided themselves on being direct, blunt-spoken and strong. The workers of 1976 had been children during the grinding famine of the Great Leap Forward, and their growth had been stunted by malnutrition and starvation. Medical records from the Kailuan mines show an average height of only 1.57 metres, or just under 5 ft 2 in.
A stocky build was ideal for mining, and there was a strong Stakhanovite cult among the miners, with exceptionally productive workers receiving special bonuses, and a powerful sense of comradeship among the work gangs. Chinese miners had a long history of fierce leftist politics. In the first stages of the Cultural Revolution, the miners had formed their own revolutionary committees. The last five years had seen many ‘model workers’ drafted into politics or sent to universities to ‘instruct the educated youth’.
About a quarter of the city was given over to heavy industry, mostly in the eastern mining district. The whole city covered about fifty square kilometres, and most people lived in one-storey houses, with thick load-bearing walls made of brick or stone. They often had heavy concrete roofs made of cast-offs from the mines. It was a style of building pioneered by the British as workers’ housing. They had carried out seismological surveys of the planned mining area and found fault lines, but none serious enough, in their evaluation, to warrant putting up structures built to survive earthquakes. Only the houses and offices of the foreign staff were solid enough to withstand a severe quake.
Even after the foreigners left, newcomers to the mines had copied the buildings around them, throwing up weakly built, insecure houses, the roofs held up by heavy metal rods. In the fifties, new buildings, including multi-storey dormitories to house factory workers and university students, were thrown up with equal carelessness and speed.
Although regulations on earthquake-resistant building had been issued nationally in 1955, they weren’t enforced. In the early
years of the PRC, construction was modelled on the ‘fraternal advice’ given by the Soviet Union. The taller new buildings, like the official hotels and university dormitories, were built using plans provided by the Soviets, as were some of the factories. As in other Chinese cities, a couple of hundred Russians had been stationed in Tangshan in the fifties as technical advisors and overseers of the aid the USSR was supplying at the time. There would prove to be a marked difference in survivability between the buildings the Soviets directly supervised and those put together on Soviet blueprints, but with inexperienced Chinese architects.
Despite Tangshan’s industrial might, unemployment and underemployment were high. Many young people couldn’t find jobs, and spent their days doing occasional shifts at their parents’ workplaces or helping the local militias. Full employment was supposed to be one of the defining characteristics of the socialist state, but the combination of population pressures and economic stagnation made this impossible even in a country of farmers and make-work schemes.
In the previous twenty-five years, the country’s population – or, at least, that portion of it which the census-takers could find – had nearly doubled, from 583 million in 1953, a figure already 100 million more than the government expected, to over 900 million. Family planning policies had been contradictory and confusing, depending on the whims of the leadership: contraceptive drives one year, encouragement of fertility to ensure a stronger country the next.
Mao had commented in the fifties that, ‘We need planned births. I think humanity is inept at managing itself. It has plans for industrial production . . . but not the production of humans,’1 but efforts at population control had been denounced repeatedly in the sixties. The government was now providing free condoms in many areas, and the city birthrate was dropping, but in the countryside people still married young and had plenty of kids.
Economic growth had not kept pace with population growth. The Cultural Revolution included three years of outright recession, and many more of minimal growth. It was hard to make anything when supervisors kept being purged, technicians exiled, and more time was spent on political meetings and rallies than on the factory floor.