Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes

by James Palmer

  Rise up, you who would not be slaves

  Build with your flesh and blood a new Great Wall

  As China faces its greatest peril

  Everybody is forced to give their last.

  Rise up! Rise up! Rise up!

  Our million hearts beat as one.

  Brave the enemy’s fire! March on!

  With its stirring militarism, sense of imminent danger, and appeal to the masses, it seemed well suited to the Cultural Revolution. However, it had two flaws. The first was complete omission of mention of the Communist Party, and, in particular, of Mao Zedong.4 The second was the political unreliability of the lyricist.

  Tian Han, a young playwright when he wrote the original, eventually became the chairman of the Chinese Dramatists’ Association and a critic, from an idealist communist perspective, of Maoist policies. He had almost been exiled in 1959 for speaking privately against the Great Leap Forward, but the Tibetan uprising that same year had saved him, after Zhou Enlai commissioned him to write a play emphasising national unity and the historical roots of ‘China’s Tibet’.

  Mao’s hunger for vengeance against those who had opposed him over the famine encompassed even a politically insignificant artist. In 1966, Tian Han was stripped of his official posts and attacked by Red Guards, eventually dying under a false name in a military hospital in 1968. His musical collaborator on the song, Nie Er, had been murdered by pro-Japanese thugs in 1935. Their two deaths neatly spanned China’s national tragedies.

  So at Zhou’s funeral, instead of an epic of sacrifice and danger, they sang the approved alternative,

  The East is red, the sun is rising

  China has brought forth Mao Zedong

  He works for the people’s welfare.

  Hurrah! He is the people’s great saviour!

  Chairman Mao loves the people.

  Right at that moment, Chairman Mao did not love the people. Instead, hearing accounts of the crowds’ attitude to the dead Zhou, he was bitter and resentful. ‘[Zhou] opposed me over launching the Cultural Revolution, [and] not a small bunch of veterans all listened to him [although] on the surface they supported me.’5 He declared the mourning activities ‘a cover for restoration’, and told his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, to convey as much to the Politburo.

  Deng recognised the attack on the mourning activities as another swipe at him. The culmination of the campaign against him was close at hand. Sure enough, a few days after the funeral, he was relieved of his duties. This was a soft landing as he remained in the Politburo; but it was also, he realised, a prelude to something worse. He stopped attending the Politburo meetings unless summoned directly. When forced to go, he would be ‘criticised’ non-stop by the Gang of Four, with others opportunistically joining the tirade.

  It was the kind of humiliation that had driven some to despair or even suicide, but Deng bore the political blows easily enough. After all, he was used to it; this was his third time around on the political wheel, although he was nervous for his family. He even took the chance to wind up his opponents a little. Genuinely somewhat deaf, he would deliberately exaggerate it in order to ignore comments aimed at him at meetings.

  ‘When Hua Guofeng, way at the other end of the table in a low voice announces “meeting adjourned”, he hears it immediately and, pushing back his chair, gets up to leave!’6 complained Zhang Chunqiao, one of Deng’s fiercest critics. Deng pulled the same trick at a particularly heated meeting when some young students had been brought in to act as a claque for his critics. Amid catcalls and jeers, he got up and walked out, muttering ‘I am a deaf old man and I cannot hear what you folks are yelling about.’7

  Marshal Ye Jianying, one of Deng’s close allies, also stopped going to the Politburo meetings. Ye was another of the old revolutionaries, a friend of Zhou Enlai, and one of China’s greatest generals. His power base was in Guangdong, a massive southern province. He’d implemented relatively sane and mild policies there in the 1950s, trying to work with former landlords instead of condemning them wholesale, but had fallen victim to the hardline insistence on class struggle and had his policies rescinded by Mao and Lin Biao.

  Like many of the founding Party veterans, he looked as though he should be playing with his grandson in a park, not running a country, but his wispy hair and thick-rimmed glasses concealed a still-sharp mind. Trained in Moscow, Ye had been chief of staff of the PLA in the war against the Japanese, and was a formidable tactician, organiser and analyst – skills he brought to politics as well.

  In 1967 he tried to cut the Cultural Revolution off at the knees when, along with other prominent military men, he launched a fierce attack on the leftists at a meeting in Zhongnanhai, openly condemning the mess they were making of the country and the attacks on old cadres. It was a bold move, and if he had been dealing only with a rogue political faction, it might have worked. He hadn’t realised that the leftists were acting for Mao, and how deeply Mao was committed to backing them. It had only been age and status that saved him and the other generals from being entirely destroyed, and he’d been forced out of high-level politics for four years until Mao brought him back to provide military backing for his moves against Lin Biao.

  Now he was engaged in a tactical retreat. Nearly seventy-nine, he used his age as an excuse, pleading ‘illness’ to explain why he could no longer come to meetings, and instead staying with his family at his home in the western hills of Beijing. It was a subtle show of support for Deng, and a snub aimed at the members of the Gang of Four, whom he loathed. They’d gone after him again in 1973, after he’d worked with Zhou to build relations with the US, accusing him of ‘right-wing capitulationism’. In private, he’d mock Jiang as ‘the actress’ (with much the same tone, one imagines, as a seventeenth-century Puritan would have used for the term) and Zhang as ‘glasses’.

  Deng’s removal left Mao with a serious dilemma. Deng was obviously the most competent member of the Politburo, and he would have been the only natural choice to succeed Zhou. But now that was out of the question, and the decision couldn’t be put off. Whoever Mao picked would be not only second-in-command, but would be seen as having his blessing as successor.

  Mao knew the end was coming. As he grew weaker, questions of succession continued to trouble him. He could have followed the model of past Chinese revolutionary leaders, picking one of his own children and effectively creating a new imperial dynasty. That was Kim Il Sung’s choice in Korea, although his personality cult had always been far more baroque than even Mao’s. Mao’s only surviving son, Mao Anqing, was tragically incapable of ruling. He suffered from severe mental illness, diagnosed by Chinese doctors as schizophrenia but possibly the result of trauma suffered during a vicious beating by the Shanghai police. Whatever the cause, he was depressive, occasionally delusional, and given to fits of anger to the point where he attacked people.

  Anqing and his brother, Anying, had been left in Shanghai after their mother was executed by the Nationalists, and ended up on the streets, fending for themselves. It was only by luck that they had been found again: five of Mao’s other children, two sons and three daughters, had been left behind in various villages and towns during the fight against the Nationalists and the Japanese, and were never heard of again.

  Mao had tried to toughen up Anying, a sensitive young man, by sending him to aid in the land reform programme in Communist-held areas in 1948, where he had been shocked by the brutality he witnessed. ‘After careful rehearsals, on the fifth day denunciations began . . . all the masses were told to raise their hands and shout “Kill! Kill! Kill! ”’ he wrote in his diary, ‘Eight people were beaten to death.’8 In order to prove himself, he volunteered to fight the Americans in Korea. There he would fight alongside many other ‘volunteers’ who had gone to the war to cleanse themselves of perceived bourgeois taint or Nationalist connections. He was killed in an American napalm attack, leaving Mao with a mad son and two surviving daughters.

  Mao had a surrogate son, however, Mao Yuanxin, the son of h
is younger brother. Mao Yuanxin’s father had been killed in 1943, when he was two, and his uncle had become his guardian. He’d risen to be one of the rulers of Liaoning, a small north-eastern province, where he was also a political commissar in the PLA. From the start he’d sided with the far left, cosied up to Jiang Qing, and run a grimly repressive regime in Liaoning. He had vigorously badmouthed Deng to Mao in the second half of 1975, helping persuade Mao to back the campaign against him. But he wasn’t in the Politburo, had an abrasive personality, and was far too young to be a plausible candidate. Mao used him as a liaison to communicate with the Politburo from his deathbed, but wasn’t prepared to commit China’s future to him, though he envisaged it being a possibility in a few years’ time.

  With any likelihood of a family dynasty gone, Mao toyed with other heirs. The most obvious was Lin Biao, who was actually appointed Mao’s official successor in a rewrite to the Constitution. After his fall, however, Mao became cagey about explicitly naming another pick.

  For several years though, there seemed to be a clear frontrunner. Wang Hongwen, the youngest member of the Gang of Four, had been transferred to Beijing from Shanghai at Mao’s personal request in September 1972, and begun attending high-level meetings. It was an obvious grooming for power, and, indeed Mao made him, at the age of thirty-eight, a vice-chairman of the Party in 1973. Mao had picked him as a sop to the leftists, and because he was worried about preserving the spirit of the Cultural Revolution at the same time as circumstances compelled him to let Zhou restore Deng and other pragmatists to power. But Wang had proved yet another disappointment to the Chairman.

  Although brash and forceful, he was both unnerved by working at such a high level and overwhelmed by the volume of bureaucracy and the weight of the decisions he had to make. He kept looking to Jiang Qing for advice and guidance, until he was soon perceived as nothing but her creature. Wang had lived for some time near Jiang at the Diaoyutai state guesthouse, another complex of old buildings built around a favourite fishing spot of past emperors, though he switched his home back to Zhongnanhai later. Mao frequently warned him off Jiang Qing: ‘Don’t form this little Shanghai clique!’ Sometimes, talking to friends back home, Wang regretted how close he’d become to her, but then he’d go back and end up nodding along once more. He could yell at a political opponent or lead men into battle, but he lacked the grit or the wiles to run a country.

  Zhang Chunqiao, another member of the Gang of Four, arrogantly expected to be promoted to Zhou’s former role. He was among the highest-ranking Politburo members, and ran a tight organisational ship. His hopes were misplaced. Mao had a fine sense of balance and picking Zhang would have angered so many of the old guard that he never really considered it. Instead Mao started to favour another likely successor, Hua Guofeng, who was named acting Premier on 8 February 1976.

  His appointment was announced in the first central policy document of the year, always reserved for a matter of serious state import. Hua, born in Mao’s home province of Hunan in 1921, was already minister of public security and a Politburo member, but his appointment came as something of a surprise nonetheless.

  It was certainly a slap in the face of the Gang of Four. They showed their feelings in different ways. Zhang and Yao started saying to each other whenever they met, ‘Hey, the higher you go, the harder you fall,’9 in reference to Hua. Wang Hongwen, on the other hand, bought a motorcycle and started driving around Zhongnanhai and Diaoyutai late at night at great speeds. It was a reminder of his relative youth compared to the rest of China’s leadership; at forty-one, he was about twenty years younger than the average Politburo member.

  It’s still hard to know what to make of Hua. Some thirty-five years on, nobody seems to have really understood what exactly prompted Mao to elevate him to one of the most powerful positions in the country. Some experts on Chinese elite politics, such as Victor Shih, have seriously suggested that Hua was, in fact, Mao’s illegitimate son, abandoned and then rediscovered in Hunan. The two had a certain family resemblance, both tall, good-looking men in their youth who lapsed into chubbiness in middle-age, but not an uncanny one.10

  In fact, Mao first noticed Hua in 1959, when the latter was a Party official overseeing Mao’s old home town. While on a visit, Mao was impressed both by Hua’s efficient management and his building of a memorial hall commemorating Mao’s early life. This mixture of talent, personal charm and sycophancy would be critical in Hua’s rise to the top.

  Hua had a respectable military background – he had served under General Zhu De as a regular soldier for twelve years – but had done nothing spectacular. Like a lot of people, he’d taken a patriotic name, replacing his birth name of Su Zhu. Hua Guofeng was an abbreviation of a wartime description for his unit – Zhonghua kangri jiuguo xianfengdui, ‘Nation-Saving Vanguard of Chinese Resistance Against Japan’. He was a ‘38-er’, someone who had joined the Party after the Japanese invasion, lacking the credentials of the old guard. (Admittedly, he hardly had a choice in the matter, since he had been only a child during the first struggle against the Nationalists, and had joined the Party at seventeen.)

  It was Hunan that made him. He’d become provincial Party secretary in the early sixties, cannily sided with leftists in the chaos of 1966, and then been equally opportunistic in using the army to crush them in 1969. He first came to Beijing in 1971, to work with Zhou Enlai, but had returned to Hunan before being elected to the Politburo in 1973 and made minister of public security in 1975.

  Most of all, though, he was all things to all men. It was rare for anyone to come away from a conversation with Hua without the feeling that he agreed with them. He could listen, which, at a time when everyone was shouting, was a rare gift. He was the kind of man who could have been a successful mid-level politician in any system, a well-liked MP, say, or a regularly re-elected mayor. People remembered him as modest, likeable and friendly. He had the same common touch that Mao liked to show, remembering children’s names, family illnesses and nagging health concerns. He could visit a town and still be remembered with fondness decades later.

  Hua’s social skills didn’t transfer, unfortunately, to dealing with foreigners. Singaporean dictator Lee Kuan Yew dismissed him as a ‘thug’, and one Australian ambassador saw him as ‘wooden, forgettable, and not engaging with his visitor’s agenda’.11 Even in a Chinese context, he couldn’t get on with everyone; Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua, a veteran politician, complained when accompanying Hua to greet diplomatic visitors that his role was like ‘the tutor looking after the ignorant crown prince’.

  He got on with almost everybody else. Critically, he was seen as a moderating figure, somebody who could walk the fine line between right and left. He’d helped Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping with various projects, but he was also on cordial terms with the leftists, and he’d managed much of the anti-Deng campaign of late 1975. As a relative newcomer to Beijing, he was not bound into the nets of old enmities and friendships as closely as the others, and his lack of a major political power base made him appear less threatening. He was probably closest to Wang Dongxing, Mao’s security chief.

  Born in 1916, Wang was a Long March veteran. An orphaned peasant boy taken in by revolutionaries, he was deeply loyal to Mao. He controlled the powerful 8341 security unit, which was not only in charge of guarding the senior political leadership but had also taken over several factories and important institutions in Beijing. He had a long-standing enmity with Jiang Qing, and the two had a history of regularly sniping at each other. After almost tripping himself up by supporting Lin Biao when Mao was beginning to turn against him, he redeemed himself in Mao’s eyes by doing everything he could to make sure that the supremo’s needs were met – including the cover-ups of his sexual escapades.

  Mao expected Hua to be discreet in a very different way. When he picked Hua, he had something more than just a political fix in mind. He was looking for someone who could ensure not only stability, but also that Mao’s own legacy was never abandoned. He had bee
n dwelling on this repeatedly for the last few years, calling meetings to discuss the Cultural Revolution’s pros (ideological cleansing and revolutionary triumph) and cons (failure to keep up living standards), and who was to blame (people who weren’t with him, but especially Lin Biao and his ‘anti-Party clique’). The meetings saw little discussion as the last people to stand up to Mao, over the failures of the Great Leap Forward, had been swiftly disposed of.

  A later Chinese joke captures Hua’s devotion to Mao. ‘Mao, Deng and Hua are crossing a bridge in the countryside when it collapses, leaving all three of them clinging on as the remains of the bridge dangle into the ravine below. The bridge is straining, and it’s obvious that it can’t bear the weight of all three of them. So Deng says: “Great Helmsman, the people cannot continue without your inspired leadership. China is nothing without Mao Zedong! I will cast myself into the abyss so that you may climb to safety.” Hua is so moved that he lets go to applaud . . .’ From Mao’s point of view, Hua’s sycophancy was just what was needed.

  Mao was always keenly interested in the writing of history. When the historian and deputy mayor of Beijing, Wu Han, wrote his biography of the Hongwu Emperor, the first ruler of the Ming dynasty, Mao read it attentively and suggested numerous changes. Zhu Yuanzhang, who became the Hongwu Emperor, was a peasant who had risen to greatness by leading a revolutionary movement against foreign occupiers (Mongols, in this case). In power, though, he eliminated those who had helped him rise, purged officials in the name of popular discontent, and then been disappointed that the ones he replaced them with turned out no better, ran a ruthless secret police and reduced his reign to a byword for tyranny.

  Mao was entirely aware of the parallels, and his changes offered justification for Zhu’s actions in the name of political unity and national strength. His editorial concerns didn’t stop him destroying Wu Han’s entire family later, after the unfortunate scholar wrote a historical drama in which the dismissal of an upstanding official seemed to mirror Mao’s own dismissal of the peasant general Peng Dehuai in 1959. Wu was beaten and humiliated by Red Guards. He died in prison in 1968, and his wife, who was sentenced to hard labour, a year later. Meanwhile Wu’s daughter suffered a mental breakdown and then, in an act of utterly pointless vengeance, was arrested in 1975 and driven to suicide. A man who could set such things in motion had reason to worry what history might say about him.