Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes

by James Palmer

  Deng appreciated, more than anyone else at the top, the vast reservoir of public bitterness and anger the Cultural Revolution had left behind. True, the Whateverists had the millions of provincial cadres who had been promoted during the Cultural Revolution on their side. They were acutely aware that the political shift left them critically vulnerable, especially if the justification for their seizure of power was condemned from the centre. They figured, too, that the people they’d displaced, imprisoned and tortured during their rise to power would be only too keen to take revenge, or their families would. After all, it had happened after every other political hurricane of the last thirty years.

  Deng knew that the beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution were vastly outnumbered by those it had damaged. He began by starting a campaign to reinstate provincial cadres who had lost power over the previous decade – 400,000 in Hebei alone, for instance, and millions more across the country. This created a bureaucracy increasingly loyal to him. At the same time, he used the newly reinstated officials and his own political allies to purge the beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution, putting his own men into place as each leftist official was pushed out.

  At the centre, Deng concentrated on cracking Hua’s fragile coalition of allies, spreading rumours and pressuring his own friends, such as the military leader Wei Guoqing, to withdraw their support of Hua. He concentrated on departments, such as the foreign ministry and the navy, which were full of old allies of Zhou Enlai. He was helped by Zhao Ziyang, the powerful Sichuan leader who had been attacked by the Gang of Four over the small earthquake there. Zhao, like Deng, saw Hua as a jumped-up no-account bureaucrat, and from the very start of his administration pointedly refused to back him.

  Deng’s third line of attack was intellectual and populist at the same time. He launched a new slogan in 1978, ‘Seek truth from facts’, a pointed contrast with the leftists’ insistence on the primacy of ideology over reality. With his sponsorship, a ‘Democracy Campaign’ began in 1978. Hua was bullied into acquiescing in the campaign, which was both a genuine outpouring of popular feeling and another excuse to attack Hua’s supporters.

  In Beijing, a ‘Democracy Wall’ was established, on which people pinned big-character posters, long essays and slogans. The original postings were taken from a magazine, closed down on Wang Dongxing’s orders, that had reproduced many of the poems of April 1976. Deng was particularly interested in promoting the idea of the rule of law, both in contrast to the anarchy of the last decade and in order to show that Hua’s appointment as Premier had no clear legal backing. The idea of ‘the rule of law’, as opposed to ‘the rule of man’, came up over and over again.

  ‘Scar literature’, often semi-autobiographical, became popular. The protagonists were victims of Cultural Revolution persecution, such as in Liu Xinwu’s groundbreaking story ‘Class Teacher’. As indicated by the name, it concentrated upon the lingering mental and physical effects of the persecutions, not upon the political origins. The public ate up these tales of suffering and redemption through love, family or a renewed faith in Marxism. The government gave the genre tentative support, as long as it didn’t veer too far from the official line.

  One of the finest artistic responses came in the form of an exhibition in Guangdong, organised by the great cartoonist Liao Bingxiong, along with five other artists. It was hugely popular, attracting over 10,000 visitors a day. Liao had been active in the 1940s and 1950s, penning scathing depictions of Chinese corruption and colonial oppression, followed by propaganda work for the New China. He’d been caught up in the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1956, and had sworn off cartooning, producing no new work for twenty-two years. Suddenly, following the fall of the Gang of Four, he began to work again.

  Outside the exhibition, a standing tombstone was dedicated to ‘Comrade Zhang Zhixin’. Zhang had been an ordinary middle-aged woman, and a critic of ultra-leftist policies in 1969. She had been arrested, imprisoned, raped, tortured and finally executed by decapitation, with her vocal cords slit first so that she couldn’t cry out Marxist slogans at the end. Her two daughters, aged ten and eighteen, had been made to sign a document before her death.

  Even though she gave birth to me and is my mother, she is a counter-revolutionary and is my enemy. She opposes the Party and Chairman Mao, and we must continue to struggle against her.2

  A mirror had been placed above the tombstone, along with an invitation to all Party members to look in it, and measure themselves against Zhang’s standards. It was a startling piece of confrontational memory, and the works inside the exhibition were no less powerful. One of the first showed Liao himself, freshly reborn from a broken burial urn, but his body still clenched in the shape of the urn. ‘After the fall of the four demons,’ the caption read, ‘This is for me, and all the others like me.’

  It was followed by a series of extraordinary works entitled ‘Annals of a Nightmare’, reminiscent of Goya’s black paintings.3 They mixed images of the Red Guards and the Gang of Four with the images of traditional Chinese culture, both heroes and demons. Here was Judge Bao, a renowned detective and magistrate, wearing a placard saying ‘Big Black Gang’ and arrested for political crimes by creatures of the underworld, the Red Guard usurping the role of judge of the dead and condemning scholars and philosophers, and gleefully elevating famous traitors to heroes.

  The final cartoon showed a land awash with blood, with ruined walls labelled ‘Cultural Revolution’ and placards of Mao floating in the carnage. In a touch of hope, two large goldfish, a symbol of prosperity and happiness, are being hooked from the sea of red, but blood splatters fly from them as they are lifted up.

  Most daringly, another of Liao’s cartoons showed a fat cat in imperial robes. (Cat is mao in Chinese, though with a different tone to Mao’s name.) It watches smugly as rats steal fish. The caption goes ‘This cat, with his air of a god, sees the rats but doesn’t catch them.’ A final picture showed Liao’s worries, as a clearly fanatical figure pores over the new liberal texts – noting down names for future use. This would be unfortunately prescient, although it would be pragmatists, not fanatics, who oversaw the next wave of persecution.

  By the Party conference of December 1978, Deng had firm control. Hua was able to cling on as Premier for the moment, but his supporters were ousted, and Deng effectively ran the country. He began economic reforms, drawing on experiments by Zhao Ziyang in Sichuan, and set out to improve relations with Western powers. His biggest achievement was the official recognition of the PRC by the US government, building on Zhou Enlai’s previous work. It was good for both sides, even if it did leave the Taiwanese convinced that Jimmy Carter, the then US president, was history’s greatest monster.4

  Apparently determined to demonstrate emphatically the shared values of the US and China, Deng went on to invade Vietnam in February 1979. The nominal excuse was border clashes, but the real reason was a long-running split over influence in the region and, in particular, China’s discontent with Vietnam’s ousting of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, a Beijing protégé who had managed, proportionately, to excel even the Chinese standards for mass murder. In Chinese, with the usual over-protestation of innocence, it was called the ‘Counterattack Against Vietnam in Self-Defence’.

  The operation was a three-month, 100,000-man chevauchée that culminated in a brutal Chinese retreat, burning granaries and factories and murdering thousands of Vietnamese as they left. In turn, the Vietnamese persecuted ethnic Chinese, driving many of them out of the country. The campaign exposed the PLA’s incompetence at fighting a real army, rather than a gaggle of civilians; losses may have run as high as a quarter of their men and half of their tanks.

  The war finished the Democracy Movement, as protestors started to turn on Deng himself. Deng ordered a crackdown, going back to the usual language of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘bad elements’. He evoked the spectre of the chaos of 1966 as he warned of ‘ultra-democracy and anarchism’. With their usefulness over, Deng, like Mao, was quite willing
to discard one-time allies. He would have very little truck with criticism of the Party’s right to rule or with talk of democracy in the future.

  Deng’s anti-Hua campaign intensified. With his power base destroyed by Deng’s manipulations, Hua was left stranded at the top. Many of his allies were pushed out at the 1979 Party conference, and Politburo meetings started to take on an increasingly bullying tone, as Hua was berated for his lack of abilities and the way he had assumed the Premiership. He soon capitulated, agreeing to resign his most important official titles. The final verdict was exceptionally humiliating, with Hua having to confess, before the rest of the Politburo, that he had never been capable of running the nation and had been promoted far beyond his abilities. By now his power was formal at best, and Deng and Hu Yaobang were effectively performing his job duties.

  In his purge of China’s top ranks, Deng was careful to signal that the days of exile and murder were over. Apart from the Gang of Four themselves, the ousted leaders were almost all put out to grass in comfortable sinecures, not imprisoned or executed. Deng would have hated the comparison, but the decision was very similar to Khrushchev’s own actions against his fellow members of the Stalinist old guard in the 1950s, where once-powerful figures were stripped of their chief responsibilities and dispatched to minor positions – Stalin’s foreign minister, Molotov, found himself appointed Soviet ambassador to Mongolia.

  Hua and Wang Dongxing, for instance, were allowed to retain membership of top-level committees and to keep a variety of impressive official titles, while being kept away from any actual power or influence. Their children were permitted to rise to comfortable mid-level jobs in the army or state administration. The message was clear: the political game at the top levels would no longer be fought for fatal stakes.

  The relative mercy shown at the top was echoed throughout the country. The focus was on rehabilitating the victims of the Cultural Revolution, not punishing the perpetrators. In one typical Hebei town, Raoyang, studied by the political scientist Edward Friedman, 1,241 people branded as ‘bad elements’ had their cases reviewed, and all but five of them were cleared. The investigations went back to the pre-Cultural Revolution era: out of 622 older cases, mostly dating from the Anti-Rightist Campaign, 564 were cleared. People were re-labelled as ordinary peasants, and no longer branded with the black mark of wealth. Out of 93 people in Raoyang who had been tortured, 77 were cleared.

  The torturers themselves faced no great repercussions, though across the country tens of thousands of ‘helicoptered’ officials were demoted. Those who were found guilty of serious crimes lost their jobs, but rarely faced worse. Humiliation and degradation were usually as bad as it got, and even that was limited. ‘Three kinds of people [were condemned]. Those who followed the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing cliques, those obsessed with factionalist ideas, and people who engage in smashing, beating and looting.’

  The courts did try a few people involved in atrocities, but punishments were restricted, and rarely exceeded relatively short sentences. In Dao County, Hunan, for instance, the site of a massacre of over 4,000 people in 1967, 42 of the perpetrators were arrested in 1986 after a protracted investigation, and each sentenced to ten years in prison. The killings and rapes had been so bad that another 12 people, who had originally been arrested during the Cultural Revolution itself, were also condemned to serve short jail terms. Although 54 people had been punished, unofficial estimates showed that over 14,000 people must have been involved in the atrocities in Dao County.

  The decision not to start a new round of persecutions was a clear sign that the days of fractured violence were over. The signals coming from the centre weren’t the only reason for the lack of vengeance. The public was tired of politics and of killings. This hardly served justice, but it kept the peace. Many powerful local figures survived simply by switching to the Deng team as soon as it was obvious who was going to win. People had to keep working, living and serving on committees with the same people who had tortured them and killed their relatives, but the cycle of politicised revenge that had been repeated every few years in the countryside since 1945 was broken.

  Even the Gang of Four faced imprisonment, not execution. Their show trial was held in 1980, when they were accused of having persecuted 727,240 people and being responsible for the deaths of 34,274 – a fraction of the real figures, with the victims’ names carefully selected for maximum sympathy value and ideological correctness. Jiang Qing sneered at the court, smirking and yawning as the indictment was read, and insisting on conducting her own defence.

  The prosecution combined the usual mixture of personal insult with legalistic denunciation, but tried to keep Mao’s name as far from the listed crimes as possible. It was Jiang who kept bringing him back in, insisting – completely truthfully – that much of the time she’d been operating entirely in line with her husband’s wishes. ‘I was the one who stood by Chairman Mao Zedong! Arresting me and bringing me to trial is a defamation of Chairman Mao! . . . Do you think I was a monster with six arms and three heads, capable of doing all this by myself?’5 Wang Hongwen, meanwhile, all but collapsed, admitting, with due expressions of shame, his role in starting riots and persecuting the innocent.

  In the end Wang got life, Yao twenty years, and Jiang and Zhang got ‘suspended’ death sentences – an odd Chinese form of verdict, today most frequently handed out to corrupt officials and business executives, which in theory is designed to allow the criminal to ‘reform’, but in practice inevitably results in the sentence being commuted to ‘life’ (and, nowadays, a quiet release a few years later). Jiang hanged herself in 1991 after developing throat cancer, Wang died of cancer in prison the next year, while Yao and Zhang were released in old age and died in closely monitored obscurity.

  As for Hua, the rest of his life was quiet. He occasionally complained to his children about mistakes he felt his successors were making, but he was never dominated by bitterness. His main interest became cultivating grapes. A famous photo taken at the 2007 Party Congress showed a crumpled Hua enjoying a nap as the delegates spoke. His death in August 2008 received extremely low-key coverage from the Chinese media, unwilling to remind people of a period of ‘political errors’. For most people his time in power was a half-remembered curiosity.

  Although he never took on either of what were, nominally, the country’s two top jobs, Party Chairman or Premier, Deng was now undoubtedly the most powerful figure in China. Instead, he appointed two of his close allies, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, to these positions. No new portraits went up next to Mao’s as Hua’s came down. Deng’s own verdict on Hua’s reign was brutal, but accurate. Hua’s rule had been ‘just a transition, not an epoch. His policies were a continuation of the late Mao’s, and there was nothing original about him.’6 Deng was determined that his own rule would be far more transformative.

  And it was. Deng’s new policies of ‘reform and opening’ let loose a gigantic flood of creative and economic energy, especially from the countryside. Farmers were released from the constraints of the collectivist system, and labour increasingly freed to move around the country. With the creation of Special Economic Zones in the south, huge factories sprang up, ready to put the flood of migrant workers to good use on the assembly line.

  Individual entrepreneurs became multi-millionaires, taking to heart Deng’s injunction that it was alright for some to ‘get rich first’. Many of them wouldn’t last, falling victim to accusations – mostly true – of mass corruption, political battles, or, in the case of Xinjianese businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer, who went from running a laundry to a gigantic cross-border trade empire, to charges of ethnic separatism. Millions of others moved from their marginal existence in the countryside to middle-class prosperity in cities and towns.

  In the 1980s, the items everybody wanted shifted from radios, bicycles, sewing machines and watches to televisions, refrigerators, washing machines and tape decks. The four aspirational items of the 1970s put together cost an average worker two years’ i
ncome; in the early 1980s, a mere seven months of savings sufficed. Private cars returned to the roads, though in very small numbers at first. Beijing began sprouting multi-storey apartment buildings and freshly built compounds, with walls and guards to keep the riff-raff out, as well as two new ring roads to cope with the influx of traffic.7

  Tangshan came late to this new prosperity. For years after the earthquake, Tangshanese continued to live in what was in reality a gigantic refugee camp. It wasn’t until 1979 – 80 that serious rebuilding of houses began, and as late as 1983 two-thirds of survivors still lacked permanent homes. In the meantime, they lived in lean-to shacks built of wood and tin, from where they travelled to work in factories with still-leaking roofs. Quake fears meant many people were reluctant to move into the new buildings, scared to have anything solid above their heads again. Some moved away, such as He Jianguo, who married and went to work as a teacher in the southern province of Anhui, but most stayed, whether out of hukou restrictions, work commitments or civic pride.

  The city was essentially rebuilt by 1986 – to exhaustive anti-earthquake standards. It benefitted from the industrial boom of the 1980s, its coal now fuelling factories turning out cheap toys and plastic goods for the export market. Older Tangshanese are still very proud of the new buildings of the era, clean, well-built and safe compared to the past, and a symbol of the city’s resilience. They’re proud, too, of their mines, which maintain safety standards far higher than the infamous private operations which surfaced in the 1980s in other provinces. Chang Qing, the photographer – now so universally respected that I never heard anyone refer to him as other than ‘Teacher Chang’ – took pictures of the city each year, showing the gradual rise of a new, modern town from the ashes of the old. The phoenix became the city’s symbol.