Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (6 page)

The ascendancy of the army also meant the rise of its leader, Marshal Lin Biao, who for a time in the early 1970s became Mao’s official successor. (It was Lin who published the
Little Red Book
of canonical Mao quotations, driving Mao’s personality cult to new heights.) But then Lin fell into disfavor and fled the country after
an alleged attempt to seize power. The precise circumstances of the incident remain obscure; Lin died when his underfueled plane crashed in Mongolia. Though the sloganeering continued, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution gradually ebbed. But the damage it had caused endured for years. Education and scholarship were stunted by the assaults on “counterrevolutionary” science, technology, and culture.

By the mid-1970s, some of the survivors were beginning to trickle back. Those at the highest ranks of the party knew that Mao was dying and that his era was at an end. But no one knew what would come next.

I
n the early hours of July 28, 1976, deep beneath the industrial city of Tangshan in northeastern China, a slab of the earth’s crust slipped out of place. The jolt that resulted lasted only fifteen seconds, but it was enough to scar the mind of a generation. Many of the city’s 1.6 million residents, still half-asleep, died as their homes, mostly shoddy brick apartment buildings, collapsed around them. The bewildered survivors, many of them seriously hurt, stumbled into the darkness. The quake destroyed hospitals and blocked roads, preventing emergency teams from reaching the hardest-hit areas, in some cases for days. Thousands of the wounded died before help reached them. The death toll announced by the government came to 250,000; the real figure was probably much higher. (Experts now say that the casualties of the quake may have been three times higher than the official number.) It was the deadliest earthquake of the twentieth century, but unless you happen to be Chinese, chances are that you have never heard of it. The reasons for its obscurity have little to do with geology and everything to do with politics.
¹

The earthquake made itself felt far beyond the city limits of Tangshan. Even in Beijing, about a hundred miles away, residents awoke in terror as walls and ceilings gave way. People milled in the streets, refusing to go back inside their homes. Some moved their beds into their courtyards, too scared to sleep indoors; soon, as if to compound the general misery, it began to rain, forcing many of them back inside. One particularly enterprising family of Beijingers, after camping outside in their courtyard for a few nights, decided to build a makeshift earthquake shelter inside
their home. They gathered together all the tables they could find, lined them up, and covered them with the wooden frames and planks from their beds; mattresses went on the floor underneath. Now, it seemed, they could sleep without fear.

But there was a problem with the patriarch of the family, age seventy-one: “He had the typical old man’s enlarged prostate gland, which meant that he had to get up several times during the night to urinate,” his daughter later recalled in a memoir. “The shelter was low and bending was difficult. That wasn’t so bad, but he sometimes bumped his head.”
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He would just have to cope. This was only the latest in a series of misfortunes. Just a few months earlier, he had been one of the most powerful people in China—but then he had been felled by his enemies, stripped of his positions and dispatched into political limbo. His future, and that of the family that depended on him, was unclear. There was no way for them to know how long the situation would last.

The old man’s name was Deng Xiaoping. Over the previous decade, his life had described a bewildering trajectory. By the middle of the 1960s, he had attained a lofty position as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, just below Mao Zedong, the party’s giant, and Liu Shaoqi, China’s head of state. The onset of the Cultural Revolution changed everything. Liu was abruptly purged and died not long afterward of prolonged torture and medical neglect. Deng, too, found himself a victim of the savage capriciousness of Mao, the man he had so long revered. With stunning rapidity, Deng fell from the summit of government into humiliation and obscurity. In 1969 he and his wife were dispatched to a provincial tractor-repair shop, where they spent the next four years. Though Deng managed to escape the humiliations and torture visited upon so many others, his period in internal exile was not easy. His family members endured many privations. At one point, his older son jumped out of a top-floor window to escape rampaging Red Guards and was crippled for life in the fall.

Countless other Chinese had lived through similar horrors during the Cultural Revolution; many of the survivors had experienced stories even more convoluted than Deng’s. But by the mid-1970s, as the Cultural Revolution faded, a decade of violence and upheaval was giving way to pervasive exhaustion and disillusionment. In this light, perhaps, it was understandable that many Chinese saw the Tangshan earthquake not merely as a natural disaster but also as a portent of serious change. The year 1976, as everyone knew, was the Dragon Year—a moment in the Chinese zodiac that is pregnant with the possibility of epochal transformation, and perhaps calamity as well. (In Chinese history, indeed, those two things frequently go together.)

The earthquake was not the only omen. A few months earlier, in January, the nation had witnessed the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, an urbane party grandee
whose passing triggered a surprising surge of public grief. Not everyone was quite so sad to see him go. The people who had benefited the most from the Cultural Revolution—above all Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and her political allies—hated Zhou, who did not share their radical zeal. Taking their cue from Mao, who had become increasingly hostile toward his colleague over the years, they ensured that the funeral observances were kept to a minimum. But many Chinese deemed this an insult to the memory of the man. As they saw it, this was someone who had worked to contain the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and for that he deserved their thanks. People around the country expressed their loyalty to Zhou in wall posters and commemorative bouquets—often openly defying official instructions against public displays of sympathy for the dead premier.

Deng, who had returned from internal exile in 1973, just three years earlier, had done his best to carry on Zhou’s course, which prioritized practical economic development over revolutionary sentiment. Jiang and her friends accused Deng of masterminding the popular expressions of mourning for Zhou and succeeded in persuading Mao—who, old and ailing, was getting more paranoid and ill-natured by the day—to remove him from his day-to-day work at the top of the government.

Just a few weeks later, public opinion caught the leadership off guard by reasserting itself once again. In early April, many Chinese seized upon the Qing Ming Festival, China’s traditional day of mourning, to make up for the party’s failure to pay the necessary respect to Zhou. In Beijing alone, close to 2 million people visited Tiananmen Square to show their respect for the dead premier. Party leaders ordered the police to move in and clear the square of the vast pile of flowers and wreaths left by the mourners. When mourners gathered in the square again on April 5, they were outraged to discover that their tributes to Zhou had been cleared away. Anger gave way to public demonstrations. Soon tens of thousands of people were rioting in the heart of the capital.

Jiang and other acolytes of the Cultural Revolution denounced the mourners as enemies of the state and called out the troops, who cleared the streets with considerable bloodshed. Many demonstrators were injured; it is not clear whether any were killed. Jiang and her three main allies—soon to be known as the “Gang of Four”
³
—now saw an opportunity to finish off Deng, whom they viewed as their primary enemy. Mao had brought him back from exile precisely because he saw Deng as a skilled manager and problem solver. As Mao saw it, the Cultural Revolution had achieved his intended goal of jolting society out of its lethargy, and he now acknowledged that it was time to restore a degree of stability after years of economic turbulence. Mao still valued Deng’s administrative expertise, and he knew that this small yet tough man was just the person he needed to reinstill a sense of discipline.
He also knew that Deng’s comeback would balance the growing power of the radical faction surrounding his own wife, whom he correctly suspected of maneuvering to seize the reins after his death.

But by the time of Deng’s dismissal, Mao, now eighty-one, was seriously ill, plagued by the symptoms of what appears to have been amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Barely capable of speech, he was reduced to communicating by means of cryptic remarks scrawled on notepads; often the only person who could decipher them was the comely young woman who now served as his constant companion. His poor condition was clearly visible during his last public appearance in late May 1976, when he received the visiting Pakistani prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Photos of the meeting, which showed Mao’s head lolling on the back of his armchair, made it clear to everyone that the Great Helmsman could not go on for long.

Mao’s fragility made it all too easy for Jiang and her faction to pin the blame for the Qing Ming protests on Deng. They accused him of orchestrating the “counter-revolutionary” demonstrations in the heart of the capital to further his own subversive political agenda. The ailing Mao finally gave in to their demands, and Deng was formally purged from the leadership. Yet the Chairman still held back from the final blow. He allowed Deng to retain his party membership, a move that allowed at least the possibility of yet another comeback in the future. For all that had happened, Mao still had great respect for Deng’s toughness and abilities. (In 1954, in a meeting with Khrushchev, he had once drawn the Russian’s attention to Deng, saying, “See that little man there? He is highly intelligent and has a great future ahead of him.”)
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A few years earlier, as he was maneuvering to return to Beijing, Deng had sent Mao two obsequious letters in which he assumed responsibility for his past “errors” and respectfully requested to be returned to proper party work. But now, in 1976, Deng refused to offer even a hint of apology to his persecutors. This was not the time to recant. Deng still had many powerful friends in the upper ranks of the party, and they would be looking to him as their standard-bearer in the months to come. Deng and his allies settled down to bide their time.

In early July came yet another major event: the demise of Marshal Zhu De, a titanic figure widely regarded as the military mind behind the Communist victory in the twenty-three-year-long civil war, when, at the end of the 1940s, they had finally defeated the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek, driving him into ignominious exile on the island of Taiwan. Zhu was a man of immense prestige and rocklike stolidity. If giants like him could fall, anything was possible.

This, then, was the situation when the Tangshan earthquake struck. It rattled the members of the gang, already anxious about the impending loss of their patron, Mao. They knew all too well that Deng’s demotion did not mean his final defeat. For months after Deng’s downfall, Jiang and her friends kept up a drumbeat of demonizing propaganda, exhorting their compatriots to “criticize Deng.” In the wake of the earthquake, they even unleashed a media campaign, warning, a bit too loudly, against the misuse of Tangshan relief efforts by their number-one political foe: “Be alert to Deng Xiaoping’s criminal attempt to exploit earthquake phobia to suppress revolution,” ran one of the slogans. The Gang allegedly took the campaign one surreal step further by declaring: “The earthquake in Tangshan affected only one million people, of whom only a few hundred thousand died. It’s nothing compared to the criticism of Deng, which is a matter of eight hundred million people.”
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Her efforts proved in vain. The Dragon Year of 1976 soon made good on its promise. In September Mao himself finally died. The man who had orchestrated the founding of the People’s Republic—its father, its presiding genius, its mercurial god—was gone. Within weeks, the man he had designated as his successor, a colorless apparatchik by the name of Hua Guofeng, moved to arrest the Gang of Four, forestalling the threat of a Far Left coup within the CCP leadership and bringing the Cultural Revolution to an end. A few months after that, Hua welcomed Deng back into active political life. Deng Xiaoping was finally back for good, and he would remain in power long enough to send his country in a completely different direction.

It was not immediately apparent that Deng had his own plans for China. After Hua allowed him to return, in July 1977, Deng initially assumed a job as vice premier, responsible mainly for foreign affairs—a position that seemed to pose little threat to Hua, who was, after all, Mao’s anointed successor. Most Chinese didn’t even notice that the little man was back until state television happened to linger over his image in the stands at a soccer match. A month later, Deng turned seventy-three. The doddering Leonid Brezhnev, the man who already embodied the senescence of Russian Marxism-Leninism, was two years younger than this veteran of the Chinese Communist Party. Deng could be forgiven for a certain amount of impatience. He had a lot of catching up to do.

D
eng was born in 1904, the son of a landlord in the densely populated inland province of Sichuan, a place whose people were known for their stubborn pragmatism. His father, who had enjoyed the benefits of a university education, belonged to the local secret society. His son came of age during a period of intense political ferment. After the collapse of imperial rule in 1911, China became
a republic. But the exalted expectations of the revolutionaries who had brought it about remained unfulfilled. Central control proved tenuous. China succumbed to coup, countercoup, fragmentation, feuding. In 1919, still a teen, Deng participated in the May Fourth Movement, when students around China demonstrated against Western and Japanese encroachment on Chinese national sovereignty.