The Death of Leaders—Hua Guofeng
Before Deng could
fully launch his reform program, China’s power structure underwent
an upheaval, and he himself was purged a second time.
On January 8, 1976,
Zhou Enlai succumbed to his long battle with cancer. His death
evoked an outpouring of public grief unprecedented in the history
of the People’s Republic. Deng used the occasion of Zhou’s funeral
on January 15 to eulogize him for his human qualities:
He was open and aboveboard, paid attention to the interests of the whole, observed Party discipline, was strict in “dissecting” himself and good at uniting the mass of cadres, and upheld the unity and solidarity of the Party. He maintained broad and close ties with the masses and showed boundless warmheartedness toward all comrades and the people. . . . We should learn from his fine style—being modest and prudent, unassuming and approachable, setting an example by his conduct, and living in a plain and hard-working way.7
Almost all of these
qualities—especially the devotion to unity and discipline—had been
criticized at the Politburo meeting of December 1973, after which
Zhou’s powers were removed (though he kept a title). Deng’s eulogy
was thus an act of considerable courage. After the demonstrations
in memory of Zhou, Deng was purged again from all his offices. He
avoided being arrested only because the PLA protected him on
military bases, first in Beijing, then in southern
China.
Five months later,
Mao died. His death was preceded by (and in the view of some
Chinese, augured by) a catastrophic earthquake in the city of
Tangshan.
With the downfall of
Lin Biao and the passing of Zhou and Mao in such close succession,
the future of the Party and the country was thrown wide open. After
Mao, no other figure came close to commanding comparable
authority.
As Mao came to
distrust the ambitions and probably the suitability of the Gang of
Four, he had engineered the rise of Hua Guofeng. Hua has remained
something of a cipher; he was not in office long enough to stand
for anything in particular except succeeding Mao. Mao first
appointed Hua as Premier when Zhou died. And when Mao died shortly
thereafter, Hua Guofeng inherited his positions as Chairman and
head of the Central Military Commission, though not necessarily his
authority. As he rose through the ranks of the Chinese leadership,
Hua adopted Mao’s personality cult, but he exhibited little of his
predecessor’s personal magnetism. Hua named his economic program
the “Great Leap Outward,” in an unfortunate echo of Mao’s
disastrous industrial and agricultural policy of the
1950s.
Hua’s chief
contribution to post-Mao Chinese political theory was his February
1977 promulgation of what came to be known as the “Two Whatevers”:
“We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao
made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao
gave.”8 This was hardly the type of principle that
inspired a rush to the ramparts.
I met Hua only
twice—the first time in Beijing in April 1979, and the second in
October 1979 when he was on a state visit to France. Both occasions
revealed a considerable gap between Hua’s performance and the
oblivion into which he eventually disappeared. The same must be
said about the records of his conversations with Zbigniew
Brzezinski, National Security Advisor during the administration of
Jimmy Carter. Hua conducted each conversation with the assurance
that senior Chinese officials invariably display in meetings with
foreigners. He was well briefed and confident, if less polished
than Zhou and with none of the biting sarcasm of Mao. There was no
reason to suppose that Hua would vanish as suddenly as he had
emerged.
What Hua lacked was a
political constituency. He had been projected into power because he
belonged to neither of the principal contending factions, the Gang
of Four or the Zhou/Deng moderate faction. But once Mao had
disappeared, Hua fell over the supreme contradiction of attempting
to combine uncritical adherence to Maoist precepts of
collectivization and class struggle with Deng’s ideas of economic
and technological modernization. The Gang of Four adherents opposed
Hua for insufficient radicalism; Deng and his supporters would in
time reject Hua, increasingly openly, for insufficient pragmatism.
Outmaneuvered by Deng, he became increasingly irrelevant to the
fate of the nation whose primary leadership posts he still
technically held.
But before slipping
from the pinnacle, Hua performed an act of transcendent
consequence. Within a month of Mao’s death, Hua Guofeng allied
himself with the moderates—and high-level victims of the Cultural
Revolution—to arrest the Gang of Four.