Book review - The Death Of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake And The Birth Of The New China

By Marc Lambert
Published on Sunday 29 January 2012 00:00

IT’S often forgotten just how disastrous the 19th and 20th centuries were for China.

In the face of the Scottish-inspired Opium Wars of the mid 1800s, China’s sclerotic Qing Dynasty began to fall apart, its demise prefigured in mass uprisings like the Taiping rebellion, which took over nearly half the country, endured for 14 years, and cost millions of lives.

By the time of the Boxer rebellion in the early 1900s, and occupation by the Japanese in 1931, the dominant mode of Chinese life was war both nationalist and civil, a situation which persisted until Mao took control after the Second World War.

But Mao liked nothing better than to turn things upside down. His Great Leap Forward campaign of the 1950s resulted in as many as 50 million deaths from starvation.

Not content with that, he unleashed the Cultural Revolution of 1966, costing further millions of lives over the next decade, forever scarring the psyche of the country.

No wonder then that in looking for reasons behind the economic miracle that is today’s China, all this background has to be taken into consideration.

As one of the interlocutors of James Palmer’s lively account of Mao’s demise in 1976 so tellingly says of the more liberal 1980s that followed under Deng Xiaoping: “Everybody loved money because money had no history and all that history meant was pain.”

Palmer’s essay on the social and political roots of China’s resurgence as a world power centres on this last year of Mao’s rule and the struggle behind the scenes to succeed him.

Drawing on a wide variety of archival and eyewitness sources Palmer presents an absorbing, multilayered account of Chinese society still reeling from the Cultural Revolution, but at a crossroads all the same.

At stake was China’s future direction under a party which Mao had left rife with factionalism and infighting. On one side stood Mao’s fanatical wife and her cronies, dubbed the Gang of Four; on the other Deng, the reformer who had been banished for opposition to the Cultural Revolution, but who was still quietly influential, not least for his ties to the military.

And under it all society was changing, exemplified by the discontented occupation in 1976 of Tiananmen square by many former Red Guards who were there a decade earlier cheering Mao as he launched the Cultural Revolution. Their parents had wanted nothing more than a square meal; but to the younger generation, this wasn’t anything like enough.

The pivotal year of 1976 was also marked by the Tangshan earthquake, a disaster which raised the city in 23 seconds flat with the force of 400 Hiroshimas, leaving 650,000 dead in the region. Palmer’s account of the social and political response to this catastrophe functions as a microcosm of the wider struggles that were taking place, with the added twist that in Chinese mythology, the demise of a ruling elite is signalled by natural disasters demonstrating that their mandate to rule has passed on.

And passed on it most emphatically had. When Deng finally managed to prevail against his political enemies in the 1980s, a new non-doctrinaire China gradually emerged.

As the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 showed it was still politically inflexible, yet it had turned its back on the worst excesses of Maoism.

Deng himself had experienced those excesses, as his son had been tortured, thrown from a window and left paraplegic during the Cultural Revolution.

But he was nothing if not a pragmatist anyway. As he famously declared: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

The new compact he formed with the Chinese people denied them political rights while enabling them to enrich themselves.

How long it will hold for a new, assertive, and wealthy middle class is difficult to say. But when Deng died in 1997 he had laid the foundations for irrevocable change. It was he, and not Mao, who was midwife to 21st century China.

• The Death Of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake And The Birth Of The New China, by James Palmer. Faber, £18.99

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