Mao: The Unknown Story

MAO’S MOMENT CAME on 8 January 1976, when Deng’s chief ally Chou En-lai died, at the age of seventy-eight. Mao moved at once. He fired Deng, put him under house arrest, and publicly denounced him by name. Simultaneously, he suspended Marshal Yeh, the third key member of the Alliance, claiming that Yeh was ill. To succeed Chou, Mao appointed a hitherto unknown middle-level disciple called Hua Guo-feng. An equally unknown low-ranking general called Chen Xi-lian was appointed to run the army. Mao chose these relatively neutral new faces, rather than members of the Gang of Four, to minimize adverse reactions from the Party and the army, most of whom loathed the Gang.

However, Chou’s death detonated something that hitherto had not existed in Mao’s China: public opinion. In the previous year, under Deng, information about who stood for what at the top had been made available for the first time through the networks of reinstated Communist officials and their children, and had circulated around the country. The public came to have some idea that Chou had been persecuted (while learning nothing about his squalid role in the Cultural Revolution). The news of Chou’s death triggered off an unprecedented outpouring of public grief, especially as the media played it down. On the day when his body was taken from the hospital to the crematorium, over a million people lined the streets of Peking. This was the first time under Mao that anything remotely resembling this number of people had gathered without being organized. On the day of Chou’s memorial service, even Mao’s extremely prudent nurse-cum-secretary suggested that perhaps he should attend, an idea Mao rejected. People took Mao’s absence as a snub to Chou, and when firecrackers were set off some days later at Mao’s residence in Zhongnanhai for Chinese New Year, staff started whispering that he was celebrating Chou’s death.

Popular protests broke out all over China, using the breach blown open by Chou’s death to express loathing for Mao’s policies. In early April the volcano erupted during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, when the Chinese traditionally pay respects to their dead. Spontaneous crowds filled Tiananmen Square to mourn Chou with wreaths and poems and to denounce the Cultural Revolution. Even more amazing, in the heart of the capital crowds destroyed police vehicles broadcasting orders for them to clear the square, and set fire to the headquarters of the militia, who were organized by the Gang of Four and were trying to disperse the demonstrators violently. This defiance of Mao’s rule took place a stone’s throw from his house.

The regime suppressed the protests with much bloodshed. Mme Mao toasted this as a victory, and Mao wrote: “Great morale-booster. Good. Good. Good.” A crackdown followed on across the country, but Mao was unable to crank up great terror like before.

Although Deng had nothing to do with organizing the demonstrations, a single device announced his popularity: the assortment of little bottles that hung from the pine trees around Tiananmen Square. Deng’s given name, Xiao-ping, is pronounced the same as “little bottles.” Mao felt extremely threatened by this sign. For the public to join hands with his Party opponents was an act without precedent. Mao had Deng hauled off from house arrest at home to detention in another part of Peking.

But instead of punishing Deng by the same cruel methods he had inflicted on other foes, Mao left him unharmed. This was not because he was fond of Deng. He simply could not take the risk of creating a situation where Deng’s many supporters in the army might feel forced to take action. Although Mao had had Deng’s ally Marshal Yeh suspended, Yeh continued to exercise virtual control over the military. At his home in the exclusive army compound in the Western Hills, he received a stream of generals and top officers, telling them defiantly that he was not ill at all, as Mao had been claiming. Among friends, Yeh now referred to Mao not as “the Chairman,” which was the de rigueur respectful norm, but as na-mo-wen, the Chinese transliteration of the English “number one,” which was irreverent. Army chiefs were discussing semi-openly what to do. One, nicknamed the “Bearded General,” urged Yeh to act at once and “simply grab” the Gang of Four. Not speaking out loud, for fear of bugs, Yeh stuck his thumb upwards, shook it a couple of times and then turned it downwards, meaning: Wait for Mao to die. The “Bearded General” then had a word with the head of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, who was a former subordinate of his, to say that Deng must be well protected.

Mao knew what was going on in the Western Hills, but his new enforcers in the army were in no position to take on the veterans, and he himself was too ill to act. He had to lump it. It was in this frustrated state of mind that he had a massive heart attack at the beginning of June 1976, which left him at death’s door.