Death of Mao (eBook)

James Palmer (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-28206-7 (ISBN)

Infos

The Death of Mao opens in the summer of 1976, as Mao Zedong lay dying and China was struck by a great natural disaster. The earthquake that struck Tangshan, a shoddily built mining city, was one of the worst in recorded history, killing half a million people. But the Chinese Communist rulers in Beijing were distracted, paralysed by in-fighting over who would take control after Chairman Mao finally died. Would Mao's fanatical wife and her collaborators, the Gang of Four, be allowed to continue the Cultural Revolution, which had shut China off from the world and reduced it to poverty and chaos? Or would Deng Xiaoping and his reformist friends be able to take control and open China up to the market, and end the near permanent state of civil war? James Palmer recreates the tensions of that fateful summer, when the fate of China and the world were in the balance - as injured and starving people crawled among the ruins of a stricken city. 'The best account of Mao's last year that we have . . . It deserves to be a classic of modern Chinese history.' John Simpson

James Palmer lives in Beijing. He has interviewed many survivors of the Tangshan earthquake and of the Communist Party struggles of that crucial year.His books include The Bloody White Baron, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2008, and The Death of Mao, which John Simpson called 'The best account of Mao's last year that we have.'

Textauszug

2 Living in coal country

Yu Xuebing was one of the seven black elements, and she wasn’t happy about it. Her family had been branded as class enemies a long time ago, during the Anti-Rightist campaign of the 1950s, and the label had stuck. Being ‘black’ made it hard for her to find boys willing to go out with her – and although she was only fourteen in 1976, she liked boys. And if they weren’t too scared of her family’s reputation, they tended to like her.

Unusually, she was an only child, with elderly parents; her mother was already sixty. She had four cousins, though, who in the Chinese fashion she called sisters and brothers. Space was cramped in their house, so quite often they slept over at hers.

Her family had been harassed in the last ten years, because they had once been rich. In the 1950s they had even owned a private car, which at the time was about equivalent to owning your own yacht. Her uncle, however, had got drunk and driven it into a ditch in the early sixties. Nobody in the county had been able to fix it, and it was left to rust by the side of their house.

In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, her uncle had been driven mad after being dragged out of his home for daily public criticism and beatings. Some of her relatives were in Taiwan now, having fled in 1949; her father sometimes wished aloud that he had gone with them.

During the first few years of the Cultural Revolution, Yu had lived in constant fear. She was only a small child at the time, but she picked up on the terror of the adults around her. She was disturbed by pictures of Liu Shaoqi’s wife being humiliated in public, since the same was happening to her family. The local Red Guards broke into their house several times, looking for signs of bourgeois wealth that they could steal. They stripped the floorboards and the roof for hiding places, and came away with a gold bracelet, a gold ring and 90 yuan. They also took the family’s precious sewing machine. After Deng’s rectifications of 1974, power in the village shifted, and her family was compensated for the lost cash, but they never saw the jewellery again.

Yu lived in a small village about a dozen miles outside Tangshan, with thirty-three other families. The road was still lined with crude effigies of Lin Biao, put up there in mockery after his ‘flight’ to Mongolia, along with more recent political slogans like ‘Earnestly study the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat’. For her, Tangshan was the city – it had a cinema, a library, a theatre, even a university. Going there was a rare treat. To outsiders, though, Tangshan was a backwater, overshadowed not only by Beijing but by the neighbouring city of Tianjin, an hour’s train ride away.

Tangshan was indeed a backwater, but it was also a powerhouse of heavy industry, nicknamed the ‘Coal Capital’ of China. Tangshanese coal drove Chinese industry, which was recovering strongly after years of decline. The first railway in China, only 7 km long, had been built in Tangshan to haul coal. Tangshan was still a major producer of rolling stock for China’s ever-expanding rail system.

It was a mining town, founded with British and Belgian money in 1877 to exploit the massive coal deposits nearby. They, like other foreign powers, had even won the right to station troops there after the Boxer Rebellion, though only the Japanese ended up sending soldiers there. After the foundation of the PRC, nationalisation had transformed the mines from an outpost of colonial power into a symbol of the new China’s industrial might.

The Kailuan mining complex, China’s first coal company, produced 5 per cent of the whole country’s coal. It had been designed by Herbert Hoover, later to be US president, during his stint as a mining engineer in China. Tangshanese liked to boast that, with about a million people, they were only a thousandth of the population of China, but produced a hundredth of the output. Economically, a single Tangshanese factory worker or miner was worth ten farmers. Pictures of new Tangshan industrial plants were among the first propaganda images produced by the PRC.

The city centre was on a low-lying plateau. Like most of Hebei, it was dry land, and in the spring winds choked the air with sand and dust. A few miles from the centre the hills started, scored with quarries and vast slag heaps that formed an eerie grey desert. Heavy trucks trundled across worn roads, bearing Tangshan’s coal to fuel the cities and steel factories of northern China.

Tangshanese prided themselves on being direct, blunt-spoken and strong. The workers of 1976 had been children during the grinding famine of the Great Leap Forward, and their growth had been stunted by malnutrition and starvation. Medical records from the Kailuan mines show an average height of only 1.57 metres, or just under 5 ft 2 in.

A stocky build was ideal for mining, and there was a strong Stakhanovite cult among the miners, with exceptionally productive workers receiving special bonuses, and a powerful sense of comradeship among the work gangs. Chinese miners had a long history of fierce leftist politics. In the first stages of the Cultural Revolution, the miners had formed their own revolutionary committees. The last five years had seen many ‘model workers’ drafted into politics or sent to universities to ‘instruct the educated youth’.

About a quarter of the city was given over to heavy industry, mostly in the eastern mining district. The whole city covered about fifty square kilometres, and most people lived in one-storey houses, with thick load-bearing walls made of brick or stone. They often had heavy concrete roofs made of cast-offs from the mines. It was a style of building pioneered by the British as workers’ housing. They had carried out seismological surveys of the planned mining area and found fault lines, but none serious enough, in their evaluation, to warrant putting up structures built to survive earthquakes. Only the houses and offices of the foreign staff were solid enough to withstand a severe quake.

Even after the foreigners left, newcomers to the mines had copied the buildings around them, throwing up weakly built, insecure houses, the roofs held up by heavy metal rods. In the fifties, new buildings, including multi-storey dormitories to house factory workers and university students, were thrown up with equal carelessness and speed.

Although regulations on earthquake-resistant building had been issued nationally in 1955, they weren’t enforced. In the early years of the PRC, construction was modelled on the ‘fraternal advice’ given by the Soviet Union. The taller new buildings, like the official hotels and university dormitories, were built using plans provided by the Soviets, as were some of the factories. As in other Chinese cities, a couple of hundred Russians had been stationed in Tangshan in the fifties as technical advisors and overseers of the aid the USSR was supplying at the time. There would prove to be a marked difference in survivability between the buildings the Soviets directly supervised and those put together on Soviet blueprints, but with inexperienced Chinese architects.

Despite Tangshan’s industrial might, unemployment and underemployment were high. Many young people couldn’t find jobs, and spent their days doing occasional shifts at their parents’ workplaces or helping the local militias. Full employment was supposed to be one of the defining characteristics of the socialist state, but the combination of population pressures and economic stagnation made this impossible even in a country of farmers and make-work schemes.

In the previous twenty-five years, the country’s population – or, at least, that portion of it which the census-takers could find – had nearly doubled, from 583 million in 1953, a figure already 100 million more than the government expected, to over 900 million. Family planning policies had been contradictory and confusing, depending on the whims of the leadership: contraceptive drives one year, encouragement of fertility to ensure a stronger country the next.

Mao had commented in the fifties that, ‘We need planned births. I think humanity is inept at managing itself. It has plans for industrial production … but not the production of humans,’1 but efforts at population control had been denounced repeatedly in the sixties. The government was now providing free condoms in many areas, and the city birthrate was dropping, but in the countryside people still married young and had plenty of kids.

Economic growth had not kept pace with population growth. The Cultural Revolution included three years of outright recession, and many more of minimal growth. It was hard to make anything when supervisors kept being purged, technicians exiled, and more time was spent on political meetings and rallies than on the factory floor.

This fed into the Revolution itself. The denunciations of middle management, factory overseers and village heads were at least as motivated by the desire to take over their positions as any ideological fervour. With new agricultural techniques developed during the worldwide green revolution reverberating even in China, farmers were producing more than ever before. But the job situation in the cities was poor, even in an industrial powerhouse like Tangshan. In theory, every citizen was supposed to have a danwei (work unit) and a job; in practice, tens of millions of young adults survived on their parents’ incomes and worked at whatever was available.

Even relatively comfortable families couldn’t afford much. The average worker’s income was about 300 yuan a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.1.2012
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Freizeit / Hobby ► Sammeln / Sammlerkataloge
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Zeitgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
• Schlagworte: Chairman Mao • Chinese history • MAO • mao's great famine • mao the unknown story • Mao Tse Tung • Mao Zedong
• ISBN-10: 0-571-28206-7 / 0571282067
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-28206-7 / 9780571282067