On the afternoon of April 22, 1976, Mao Zedong’s personal attendant, Meng Jinyun, read him a news item about a fireball that had fallen over Jilin province in China’s northeast. Mao was 82 and dying. Guo Jinrong, who interviewed the staff who nursed him, writes that he said nothing for a long time, then told her that the deaths of great men have always been foretold by stones falling from the sky.
Meng recalled answering that she did not believe in feudal superstition. By Guo’s account Mao said he believed it, and named the doctrine: the resonance between heaven and man, which holds that a great change in the human world draws a sign from nature, good omens for good and ill for ill.
He reached for Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the 14th-century novel, where stones fell and banner poles snapped at the deaths of the strategist Zhuge Liang and the general Zhao Yun. Great men differed from ordinary people, Guo quotes him saying, even in how they died. Retellings vary in how firmly he put it, and one closes on him asking why the ancients invented such stories. He then asked for the curtains to be opened, a request Guo records as rare, and watched the sun go down.
Mao was reaching for an idea far older than communism. Under the Mandate of Heaven, a ruler governs because heaven permits it, and heaven withdraws its permission through floods, famines, earthquakes, and strange lights in the sky. “Heaven sees as my people see,” the Book of Documents says, “Heaven hears as my people hear.” Every dynasty claimed the mandate on taking power, and every successor claimed it had lapsed. The Communist Party, officially atheist, prosecuted the idea as feudal superstition and sent Red Guards to burn temple libraries and parade fortune-tellers through the streets.
Mourning for the prime minister turned into protest against Mao’s wife
Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, the administrator who kept the state running through the Cultural Revolution, died of cancer on Jan. 8. The radicals around Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, moved to restrict public mourning. The country mourned anyway.
For the best of our weekly content！
You are now signed up for our newsletter
Check your email to complete sign up
On the afternoon of March 8 a body of about four tons entered the atmosphere over Jilin and broke apart with a roar heard more than sixty miles off. The largest stone recovered, Jilin No. 1, weighed 1,770 kilograms (3,900 pounds) and punched through frozen ground to leave a crater 6.5 meters deep. It remains the largest stony meteorite ever recovered. Meng read the news of it to Mao six weeks later.
In early April, during the Qingming festival for the dead, hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents filled Tiananmen Square with wreaths and poems for Zhou. The poems attacked Jiang Qing’s faction in barely veiled terms, and on April 5 the square was cleared by force. The faction carrying the Cultural Revolution’s banner had lost the street six months before it lost power.
Tangshan died in 23 seconds and the toll stayed secret
Marshal Zhu De, founder of the Red Army, died on July 6. At 3:42 on the morning of July 28, the ground under Tangshan, a coal-mining city of a million people a hundred miles east of Beijing, tore open. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake released energy that Chinese state media at the time compared to 400 Hiroshima bombs detonating ten miles underground. Most of the city was flat within 23 seconds.
The Party censored reporting on the disaster and published no casualty figure for three years. The count it released in 1979, 242,769 dead and 164,851 seriously injured, is still the official one. Estimates made after the earthquake ran as high as 655,000.
The shock rolled a hundred miles west into Zhongnanhai, the walled leadership compound beside the Forbidden City, and rocked the Chairman’s sickbed.
Wang Xinde, a neurologist on Mao’s medical team, described what followed in an account the Beijing News published on the earthquake’s fortieth anniversary:
“Every earthquake report that came in, the Chairman insisted on going over himself, however ill he was. More than 240,000 died in this earthquake, and the other losses are beyond calculating. When the secretary reported the extremely heavy losses the earthquake had caused, the Chairman wept. It was the first time I saw him sob openly.”
Three days later another report reached his bedside. His secretary offered to read it aloud. Mao refused and worked through the paper himself, one character at a time. A relief circular on the Tangshan and Fengnan area dated Aug. 18 was the last Central Committee document he marked as read. He died on Sept. 9.
Four weeks after Mao died, his widow was under arrest
Marshal Ye Jianying and the surviving military leadership feared for the state and themselves. Hua Guofeng, whom Mao had made prime minister in April, needed a legitimacy the radicals would never grant him. Wang Dongxing commanded the guard unit inside the compound.
They moved on Oct. 6, backed by Li Xiannian. Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan were seized inside the compound and branded the Gang of Four. Their trial in 1980 and 1981 was broadcast on national television. The Cultural Revolution ended in a palace coup carried out by the men Mao had left in place.
Every step of that autumn can be accounted for without looking at the sky. The regime’s legitimacy had collapsed: the street turned against the Cultural Revolution faction and the leadership split. A classical statesman watching the same wreaths and the same split would say the mandate was withdrawing. Both readings put the verdict in the same place.
The Party polices omen talk after disasters, as it did after Tangshan, an episode the historian James Palmer documents in Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes. A state does not campaign against a reading nobody is making. In this doctrine heaven’s verdict shows itself in the condition of the people and in whether they still support the throne.
Original article
Comments