The Succession Crisis
Instead of choosing a
new successor, Mao attempted to institutionalize his own
ambivalence. He bequeathed to China an extraordinarily complex set
of political rivalries by promoting officials from both sides of
his vision of China’s destiny. With characteristic convolution, he
fostered each camp and then set them against each other—all while
fomenting “contradictions” within each faction (such as between
Zhou and Deng) to make sure no one person became dominant enough to
emerge with authority approaching his own. On the one side stood a
camp of practical administrators led by Zhou and subsequently Deng;
on the other were the ideological purists around Jiang Qing and her
faction of Shanghai-based radicals (to whom Mao later applied the
derisive label “the Gang of Four”). They insisted on a literal
application of Mao Zedong Thought. Between them stood Hua Guofeng,
Mao’s immediate successor—to whom fell the awesome (and eventually
unmanageable) task of mastering the “contradictions” that Mao had
enshrined (and with whose brief career the next chapter will
deal).
The two principal
factions engaged in numerous disputes over culture, politics,
economic policy, and the perquisites of power—in short, on how to
run the country. But a fundamental subtext concerned the
philosophical questions that had occupied China’s best minds in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: how to define China’s
relationship with the outside world and what, if anything, it could
learn from foreigners.
The Gang of Four
advocated turning inward. They sought to purify Chinese culture and
politics of suspect influences (including anything deemed foreign,
“revisionist,” bourgeois, traditional, capitalist, or potentially
anti-Party), to reinvigorate China’s ethic of revolutionary
struggle and radical egalitarianism, and to reorient social life
around an essentially religious worship of Mao Zedong. Mao’s wife,
Jiang Qing, a former actress, oversaw the reform and radicalization
of traditional Beijing opera and the development of revolutionary
ballets—including The Red Detachment of
Women, performed for President Nixon in 1972, to the
American delegation’s general stupefaction.
After Lin fell from
grace, Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four survived. Ideologues under
their sway dominated much of the Chinese press, universities, and
the cultural sphere, and they used this influence to vilify Zhou,
Deng, and China’s supposed tendency toward “revisionism.” Their
conduct during the Cultural Revolution had made them a number of
powerful enemies, however, and they were unlikely contenders for
succession. Lacking association with the military establishment or
the Long March veterans, they were unlikely aspirants for the top
position: an actress and theatrical producer seeking posts that
only a small handful of women had reached in all of Chinese history
(Jiang Qing); a journalist and political theorist (Zhang Chunqiao);
a leftist literary critic (Yao Wenyuan); and a former security
guard, plucked from obscurity after agitating against his factory’s
management and possessing no power base of his own (Wang
Hongwen).1
The Gang of Four
stood opposite a camp of relative pragmatists associated with Zhou
Enlai and, increasingly, Deng Xiaoping. Though Zhou himself was a
dedicated Communist with decades of devoted service to Mao, for
many Chinese he had come to represent order and moderation. Both to
his critics and to his admirers, Zhou was a symbol of China’s long
tradition of mandarin gentleman-officials—urbane, highly educated,
restrained in his personal habits and, within the spectrum of
Chinese Communism, his political preferences.
Deng possessed a
blunter and less refined personal style than Zhou; he punctuated
his conversations by spitting loudly into a spittoon, producing
occasional incongruous moments. Yet he shared, and went beyond,
Zhou’s vision of a China that balanced its revolutionary principles
with order and a quest for prosperity. Eventually he was to resolve
Mao’s ambivalence between radical ideology and a more strategically
based reform approach. Neither man was a believer in Western
principles of democracy. Both had been uncritical participants in
Mao’s first waves of upheaval. But in contrast to Mao and the Gang
of Four, Zhou and Deng were reluctant to mortgage China’s future to
continuous revolution.
Accused by their
critics of “selling out” China to foreigners, both the nineteenth-
and twentieth-century sets of reformers sought to use Western
technology and economic innovations to bolster China’s strength
while preserving China’s essence.2 Zhou was closely identified with the
Sino-U.S. rapprochement and with the attempt to return Chinese
domestic affairs to a more normal pattern in the wake of the
Cultural Revolution, both of which the Gang of Four opposed as a
betrayal of revolutionary principles. Deng and likeminded
officials, such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were associated with
economic pragmatism, which the Gang of Four attacked as the
restoration of aspects of the capitalist system.
As Mao grew
increasingly frail, the Chinese leadership was locked in a power
struggle and a debate over China’s destiny, profoundly affecting
Sino-U.S. relations. When China’s radicals gained in relative
power, the U.S.-China relationship cooled; when America’s freedom
of action was limited by domestic upheavals, it strengthened the
radicals’ arguments that China was unnecessarily compromising its
ideological purity by tying its foreign policy to a country itself
riven by domestic disputes and incapable of assisting China’s
security. To the end, Mao attempted to manage the contradiction of
preserving his legacy of continuous revolution while safeguarding
the strategic rapprochement with the United States, which he
continued to deem important for China’s security. He left the
impression that he sympathized with the radicals even as the
national interest impelled him to sustain the new relationship with
America, which, in turn, frustrated him with its own domestic
divisions.
Mao, in his prime,
could have overcome internal conflicts, but the aging Mao was
increasingly torn by the complexities he had created. Zhou, the Mao
loyalist for forty years, became a victim of this
ambivalence.