BOOK
REVIEW When heaven and earth shook in
China The Death of Mao:
The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New
China by James Palmer
Reviewed by Michael Rank
Sometimes perhaps, the heavens really do
"blaze forth the death of princes".
At
least that is how it must have felt on July 28,
1976, when one of the worst earthquakes in history
destroyed the northern Chinese city of Tangshan.
The 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck as the
82-year-old Chairman Mao Zedong's health was
failing in full view of his 800 million subjects,
in a country where natural disasters have long
been seen as portents of political upheaval.
Hitting the coal-mining city of Tangshan on a
sweltering summer's night, at
exactly 03:42:53, the
quake killed hundreds of thousands.
"The
23 seconds of the earthquake were probably the
most concentrated instant of destruction that
humanity has ever known. In Tangshan alone it did
more damage than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki,
more damage than the firebombings of Dresden or
Hamburg or Tokyo, more damage than the explosion
at Krakatoa," says James Palmer in this highly
readable account of the quake and its aftermath.
"It took more lives in one fraction of
northeast China than the 2004 tsunami did across
the whole of the Indian Ocean."
The book
skillfully puts the Tangshan earthquake in its
political context, with the country exhausted from
the ravages of the Cultural Revolution in which
millions had died just a few years before. This
was a mass movement that refused to die and was
still being waged by the ultra-leftist clique who
held the reins of power in Beijing.
These
leftists, led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, were
engaged in a paranoid struggle to seize control
once the increasingly feeble chairman finally went
to "meet Marx". The Chinese people could only
watch and weep as their leaders played out their
vicious power games.
Although the story of
the rise and fall of the Gang of Four, as the
leftists were soon to be dubbed, is well known,
the Tangshan earthquake has been largely forgotten
as the world has focussed on China's extraordinary
economic rise over the last couple of decades.
The author, who was born two years after
the earthquake but has the advantage of living in
Beijing and being married to a Chinese, has
interviewed survivors of the quake to piece
together what it was like to live through those
terrible days and weeks and what the government
did - and didn't do - to help.
"I was
rescued by my neighbor." "Somebody pulled me out
of the ruins that morning, I don't know who,"
survivors recall, evoking the heroism that was
remarkable yet commonplace as the people of
Tangshan struggled to come to terms with the
disaster.
It was, in the words of a nurse,
"like a knife cutting through the sky", but Palmer
also tells how, amid the bravery and
determination, the story that the state media
chose to portray was quite different, and
remarkably callous.
Two days after the
quake struck, Chinese Communist Party newspaper
the People's Daily splashed on its front page the
story of how the children of party cadre Che
Zhengming were buried in their home, but as his
daughter cried out, "Dad, save me", his priority
was to save the local party boss from the ruins of
his apartment nearby.
Che's children died,
but the party paper "praised his political
commitment, noting approvingly that 'he felt
neither remorse nor sorrow' for the death of his
children, but had shown 'a willingness to benefit
the majority at the expense of his own children',
which was an example to everybody."
The
general consensus is that "Tangshan saved itself"
rather than relying on outside assistance, for
while the People's Liberation Army played its
part, Palmer says troops concentrated almost
entirely on the urban area, leaving peasants in
the mountainous hinterland to fend for themselves.
The peasants didn't matter enough, the
author reckons, for there were hundreds of
millions of them in China, while Tangshan city was
a key industrial center that had to be saved at
all costs.
Tangshan is one of China's main
coal-mining areas, but remarkably, while there
were roughly 10,000 miners underground when the
quake hit, only 17 died, according to Palmer.
"Earthquakes are less intense deeper underground,"
he claims, "and Tangshan's eight major coal mines
were dug deep".
The author seems
surprisingly uninterested in the question of just
how many people died in the earthquake. Government
surveys after the quake recorded the names of
242,000 people killed, which he says is "the
lowest figure possible", and he also cites a
survey from the early 1980s which put the death
toll at around 650,000, which Palmer says "seems a
reasonable estimate".
There's a huge
difference between 242,000 and 650,000 dead and
the death toll could have been investigated more
vigorously.
The book includes some
memorable photographs of the quake from the
Tangshan Earthquake Museum and by a local
photographer, including one taken in an improvised
classroom in autumn 1976, in which children are
being taught that "father and mother are not as
good as Chairman Mao."
In his
introduction, Palmer describes Tangshan today as
"an ordinary Chinese provincial city, a
two-McDonald's town of heavy industry, factories
and cheap hotels".
Little physical sign is
left of the quake following the construction boom
that's taken hold of Tangshan in recent years like
every other Chinese city. There is a couple of
collapsed buildings have been preserved as
memorial sites, and a new memorial wall, which
apparently names every victim (how many are
listed, Palmer doesn't say), as well an an
Anti-Earthquake Square, but that's about all.
The Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, in
which 80,000 people died, triggered terrible
memories for older people in Tangshan, and their
reaction was both generous and bitter.
Donations from Tangshan were among the
highest in China but there was "an odd tone of
jealousy. 'Tangshan was worse than Sichuan,' I was
told over and over again, 'Ours might have been a
7.8 and theirs an 8.0, but we were right at the
center'."
Six weeks after the Tangshan
quake Mao died and a few weeks later the Gang of
Four were arrested. Their nemesis, Deng Xiaoping,
bounced back to power and put China on the road to
"reform and opening up".
This led
eventually to China's spectacular economic boom,
but in the light of the shoddily built schools in
which thousands of children died in the Sichuan
earthquake, one cannot help feeling that not much
changed in the way China manages its disasters.
The Death of Mao: The Tangshan
Earthquake and the Birth of the New China by
James Palmer. Faber and Faber Non Fiction (January
17, 2012). ASIN: B006GJ2EJO. Price US$39, File
Size: 1940 KB, print length: 288 pages.
Michael Rank was a British
Council student in China under the Gang of Four
1974-1976 and a Reuters correspondent in Beijing
1980-1984. He is now a freelance journalist and
translator based in London.
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2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
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The book
skillfully puts the Tangshan earthquake in its
political context, with the country exhausted from
the ravages of the Cultural Revolution in which
millions had died just a few years before. This
was a mass movement that refused to die and was
still being waged by the ultra-leftist clique who
held the reins of power in Beijing. 
