Table of Contents
Also by James Palmer:
THE BLOODY WHITE BARON
For Claudia He, who is incomparable
Plates
Students at the Tangshan Public Library, 1962. Tangshan City Museum
Tangshans railway station, among the first in China, in the 1930s. Tangshan City Museum
A clock at the Tangshan Coal Power Station shows the exact time the earthquake hit. Chang Qing
Ruined factories in Tangshan, July 1976. Chang Qing
Aerial view of the ruined city. Chang Qing
Local Party committee members hand out food. Chang Qing
A political message atop the damaged sailors club in Qinhuangdao. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
Tangshans rail track, ruined by the quake. Chang Qing
Two images of PLA soldiers hurrying to aid the stricken city. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
PLA soldiers haul rubble in Tangshan. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
Tangshan residents and rescuers in the Xiaoshan district. Chang Qing
The Peoples Liberation Army struggles to recover survivors. Chang Qing
Survivors walk through a cleared path in early August 1976. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
Clothing hangs among reconstructed houses. Chang Qing
Children study in an open-air classroom among the ruins of Tangshan. Chang Qing
Tangshan students learn Father is good, mother is good, but Chairman Mao is best. Tangshan Earthquake Museum
Hua Guofeng is applauded by city officials on a visit to Tangshan, 1978. Chang Qing
Introduction
Tangshan is an ordinary Chinese provincial city, a two-McDonalds town of heavy industry, factories and cheap hotels. Building work is everywhere, the pavements are cracked and broken, and the ubiquitous dust of the Hebei plains ruins clothes and electronics. Thirty-five years ago, its population of one million people made it one of Chinas larger cities. Today it is double the size it was in 1976, but there are dozens of bigger conurbations.
Migrant workers, brought in busloads from the countryside, huddle around small fires in the night to cook their noodles. They live in tents near the construction sites, where they labour for a few dollars a day. Anyone with ambition or education, however, tends to make their way to Beijing or Tianjin; nobody studying at the local universities plans to remain, unless they have a promise of a very well-paid, or well-connected, job. The city is run by the normal coalition of businessmen, gangsters and officials, a network of relationships smoothed by cash, drink and girls.
The only remarkable thing about Tangshan is that it exists at all. On 28 July 1976, the city was flattened in the space of a few minutes, all but obliterated in one of the worlds worst earthquakes.
For many Chinese, though, the Tangshan disaster was only one small part of the cursed year of 1976. It was the last of the ten years of chaos spurred by the Cultural Revolution. As Mao Zedong lay dying in the capital, his potential successors squabbled around him. The Cultural Revolution had frequently exploded into outright battles between different factions, bloody street fights that left hundreds dead at a time. Tens of thousands more had been killed in political persecutions. Beijing was split between potential reformers and the fanatics who had ridden the chaos to power.
The Chinese have many sayings about the relationship between Heaven and Earth, and between high politics and everyday life. One of them is The heavens crack, and the earth shakes. As Maoist rule in China cracked that year, the second part of the saying came true in all too literal and lethal a fashion.
Maoism claimed to be a peoples movement: the very name of the new China, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), proclaimed it. The Cultural Revolution could never have happened without Maos ability to tap into popular discontent and turn it to his own ends. By the end of his life, however, the public was sick of violence, disorder and fanaticism. While the leadership in Beijing was locked in battles over the succession, the people spoke, launching mass protests that played a critical part in determining the future of the country.
A terrible year, it was also a turning point; it was the year that China began to recover, and that the relative normalcy, peace and prosperity of modern Tangshan, and the rest of China, was achieved. This is the story of 1976 in China, of the fights to determine the fate of a country of 800 million people, and of how over half a million of them lost their lives in the middle of that struggle.
A NOTE ON STATISTICS AND NAMES
Chinese statistics, even today, are inherently unreliable. This is partly due to the size of the country, and partly due to the systematic mispresentation of statistics by local governments for political purposes. I have an acquaintance whose job is to provide economic growth figures for the county where hes employed as a low-level (but fast-tracked) government official; when I asked him how he gets them, he told me, quite simply, that he makes them up. With performance evaluation linked to GDP growth and little independent or external oversight, the motivation for local officials to deceive is enormous.
Take something seemingly as simple as population. How many Chinese are there? The official estimate of Chinas population is 1.3 billion, but the real figure is likely somewhere between 1.4 and 1.5 billion, perhaps even higher. Apart from size and inefficiency, the root cause of this is the One Child Policy, which has produced tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of unregistered births.
It has also induced local family planning officials systematically to under-report population growth in order to make it seem as if theyre doing a better job. (The One Child Policy has had a striking effect on reducing family size, but anyone with rural acquaintances will find that they usually have two or three siblings; its just not the seven or eight it would have been in the past.) Grassroots officials report fake numbers to their superiors, who massage the statistics when giving them to their bosses, who in turn tweak them further to meet the regional or provincial goals theyve been set, and by the time the figures reach the top their relationship with reality is tenuous at best.
The situation in 1976, with the country barely recovering from one of its most chaotic decades and much of the countryside deeply isolated, was even worse. In 1976, the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing had forty-eight people to cope with the whole of China, and the political motive for lying about figures was even stronger than today. All statistics in this book, save for those gathered directly from the lowest levels, therefore have to be taken with a grain of salt. Ive noted likely biases and made estimates of what the actual numbers might be at various points, but these are extremely loose guesses for the most part.
All names are given in the Chinese style of family name first, and in Pinyin, the standard romanisation system developed in the PRC in the 1950s. Unfortunately, this system was largely based around Russian sounds, which can make it a tad unintuitive for English-speakers.
Unfootnoted direct quotations are taken from interviews conducted in Tangshan or Beijing during 2009 11. It was rare for interviewees to consent to being recorded, and so I wrote up the accounts from my notes as soon as I could afterwards, checking details by follow-up phone calls where possible. Speaking to strangers is still not easy in China, though the situation has improved immeasurably from the past. Many of my Tangshan interviewees preferred to remain anonymous, or wanted to give only a last name; I have occasionally given people invented personal names for the sake of readability, since the Chinese journalistic habit of a witness surnamed Zhang sounds distinctly odd in English.
