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Hua Guofeng

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The Man Who Arrested Mao's Wife

Just after midnight on October 6, 1976, three of China's most powerful politicians walked into a meeting at Zhongnanhai, the walled compound that serves as headquarters for the Chinese Communist Party. They had been summoned to discuss the fifth volume of Mao Zedong's collected works. It was a trap.

As each figure entered Huairen Hall, guards seized them. The man waiting inside to personally announce their detention was Hua Guofeng, a relatively obscure bureaucrat who had risen to become Mao's designated successor just months earlier. That same night, another team arrested Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, at her residence. Within hours, the so-called Gang of Four—the radical faction that had driven the brutal Cultural Revolution for a decade—was finished.

It was one of the most consequential political coups of the twentieth century. And it was orchestrated by a man whose very ordinariness had been his greatest asset.

A Revolutionary Name

Hua Guofeng was born Su Zhu in 1921, in Jiaocheng county in Shanxi province, the fourth son of a family originally from Henan. His father died when he was seven. The boy studied at the local commercial school, an unremarkable beginning for someone who would one day command the world's most populous nation.

In 1938, seventeen-year-old Su Zhu joined the Chinese Communist Party. China was in the midst of catastrophe—Japan had invaded the previous year, and the country was fracturing under the weight of foreign occupation and civil strife. Like many young revolutionaries of his era, Su Zhu adopted a new name to signal his transformation. He chose "Hua Guofeng," an abbreviation of a phrase meaning "Chinese Anti-Japanese Aggression National Salvation Vanguard." The name itself was a political statement, a declaration of purpose worn as identity.

For twelve years, Hua served as a soldier in the Eighth Route Army under Marshal Zhu De, fighting first the Japanese and then, after World War II ended, the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek in China's civil war. By 1947, as the Communists gained the upper hand, Hua had transitioned from soldier to propagandist, becoming the propaganda chief for his home county's party committee.

The Hunan Years

In 1948, Hua moved south with the victorious People's Liberation Army to Hunan province. He married a woman named Han Zhijun and settled into what would become a twenty-three-year tenure in the province. This long posting would shape his entire career.

Hunan held special significance in Communist China. It was the birthplace of Mao Zedong himself. In 1952, Hua was appointed secretary of Xiangtan Special District, which included Mao's hometown of Shaoshan. This was not a coincidence of geography—it was an opportunity.

Hua understood what the assignment meant. He built a memorial hall dedicated to Mao in Shaoshan. When Mao visited the site in June 1959, he was favorably impressed. The two men had first met four years earlier, in 1955, and Mao had noted Hua's simplicity—a quality the Chairman valued, at least rhetorically, in his subordinates.

The memorial hall was not mere flattery. It was a carefully calibrated demonstration of loyalty, the kind of gesture that could make a career in a system where personal relationships with the paramount leader mattered more than any formal qualification. Hua was building something more durable than concrete and stone. He was building trust.

Navigating the Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution, which Mao launched in 1966, was designed to purge the Communist Party of officials who had supposedly strayed from revolutionary principles. In practice, it was a decade of chaos, violence, and political terror. Careers were destroyed overnight. Senior leaders were humiliated, imprisoned, or killed. The safest strategy was often to be invisible.

Hua chose a different path. He supported the Cultural Revolution and led the movement in Hunan. This was a calculated risk. Many officials who aligned themselves with the radical factions later found themselves purged when political winds shifted. But Hua managed to ride the tiger without being devoured.

In 1967, he helped establish Hunan's Revolutionary Committee—the new governing bodies that replaced the party and government structures the Cultural Revolution had dismantled—and became its deputy chairman. By December 1970, he had risen to chairman of the Revolutionary Committee and first secretary of the Communist Party's Hunan Committee. He was the most powerful man in the province.

His success came from an unusual combination: genuine enthusiasm for Mao's vision, competent administration, and an ability to avoid making powerful enemies. At the 1959 Lushan Conference, a pivotal meeting where Mao purged critics of his disastrous Great Leap Forward, Hua had written two reports defending all of Mao's policies. He was a true believer, or at least convincingly performed as one.

Called to Beijing

In 1971, Hua was summoned to Beijing to work in Premier Zhou Enlai's State Council staff office. He stayed only a few months before returning to Hunan. But later that year came a more significant assignment: he was appointed to the seven-member committee investigating the Lin Biao Affair.

Lin Biao had been Mao's designated successor, the man chosen to carry forward the Chairman's legacy. Then, according to official accounts, Lin attempted a coup and fled toward the Soviet Union when it failed, dying in a plane crash in Mongolia. The truth of what happened remains murky, but the political implications were clear: Mao needed people he could trust absolutely to investigate what had gone wrong.

Hua was the most junior member of the investigative committee. His inclusion signaled something important about his standing with Mao.

The promotions accelerated. In 1973, Hua was elevated to the Politburo and put in charge of agricultural development. That same year, Mao named him Minister of Public Security and Vice Premier. The Ministry of Public Security controlled China's police and security forces—a position of enormous power in any authoritarian system, but especially during the paranoid final years of Mao's rule.

The Death of Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai died on January 8, 1976. The Premier had been the steady hand of Chinese governance for decades, a skilled diplomat and administrator who balanced the competing factions within the party. His death created a vacuum.

Two factions competed to fill it. On one side stood Deng Xiaoping, the pragmatic reformer who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution, then rehabilitated, and who represented a vision of China focused on economic development rather than perpetual revolution. On the other side stood the Gang of Four: Mao's wife Jiang Qing, along with Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan. They were the radical standard-bearers of the Cultural Revolution, committed to continuous ideological struggle.

Mao reportedly wanted to appoint Zhang Chunqiao as Zhou's successor. Instead, he chose Hua Guofeng as acting Premier. The appointment bypassed the National People's Congress, China's nominal legislature. Mao was dying, and normal procedures no longer mattered.

A week after delivering Zhou Enlai's eulogy, Deng Xiaoping left Beijing for the relative safety of Guangzhou in southern China. He could read the political weather.

The Tiananmen Incident of 1976

The first Tiananmen Incident—not to be confused with the 1989 massacre—erupted in April 1976 during the Qingming Festival, a traditional time for honoring the dead. Thousands of Beijing citizens gathered at the Monument to the People's Heroes to lay wreaths commemorating Zhou Enlai. It was an implicit rebuke of the radical faction that had attacked Zhou's legacy.

Militia forces allied with the Gang of Four removed the wreaths. The crowds responded with fury. Vehicles were burned. Offices were ransacked. There were reports of injuries and deaths.

Deng Xiaoping was blamed for inciting the protests and stripped of all his party and government posts, though Mao allowed him to retain his party membership—a signal that even the Chairman was hedging his bets. Shortly after, Hua was elevated to First Vice Chairman of the Communist Party Central Committee and Premier of the State Council. He was now Mao's official designated successor.

Hua delivered speeches criticizing Deng that were approved by Mao and the Party Central Committee. He was playing his part in the factional struggle. But he was also watching, waiting, calculating.

The Earthquake and the Death

In July 1976, a massive earthquake struck Tangshan, an industrial city east of Beijing. The official death toll was 242,000, though the actual number may have been much higher. It was one of the deadliest earthquakes in recorded history.

Hua visited the devastated area and helped direct relief efforts. The Gang of Four was conspicuously absent. In Chinese political culture, where natural disasters were traditionally seen as signs of heaven's displeasure with rulers, the contrast mattered. Hua was acting like a leader. The Gang was not.

Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976. Hua, as both the second-highest-ranking member of the party and Premier, led the national commemorations. He delivered the keynote speech at the memorial service in Tiananmen Square.

The Politburo Standing Committee—the apex of power in China—now consisted of just four people: Hua, Marshal Ye Jianying, Zhang Chunqiao, and Wang Hongwen. Ye was in semi-retirement. Zhang and Wang were members of the Gang of Four. The balance of power was precarious.

The Arrest

Hua understood that his position against the Gang of Four was a zero-sum game. If he did not move against them, they would move against him. Days after Mao's death, he contacted Marshal Ye Jianying to discuss plans.

Ye had grown disillusioned with the Gang even before Mao died. The two men quickly agreed that the Gang had to go. But how?

They considered convening a Politburo or Central Committee meeting to remove the Gang through established party procedures. The idea was rejected. The Central Committee at that time included too many Gang supporters. A vote might not go their way, and a failed attempt would be fatal.

Hua had crucial advantages. He controlled the Ministry of Public Security. More importantly, he had the support of Wang Dongxing, Mao's loyal security chief, who commanded the elite 8341 Special Regiment—the unit responsible for protecting China's top leaders. Vice Premier Li Xiannian, the chief economic planner, was also on board, as was General Chen Xilian, commander of the Beijing Military Region, and Luo Qingchang, head of the intelligence services.

The group decided to use force.

On the night of October 6, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan were summoned to Zhongnanhai for the fabricated meeting about Mao's collected works. They walked into Huairen Hall and into the waiting guards. Jiang Qing and Mao Yuanxin, Mao's nephew who had served as his liaison to the Politburo, were arrested at their homes.

A task force led by Geng Biao seized the headquarters of the party's main propaganda organs, which had been the Gang's stronghold. Another team was dispatched to Shanghai, the Gang's regional power base, to prevent any organized resistance.

At an emergency Politburo meeting the next day, Hua Guofeng was appointed chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the Central Military Commission. He now held the top offices of party, government, and military simultaneously—the first person in the People's Republic's history to do so.

The Brief Zenith

The arrest of the Gang of Four marked the end of the Cultural Revolution. After a decade of ideological frenzy, purges, and violence, China could finally begin to recover.

Hua launched a nationwide campaign to criticize the Gang. People who had been punished for opposing the radicals were released and rehabilitated. The participants in the 1976 Tiananmen Incident were exonerated. Between October 1976 and December 1978, more than 4,600 officials disgraced during the Cultural Revolution were restored to their positions.

In July 1977, at the first plenary session of the new Central Committee, Hua approved the rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping himself. It was a fateful decision. Hua may have believed he was being magnanimous from a position of strength. In retrospect, he was inviting the man who would ultimately displace him back into the arena.

Hua worked to elevate his own prestige. In 1978, he decreed that all party meetings must hang portraits of Mao and Hua side by side. Schools were required to display his picture next to Mao's. He had the national anthem revised to incorporate references to Mao and the Communist Party. State media referred to him as "the wise leader."

But Hua's legitimacy rested on a thin foundation. His claim to authority came from a quote attributed to Mao: "With you in charge, I am at ease." This single sentence, published after the arrest of the Gang of Four, was offered as evidence of Mao's "boundless trust" in Hua. It was not much to build a political dynasty on.

The Two Whatevers

In February 1977, the central leadership under Hua released a new slogan that would define and ultimately doom his tenure: "We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave."

Critics satirically dubbed this the "Two Whatevers." The slogan captured Hua's fundamental problem. His legitimacy came entirely from Mao. He could not repudiate Mao without undermining himself. But he also could not move China forward while remaining shackled to Mao's legacy—including the disastrous policies of the Cultural Revolution.

Hua was genuinely concerned about China's economy, which he feared was on the brink of collapse. Working with Li Xiannian, he endorsed plans to accelerate growth by increasing enterprise budgets and importing foreign technology. He introduced an ambitious ten-year economic plan that sought to modernize industry and agriculture through massive investment.

The scale was unprecedented. By summer 1978, Hua had proposed importing eighty billion dollars worth of foreign equipment and services. Critics derided the plan as "the Western-Led Leap Forward," a mocking reference to Mao's catastrophic Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. The proposal was seen as reckless and impractical.

Yet Hua's approach, for all its flaws, did accomplish something important: it removed the political stigma from the idea of importing foreign technology. The notion that China could learn from capitalist countries had been heresy during the Cultural Revolution. Hua made it thinkable.

The Rise of Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping was everything Hua was not. Where Hua was a provincial administrator elevated by circumstance, Deng was a revolutionary veteran with decades of experience at the highest levels of power. Where Hua clung to Maoist orthodoxy, Deng was willing to jettison ideology in pursuit of practical results. His famous aphorism—"It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice"—captured his pragmatic philosophy.

Deng had been purged twice during the Cultural Revolution and had survived both times. He understood how power worked in the Communist Party better than almost anyone alive. And he had something Hua lacked: a vision for China's future that did not depend on the sanctification of Mao's every decision.

The struggle between Hua and Deng was decisively resolved at a Central Committee work conference in December 1978. Deng and his allies maneuvered to shift the party's focus from class struggle to economic development. The "Two Whatevers" doctrine was effectively repudiated. The conference is generally taken as the starting point of China's "reform and opening up"—the transformation that would make the country an economic superpower.

Hua was not immediately removed. The process was gradual, almost gentle by the standards of Chinese politics. Between December 1978 and June 1981, Deng and the party veterans around him systematically stripped Hua of his positions. He was allowed to retain some titles for a time, a face-saving gesture. But his power was gone.

The Long Fade

Hua Guofeng spent the last three decades of his life in political obscurity. He retained his membership in the Central Committee until 2002, a ceremonial honor that required him to do nothing and gave him influence over nothing. He made few public appearances and gave no interviews.

He never recanted. To the end, Hua insisted on the correctness of Maoist principles. He had arrested the Gang of Four not because he rejected the Cultural Revolution's goals, but because he believed they had betrayed those goals. It was a distinction that mattered deeply to him and almost no one else.

Hua died on August 20, 2008, at the age of eighty-seven. He had outlived Deng Xiaoping by more than a decade. He had watched China transform into something neither he nor Mao could have imagined: a one-party state that had embraced capitalism with an enthusiasm that would have horrified the Chairman.

The Transitional Figure

History has not been kind to Hua Guofeng. He is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as a transitional figure—the man who held power briefly between Mao and Deng, a placeholder rather than a protagonist.

This assessment is not entirely fair. Hua's arrest of the Gang of Four was a genuine act of political courage. The outcome was not foreordained. If the coup had failed, Hua would have been destroyed, probably killed. He took that risk and succeeded, ending a decade of ideological terror.

But Hua could never escape his fundamental limitation. He was Mao's man, elevated by Mao, dependent on Mao's memory for his legitimacy. When the party decided to move beyond Mao's legacy, Hua had nothing left to offer. He had built his career on loyalty to one man. When that loyalty became a liability, his career was over.

Deng Xiaoping understood something Hua never grasped: that in politics, the future always defeats the past. Hua looked backward, to the authority of the dead Chairman. Deng looked forward, to an China that could feed its people, trade with the world, and take its place among the great powers. The man with the vision for tomorrow will always defeat the man clinging to yesterday.

Hua Guofeng's tragedy was not that he failed, but that his success—the destruction of the Gang of Four—created the conditions for his own obsolescence. He cleared the stage for reforms he could never have led. In ending the Cultural Revolution, he made possible a China that had no place for someone like him.