Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (111 page)

The showdown came on 6 October, a month after Mao’s death, at a Politburo meeting held in the home of his old comrade Yeh Chien-ying, the Defence Minister and effective second man of the regime. Chiang Ching was present with Wang and two other leading Shanghai cronies. She brandished her paper and demanded the chairmanship for herself, with her ‘brains’, the Shanghai journalist Chang Chun-chiao, as premier, and Wang as head of the National People’s Congress. But the ‘Gang of Four’, as henceforth they were known, lost the ‘argument’, and were taken straight from the meeting to prison. In Shanghai, their stronghold, their followers planned to arm 30,000 leftist militia-members, but the local party leadership and the garrison commander were removed before anything decisive could be done. Hua had the security services and Chiang Ching had made herself much hated in the army.
⁷⁵
She may have had a following in Shanghai but in Peking the mob loathed her and called her ‘the Empress’, a term of abuse since Boxer days; the 5 April riot had been directed against her and her friends. It was unfortunate for her, too, that 1976 was a year of appalling natural disasters, which the Chinese associate with a change in the dynasty. In April the largest meteor ever recorded fell on Kirin Province. In July and August three earthquakes hit north China, destroying parts of Peking and the whole of the nearby industrial centre of Tangshan, killing about 665,000 people (775,000 more were injured) – the second-worst earthquake disaster in China’s history.

It was a simple matter to blame such things, and genuine man-made catastrophes – economic failure, the collapse of the education system, the destruction of art treasures and China’s cultural life – upon the malign influence of ‘the Empress’ and her gang. Soon posters were up: ‘Cut Chiang Ching into Ten Thousand Pieces’, ‘Deep-fry the Gang of Four in Oil’. For her trial in 1980–1, the eventual indictment ran to forty-eight pages. All four were accused of an astonishing variety of crimes, and each separately of specific acts of wickedness, vanity and extravagance – the last to emphasize that their puritanical reign of terror had been hypocritical. Chang had even been ‘a spy in the pay of Chiang Kai-shek’. Wang was accused of philandering, importing expensive stereophonic equipment and,
only four days before his arrest, having no less than 114 photographs taken of himself. Yao Wen-yuan, the fourth member of the gang, had spent $500 on a sumptuous banquet to celebrate Chou’s death. Chiang Ching herself had drunk saffron water, dined off golden carp, kept an entire truckload of pornographic films, including the notorious
Sound of Music
, which she watched every night, ridden a horse then changed into a limousine, taken out library books on empresses, said that ‘Even under Communism there can still be an Empress’, closed a Canton shipyard because the noise disturbed her, prohibited planes landing so she could get to sleep, called the Empress-Dowager ‘a legalist’, had diverted traffic, ordered the leaves in Canton to be dusted before she arrived, said ‘it is better to have socialist trains which run late than revisionist trains which run on time’, hastened Mao’s death by shifting him from one bed to another, played poker while he lay dying and said, ‘The man must abdicate and let the woman take over.’ She and the others were ‘bad eggs’ who ‘worshipped things foreign, fawned on foreigners and maintained illicit foreign relations’ and had ‘engaged in flagrant capitulationism and national betrayal’. They were ‘the evil lords of literature and the theatre’.
⁷⁶
Chiang Ching remained defiant throughout her seven-week trial, which ended early in 1981, even extracting further drama from the proceedings at one point by suddenly stripping naked.
⁷⁷
She was found guilty on all charges and condemned to death, sentence being provisionally suspended for two years.

By this time Hua himself was in the shadows, elbowed aside by Teng, old Lazarus himself, who had re-emerged into public life in 1977 and from the end of 1978 was clearly in charge. He was a rough, hard man from Szechuan, with something of Mao’s own coarse brutality but without a suspicion of romanticism or any interest in politics as an art-form. Teng had been the most consistent opponent of Mao’s political dramas, though he had sometimes been obliged to play bit-parts in them. He had spoken out grittily and often against the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Now that it was disavowed and punished, his emergence at the top was logical and perhaps inevitable. He despised people for whom politics was the only thing in life that mattered, especially the hard Left: ‘They sit on the lavatory and can’t even manage to shit.’ ‘One should not talk of class struggle every day. In real life, not everything is class struggle.’ He had nothing but contempt for proletarian art. ‘You just see a bunch of people running to and fro on the stage. Not a trace of art.… Foreigners clap them only out of courtesy.’ Having heard the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he said,
‘This
is what I call food for the spirit.’ Chinese operas ‘nowadays’, he added, were nothing more
than ‘gong-and-drum shows’. ‘You go to a theatre and you find yourself on a battlefield.’ Teng had no particular animosities: ‘Let bygones by bygones. Those dismissed from office should be reinstated.’ He said he wanted an end to the ‘shouting and yelling’. The country must get back to work again. ‘Most college students now carry nothing but one brush for all posters. They can’t do anything else.’ ‘Scientists today are not given time for research. How can they create or invent things?’ Not least, the army was demoralized, as in Chiang Kai-shek’s day, and liable to revert to war-lordism. It had become ‘thick-skinned, disunited, arrogant, lazy and soft’.
⁷⁸

Teng, in short, was an old-fashioned, reactionary disciplinarian, now in his late seventies, who believed in law and order and hard work. He promptly sent the army into Vietnam, partly to punish the Vietnamese pro-Soviet leadership for persecuting its Chinese minority, but mainly to teach the
PLA
that life was a serious business: undisciplined units were put in the van and suffered appalling casualties. That done, he set about clearing up some of the mess Mao’s long reign had left behind in the economy. It was now admitted publicly that the Mao era had been characterized, not by the puritanical austerity of which it had boasted, but by appalling corruption in high places.
⁷⁹
The Peking
People’s Daily
apologized to readers for ‘all the lies and distortions’ it had carried and, more remarkably, warned them against ‘the false, boastful and untrue reports’ which it ‘still often prints’.
⁸⁰

In 1978–9 decisions were taken to move away from a Stalinist-Maoist stress on heavy industry and towards an economic structure more suited to a semi-developed country. The percentage of
GNP
invested was to fall from the unsustainable 38 per cent of 1978 to about 25 per cent by the mid-1980s. Profit-motives and bonuses were to be introduced; the law was to be reformed with emphasis on civil rights; democratic means were to be devised to check bureaucratic abuse; above all, market forces were to be allowed to exert their beneficent force.
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The party was to cease to be the all-powerful force in national life. Its membership, 39 million in 1982, had apparently doubled in size during the Cultural Revolution, and Teng warned that many of these people had not been properly ‘educated’ and were ‘below standard’. In a report issued in spring 1981, he claimed that many party members ‘loved flattery’, were ‘complacent and fuzzy-minded’, had stopped ‘caring about the hardships of the masses’, were ‘covered in the dust of bureaucracy’ and were ‘arrogant, conservative, lazy, interested only in pleasure and imbued with an ideology of privilege’.
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The ‘new realism’ coincided with more natural disasters, including a drought which dominated agriculture in 1980 and 1981 and forced a proud regime to beg the West for
help. As the 1980s opened, therefore, China ceased to be the miraculous new superpower and finally rang down the curtain on the make-believe world of Maoist romanticism, which had ended in horrific melodrama. Instead it entered the real world of slow, painful and pragmatic progress.

Mao’s regime in China was a tragedy. But it did not always seem so at the time, at least to the outside world. During the 1950s and 1960s it was fashionable to contrast his authoritarian centralism, which had given China unity, stability and (it was asserted) steadily rising living-standards, with the ineffectiveness of Indian parliamentary democracy. As we have seen, the Nehru era in world affairs, when he appeared the leading international statesman, the one most attuned to the needs of the times, was based on a series of illusions, the most important of which was his belief that India and China, the two most populous nations, could act together, what he termed
Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai
(India and China brothers). The policy was undermined by the first India-China conflict in 1959 and collapsed in ruins during the far more serious Chinese invasion of 1962. For Nehru, now seventy-three, it was an unrelieved personal disaster and he never recovered from it. When he died in his sleep in May 1964, he was a sad and bewildered man.

With large, overpopulated, poor and industrially backward countries like India and China, the chief problem of state is an elementary one: how to preserve the integrity of the state? How to maintain any system of government the bulk of the population will respect and acknowledge? Equally, the chief temptation of government is to bolster its popularity by taking advantage of its neighbour’s misfortunes. Mao succumbed to this urge in 1959 and 1962, taking advantage of India’s weakness and division. It intensified India’s difficulties, though in the long run it did nothing to lessen his own.

From the moment of partition in 1947–8, both India and Pakistan were cast as mutual enemies. For a quarter of a century, economists have continued to debate whether British rule hastened or impeded India’s economic progress.
⁸³
Nehru had believed unquestioningly that ‘Most of our problems today are due to … arrested growth and the prevention by British authority of normal adjustments.’
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But this was to ignore the main British contribution of imposing unity on the sub-continent and preventing the ‘normal adjustments’ of disintegration. British rule had been a progressive process of economic integration. Partition marked the first stage in its reversal. The internal conflicts within Pakistan, especially between its east and west wings, and comparable strains between Indian central government and the provinces, suggested that a fate like China’s in the 1920s was only just round the corner. Pakistan showed an inherent
tendency towards war-lordism in the shape of ephemeral military dictatorships. India evinced a contrary preference for weak parliamentary rule.

When Nehru died, a group of Congress Party and provincial bosses, known as ‘the Syndicate’, ganged up to prevent the succession of his most formidable follower, Morarji Desai. The man they picked instead, Lal Badahur Shastri, seemed to symbolize impotence. He was known as ‘the Little Sparrow’ and was so small that he only came up to the bottom of General de Gaulle’s paunch. In the autumn of 1965 India and Pakistan drifted into war over Kashmir. Militarily it was inconclusive; economically, immensely destructive to both sides. It was settled by a meeting between the Pakistan dictator, Marshal Ayub Khan, and Shastri at Tashkent in January 1966, and the effort so exhausted the Little Sparrow that he died the following night.

Bewildered, the Congress bosses turned to Nehru’s daughter, Mrs Gandhi, who had served as Shastri’s Minister of Information. Many Hindus believed she was her father reincarnated, and shouted
Jawaharlal ki jai
(’Long live Nehru!’).
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She kept five Irish wolfhounds, each bigger than her predecessor, and there was nothing small or weak about her. With China hostile, she saw India’s future as linked to a Soviet alliance, and took the country towards the Left. In 1969 she quarrelled with Desai, her Finance Minister, sacked him, nationalized the banks, smashed up the old Congress Party and created a new one around her personal faction. She broke the financial power of the princely class, and when the Supreme Court ruled her actions unconstitutional, she dissolved parliament in March 1971 and won an overwhelming victory, taking 350 out of 525 seats.

Yet Mrs Gandhi, calculating and unscrupulous behind her hooded kestrel eyes, had no more grasp of economic realities than her father, and like him turned to foreign affairs for relief. She found the answer in the growing distress of Pakistan. The two wings had never had anything in common except the Muslim religion, and fear of Hindu India. The country was ruled from the west, and this was reflected in an increasing disparity of
per capita
income: in the west it rose 1959–67 from 366 to 463 rupees, in the east only from 278 to 313. Although the bulk of the population lived in the east (70 out of 125 million in the late 1960s), and produced most of the country’s exports, the west got the imports. It had five to six times the power production of the east, and 26,000 hospital beds to 6,900 in the east.
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It was one of the many grievances of the east wing that the Pakistani government had taken no effective flood-control measures in the Bay of Bengal. On the night of 12 November 1970 a cyclone
struck the area, producing one of the greatest natural disasters of the century. A fifty-mile-wide wave swept inland, drowning hundreds of villages, turned itself into an ocean of mud, then swept out again, carrying with it hundreds more: over 300,000 people lost their lives.

The effect was to inspire the East Pakistan leader, Sheikh Mujib Rahman, to demand a federal system, and he won elections on this programme. The Pakistan government sent out General Tikka Khan, known as ‘the butcher of Baluchistan’ from his activities in the west wing, as martial law administrator, with instructions from the current dictator, Yahya Khan, ‘to sort those fellows out’. On 25 March 1971 he unleashed his troops on Dacca University, and the next day Mujib proclaimed an independent Bangladesh Republic. India could probably not have kept out of the civil war in any case, for by mid-1971 there were 10 million refugees in her territory. But Pakistan resolved Mrs Gandhi’s dilemma by launching a pre-emptive strike on Indian air bases. On 4 December she declared war, India recognized Bangladesh, and invaded the east wing. For the Indian Army it was an easy campaign, ending in Pakistani surrender. The Indian Commander-in-Chief and the Pakistani commander in the east wing had been at the Sandhurst military academy together. The former sent the latter his
ADC
with a message: ‘My dear Abdullah, I am here. The game is up. I suggest you give yourself up to me and I’ll look after you.’