Hua Guofeng's Death Goes Almost Unnoticed
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday August 22, 2008
THE death of the second leader of the People's Republic China, Hua Guofeng, has passed with barely a ripple in Beijing.
People's Daily, the Communist Party's flagship newspaper, reduced Mr Hua's life to a photo smaller than a cigarette packet and a report of only one paragraph.Hua was "an outstanding member, a loyal and long-tested communist fighter and a proletarian revolutionary who once held important leading posts in the Communist Party and the government", it read.This tiny obituary, provided by Xinhua and republished by other official media outlets, including the national broadcaster CCTV, says almost nothing about Hua's contribution to modern China. But it says a great deal about modern Chinese Communist Party historiography. According to the official history, Hua was an acolyte of Chairman Mao Zedong who tried to continue Mao's disastrous policies of the Cultural Revolution. Most people know of Mao's deathbed words: "With you in charge, I can relax."And most who follow history know of Hua's allegedly blind loyalty to his dead benefactor, as exemplified by Hua's "two whatevers". "We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave," Hua is alleged to have decreed. In some popular versions Hua, who had an uncanny resemblance to Mao, is even said to be Mao's illegitimate son. But according to Monash University's Warren Sun, an expert on Hua, "it's all complete rubbish".Dr Sun and Fred Teiwes have published the first volume of the former leader's biography, The End Of The Maoist Era, and are working on the second volume. Their extensive research reminds historians and political observers that Hua waited less than a month after Mao's death in effect to launch a coup to end the Cultural Revolution, by arresting Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and the three other members of the notorious "Gang of Four".They show the "two whatevers" came from the Propaganda Department and were never taken seriously. Perhaps most surprisingly to contemporary observers, the first momentous steps that turned China from poverty and autarky to a global economic power occurred under Hua's direction. "Hua quickly set up programs to turn big chaos into order and he achieved this by not only maintaining stability but also by restoring a national economy which was on the verge of collapse," Dr Sun said. "I think he should be considered a great transitional leader in the sense that he put an end to the Maoist era and engineered China's dramatic post-Mao turnaround," he said. Nobody denies that Deng Xiaoping was a primary steward of the early reforms. The official history dates those to the third plenary session of the 11th Communist Party Congress in 1978. But Dr Sun says the plenary session, which Deng attended, rubber-stamped intellectual and policy reversals set in train by his predecessor the year before.The People's Daily obituary airbrushes the fact that Hua was China's top leader from Mao's death in 1976 until the end of the decade, when he was gradually ousted by Deng and his allies. Deng Xiaoping won, Hua Guofeng lost, and so Deng and his successors have the privilege of writing Hua's history. There is a saying in Chinese, cheng wang bai kou, which means the emperor gets the glory and the loser becomes a bandit. The English equivalent is "the winner takes all".Chinese opera - Page 12Obituary - Page 18
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald