On May 12, 2008, a devastating earthquake ripped apart Wenchuan county in Sichuan province, southwest China. Military and civilian rescuers arrived swiftly at the scene, saving countless lives. Although more than 68,000 people died, the number of fatalities could have been much higher.
An indication of how much higher had been made clear on July 28, 1976, when the nondescript mining city of Tangshan in northern China was hit by an earthquake which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and killed some 250,000 people. At the time, many Chinese regarded the disaster as a portent of great change. Already that year two major Chinese leaders, premier Zhou Enlai and senior marshal Zhu De, had died. And just two months later, on September 9, Mao Zedong, the man who had led China for more than a quarter of a century, himself went to meet his maker Marx.
James Palmer's book weaves together these two narratives of natural disaster and elite political intrigue to provide a lucid account of one of the eeriest moments in modern Chinese history. Palmer takes us inside Zhongnanhai, the party complex formerly inhabited by the emperors in the heart of Beijing, and brings to life the personalities jockeying for power as Mao lay dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. On the left, the cultural revolution group radicals were led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing.
The Chinese (and Western) prejudice against powerful women has tended to give Jiang a uniquely demonic quality, and Palmer does well to remind readers of the role of figures such as the venal and overpromoted Wang Hongwen who whiled away the time during Mao's deathwatch by riding his motorbike and watching imported Hong Kong films. On the right, the dying Zhou, stricken with cancer, sought to promote Deng Xiaoping.
Just a few hundred miles away from the chairman's deathbed, thousands of ordinary Chinese were about to meet a sudden and much more horrific end. The earthquake hit Tangshan with the force of 400 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, and its effect was felt as far afield as Beijing. Yet the help that arrived was almost all concentrated on the city, where the industrial equipment was located.
Palmer writes in enviably elegant prose. The narrative never flags and its judgments are humane and nuanced. He argues that 1976 marks a moment of transition; after Mao's death, a series of internal coups and arrests set the stage for Deng to take power. The concentration on human stories means, however, that some of the factors that complicate the transition between the cultural revolution and the China of Deng Xiaoping are underplayed.
Palmer ends with a reflection on the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. There, effective rescuers arrived within hours but the aftermath of 2008 has been just as murky as in 1976. Locals who have tried to investigate official corruption that might have allowed substandard construction that caused buildings to collapse have been arrested and intimidated.
This account of the links between natural disaster and elite politics in China is a fine work of history. But it also shows how much has changed in China, and yet how little, since 1976.
Rana Mitter's Modern China: A Very Short Introduction is published by OUP.
The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China By James PalmerFaber and Faber, 288 pages, £18.99
