Hua Guofeng

Premier of the People’s Republic of China (1976-1980)

• Born: February 16, 1921
• Birthplace: Jiaocheng, Shanxi province, China
• Died: August 20, 2008
• Place of death: Beijing, China

As the immediate successor to Chairman Mao Zedong, Hua Guofeng helped normalize and institutionalize Chinese Communist authority and presided over the political comeback of Deng Xiaoping. Deng would eventually move Hua aside to assume paramount power in the Chinese party hierarchy.

Early Life

The proletarian credentials of Hua Guofeng (hwah gwo-fuhng) were burnished because he had been born to a genuinely poor family. Hua’s parents (his birth name was Su Zhu) were impoverished peasants. The family lived in the north-central province of Shanxi, which was, at the time of Hua’s birth, controlled by the warlord Yan Xishan, an opportunist and occasional social reformer who later became an avowed anticommunist. At age fifteen, Hua joined Communist military forces, and a year later China was invaded by Japan. Hua took part in the Communist resistance to the Japanese, which fought parallel to their Nationalist rivals, who were then in control of the official government. It was at this time that Hua had changed his name to Hua Guofeng, which reflects the Chinese phrase for resistance to Japanese invasion. (Ironically, in office Hua would sign a peace and friendship treaty with Japan in 1978.)

Hua fought in the Communist-led Eighth Route Army under the command of Zhu De, the general closest to Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. Hua took part in the long retreat through Sichuan province to the Communist redoubt in Yan’an, where the Chinese forces were situated behind the mountain, waiting for the Japanese to collapse, as they did in 1945. When the Communists took power in 1949, Hua became party secretary of a county in Hunan province. By the time of the murderously turbulent Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960’s, he was secretary of Hunan.

Hua ingratiated himself with Mao even further by constructing a mausoleum in Hunan for Mao’s second wife, Yang Kaihui. When Lin Biao, thought to be Mao’s chosen successor, perished mysteriously in an airplane crash in 1971, Hua was called to the capital of Beijing to serve on the Communist Party committee investigating the matter of Lin’s death. The other likely successor to Mao, Liu Shaoqi, had earlier been expelled from the party and then brutally killed allegedly for being procapitalist. Possible heirs to the elderly Mao included the chair’s longtime aide, Zhou Enlai, who was also old and ailing; Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who was considered too radical; and the most competent leader, Deng Xiaoping, who was considered too much like Liu politically. Deng soon was purged from the party leadership. Hua was free of the others’ liabilities and was considered a good Maoist; he gained the position of leadership after Mao’s death in September, 1976.

Life’s Work

Hua succeeded a leader who inspired a mixture of awe, fear, and revulsion in people throughout the world. He faced both foreign and domestic challenges upon his assumption of power. In foreign policy, China’s rapprochement with the United States in 1972 still had not led to formal diplomatic relations, in part because the United States was unwilling to suspend diplomatic relations with the Chinese Nationalist state of Taiwan. China was more suspicious of the Soviet Union, its former ideological sponsor, who was considered by the Chinese to be expansionist. The recent acquisition by the Soviets of a group of satellite regions in Indochina after the Communist victory in the Vietnam War threatened to encircle China with Soviet-backed nations.

Hua was between opposites at home as well. Jiang and her associates in the so-called Gang of Four saw themselves as the true inheritors of Mao’s legacy, while the purged Deng still commanded a large following in the party ranks. Playing upon his status as Mao’s choice as successor, Hua proclaimed, “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave,” a statement that became known as the Two Whatevers and inspired more derision than respect among Chinese political insiders.

After a period of indecisiveness and confusion, the Gang of Four was purged and Deng began to come out from the shadows. Hua pardoned Deng and readmitted him into the party. However, Deng’s political skills and the appeal of his leadership and vision were more than matches for the pallid and often uninspired Hua. By mid-1978, Hua was recognized as more or less a figurehead and Deng the leader with real power.

Nonetheless, Hua remained party head through a series of important events. In October, 1978, Hua proclaimed, “We must emancipate our minds, and seek truth only from facts.” This statement was remarkable considering that many thought Hua had risen to power on the basis of his deference to Mao on a personal level and because of his dedicated subservience to Mao’s credos on the political plane. These readjustments were further reiterated at the third plenum of the Eleventh Communist Party Congress in December, 1978. In late 1978 the United States and China formally exchanged diplomatic recognition; in early 1979, China invaded Vietnam in retaliation for Vietnam’s previous invasion of China’s ally, Democratic Kampuchea (now Cambodia); and a nascent democracy movement broke out in Beijing. All these changes had their limits: The United States and China did not become allies, the incursion into Vietnam ended after a few weeks, and the democracy movement was quelled by the Communists.

During this time, Hua, as nominal head of state, traveled abroad extensively and participated in Deng’s various diplomatic openings. In this process, he was aided by Huang Hua, the competent foreign minister who, like Hua, had come into office in 1976. In France, in the autumn of 1979, Hua was lionized by radical Maoists who apparently were unaware that Mao’s theories had basically been repudiated or revised within China. In Great Britain, Hua met newly elected prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who, paradoxically, proved friendlier to Communist China than had been her Labour Party predecessor. In Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now in Croatia), Hua gave an interview in July, 1980, to a local newspaper in which he was more laudatory of the recently deceased Yugoslav president Tito than he was of Mao.

Despite his faithful espousal of the Deng line, Hua’s days were numbered. In 1980, he gave up his political position to Zhao Ziyang, and in 1981 he was replaced as Communist Party chair by Hu Yaobang, both of whom were more firmly in step with the Deng reformist line.

Significance

Hua’s place in Chinese history has been preserved, in part, because of his role as the principal eulogist for Mao, a role that has helped established Mao’s legacy as a great, founding statesman but not as an infallible or quasi-religious oracle. Hua did not have much of an opportunity to put his own stamp on China, and his time in office was spent negotiating with people of more ambition and political savvy who could outmaneuver him as well. His intelligence and gift for nuance, though, helped to keep him in office during four perilous years of transition for China. This time in office helped establish a sense of institutional continuity, suggesting to the world that even a post-Mao China which remained a dictatorship would not simply lurch from one autocratic ruler to another. The orderly way in which Hua succeeded Mao, and was in turn replaced by Hu and Zhou, provided a model for later Chinese actions in the political realm. Hu Jintao’s transition to the leadership of the Communist Party in 2003, replacing Jiang Zemin, was a smooth and orderly one.

Hua helped establish institutional continuity in another way as well. In Communist China, as in most authoritarian societies past and present, leaders overthrown from power were at the very least jailed or persecuted, and they were often killed. Hua, on the other hand, was left alone. He retained nominal party dignity as a member of the central committee well past the normal retirement age of seventy (he only stepped down after his eightieth birthday) and in general was treated as a distinguished if politically inconsequential past eminence. That China, despite its continuing harsh single-party regime, became a more stable economic and functional polity during the 1980’s and 1990’s was signaled by the relative leniency accorded Hua after his fall.

Bibliography

Marti, Michael E. China and the Legacy of Deng Xiaoping: From Communist Revolution to Capitalist Evolution. Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2002. Describes how Hua was outmaneuvered by the intrigues of Deng and his faction in the late 1970’s.

Myers, James T., ed. Chinese Politics Documents and Analysis: Fall of Hua Kuo-Feng, 1980, to the Twelfth Party Congress, 1982. Charlotte: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. The most thorough documentation of Hua’s slow and steady loss of power during his tenure in office.

Nathan, Andrew J. Chinese Democracy. New York: Knopf, 1985. Excavates the human rights and democracy movements, whose emergence were an unexpected feature of Hua’s brief time in power. Also reveals Hua’s ambiguous response to those movements.

Short, Philip. Mao: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Describes the process whereby Hua became Mao’s handpicked successor and, unlike many others, managed to hold on to that position and attain his own power.

Wong, Jan. Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now. New York: Anchor Books, 2005. Epitomizes the conventional popular-culture view of Hua as an ineffectual, somewhat comical, nonentity.