The People’s Republic of China 145
Qing, and the other leaders of the Cultural Revolution blamed this open
defi ance of the Communist Party on Deng Xiaoping, and Mao agreed
once again to Deng’s dismissal. Then in July, one of the most severe
earthquakes on record devastated the coal-mining town of Tangshan,
near Tianjin, killing as many as 600,000 people. Many Chinese could
not help seeing such a natural disaster as foretelling a change of the
Mandate of Heaven.
As if to confi rm such an interpretation, Mao Zedong died on Sep-
tember 9, 1976, a momentous event that left everyone feeling anxious
and uncertain about the future. Before his death, with high party lead-
ers increasingly polarized into moderate and radical camps, Mao had
appointed a little-known provincial offi cial, Hua Guofeng, as his succes-
sor. Within one month after Mao died, Hua arrested Jiang Qing and her
three Shanghai associates. They were now labeled the Gang of Four—
Mao had once cautioned his wife not to form a “gang of four” with
these three. In November 1980, they were put on trial and convicted
Curious crowds absorb the fall of the “Gang of Four,” caricatured in Shanghai
wall posters in mid-October, 1976. The closest associates of Chairman Mao, his
wife and three of her Shanghai colleagues, were arrested in early October, about
one month after Mao’s death, and their fall from power was fi rst announced,
beginning October 15, in a fl urry of wall posters covering the streets of Shanghai,
the city they had controlled for the past decade. Photo by Paul Ropp