Mao Zedong, Madame Mao and Hua Guofeng

One of the first things I realized when I arrived in Beijing in November of 2006 was that my historical knowledge of a country that traces its own origins back for more than 4,000 years, was simply missing. After spending a day walking through the Forbidden City with my friend Yang Pei, I quickly came to realize that the mountain I originally perceived was merely the tip of a gigantic iceberg, submerged with more than 9/10ths invisible to my western eyes.

I went back to my hutong and started building a graphic animation, a timeline that I could use to visually take me from the here-and-now, back through the dynasties to the beginnings of recorded time. Today, the announcement of the death of China's Hua Guofeng reminds me that I still have lots of Asian history homework to do. Digging through the Wikipedia like an archeologist... I assemble another detailed segment in my timeline of transition.

Born to a poor family of Shanxi province in 1921, Hua Guofeng was originally named Su Zhu (蘇鑄). In 1936, at the age of 15, he joined the Long March. Like many young revolutionaries in those times, he took on a long and patriotic name: Zhonghua kangri jiuguo xianfengdui (中華抗日救國先鋒隊), which means "Chinese, Resisting-the-Japanese, Nation-saving, Vanguard. Later he shortened it to Hua Guofeng. In 1938 he joined the Communist Party of China and in 1969 and was named to the Central Committee, where he eventually succeeded Zhou Enlai as prime minister. On his deathbed in 1976, Mao Zedong selected Hua Guofeng as his successor.

During a relatively short term of leadership, Hua is credited for quickly ousting the Gang of Four, a group led by Mao's widow - his last wife of 38 years - Jiang Qing and her three close associates, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan. The Gang of Four effectively controlled the power organs of the Communist Party of China through the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution, although it remains unclear which major decisions were made through Mao Zedong and carried out by the Gang, and which were the result of the Gang of Four's own planning. Jiang Qing's explanation is remembered as her most familiar quote: "I was Chairman Mao's dog. When Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit!"

Near the end of Mao's life, a power struggle occurred between the Gang of Four and the alliance of Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Ye Jianying. The "Gang" hoped that key military leaders, Wang Dongxing and Chen Xilian would support them, but it seems that Hua won the Army over to his side. Their downfall in a coup d'état on October 6, 1976, merely a month after Mao's death, brought about major celebrations on the streets of Beijing, and marked the end of a turbulent political era in China.

The Gang of Four, along with disgraced Communist general Lin Biao, were labeled as the two major "counter-revolutionary forces" of the Cultural Revolution, and officially blamed for the worst excesses of the societal chaos that ensued during the ten years of turmoil from 1966-76.

Hua Guofeng became the leader whose emergence marked the end of the Cultural Revolution. However, Deng Xiaoping was already maneuvering to replace him. Hua was effectively stripped of his powers by 1978 and formally lost the chairmanship in 1981. Hua Guofeng, died today in Beijing at the age of 87.