This Week in China’s History: April 5, 1976
With Beijing starting to emerge from a long winter, citizens of the capital made their way to Tiananmen Square. They came first to lay wreaths and other tributes to a top Communist Party official who had recently died, one many saw as representing moderation and reform in the face of an extreme leadership that would brook no dissent. What began with hundreds and then thousands swelled over the course of several weeks until more than a million people were gathered in the square that is often described as the political and spiritual center of China.
Of course, this could describe what happened in 1989, as Beijingers mourned the death of Hú Yàobāng 胡耀邦. But many who observed the protests that led to the violence of June 4 remembered an earlier movement: 1976, when the people of Beijing mourned the death of Zhōu Ēnlái 周恩来 — China’s premier since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 — and protested the leadership of Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 and the Cultural Revolution that had been going on for a decade.
None of this is to suggest that the two Tiananmen-centered protests, 13 years apart, were the same. And certainly the scale of both the 1989 movement and its suppression far exceeded what occurred in 1976. Nonetheless, the response to Zhou’s death was an important turning point in the history of the PRC that deserves to be remembered.
Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun’s thorough account describes the 1976 movement as “one of the crucial, if inadequately analyzed, moments in the history of the People’s Republic.” What happened in the first several months of 1976 represented not only a striking grassroots resistance to elite leadership, but also both exposed and widened deep rifts in that leadership, as an authoritarian leader’s power began to wane.
Zhou Enlai died on January 8, 1976, and his death was a match tossed into the gasoline-soaked rags that was the CCP’s leadership in the late Cultural Revolution period. Zhou’s role in the Cultural Revolution is not clearly understood, but he was certainly a moderating force in contrast to the so-called “Gang of Four” (Jiāng Qīng 江青, Yáo Wényuán 姚文元, Wáng Hóngwén 王洪文, and Zhāng Chūnqiáo 张春桥): radicals in the leadership who wanted to deepen the policies of the Cultural Revolution, with an eye toward ensuring that they would outlive the chairman. But Mao was himself not well — he had only nine months to live — and was increasingly paranoid and erratic.
Mao’s volatility and frailty had seen him waver between the radical and moderate forces in his leadership. Zhou had engineered the rehabilitation of Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平, whose market-based reforms had helped revitalize the Chinese economy in the early 1960s, following the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. The “capitalist tendencies” of both Deng and Liú Shàoqí 刘少奇 made them targets of radicals who saw them as selling out the revolution, and both of them were among the highest-profile victims of the Cultural Revolution. Liu died following his arrest and humiliation, in 1968; Deng managed to survive with the protection of Zhou Enlai.
Zhou arranged for Mao to bring Deng back to Beijing in 1973. Deng gained the post of first vice premier, focused on rebuilding the economy following the chaos the Cultural Revolution had engendered. Deng’s rehabilitation outraged the Gang of Four, who continued to lobby Mao against the perils of Deng’s “capitalist tendencies.” Even before Zhou’s death, the radical campaign against Deng had jeopardized Deng’s position, forcing him to write self-criticisms in late 1975 and bringing him before the entire Central Committee to evaluate his ideological correctness.
When Zhou died it removed not only the most important support for Deng Xiaoping but also the most powerful opposition to the radical movement in the government. Zhou was also extremely popular — probably more popular than Mao himself, and certainly more than the Gang of Four. The leadership had no desire to celebrate Zhou’s accomplishments, and though the premier could scarcely be denied a state funeral, it was limited in scope. Mao was conspicuously absent from the funeral, and the official mourning period curtailed. Common mourning practices like wearing black armbands, laying wreaths, and displaying photos were banned, seen (rightly) as not only mourning Zhou, but objecting to the campaigns against Zhou and Deng and, more broadly, to the entire Cultural Revolution.
Denied the opportunity to grieve in January, the public channeled its emotions to the Qingming Festival, the tomb-sweeping holiday when all who had died could be remembered. The first Qingming commemorations for Zhou occurred on March 19, when an elementary school laid a wreath in Tiananmen Square. Authorities removed this and several other displays, and began recording the names of everyone who made such gestures. At the same time, news arrived in Beijing of unrest in Nanjing, where students laid wreaths and led a protest march to the martyrs’ cemetery.
As the public security apparatus in the capital worried about the displays, and continued to remove wreaths and flowers, the number of protesters/mourners grew. So did the police presence, establishing a command post on the square, which included PA announcements declaring Qingming to be an outmoded tradition that was inconsistent with modern life.
On April 4 — the eve of the festival itself — the square was filled as it had not been since the rallies of the early Cultural Revolution, with more than a million people. They brought not only wreaths and flowers, but posters, poems, and handbills, many of them attacking the Gang of Four. No one dared criticize Mao by name, but several posters clearly made reference to the Great Helmsman without naming him. Some made speeches. In the tense atmosphere, fights broke out within the crowd, and between protesters and police. Both symbolically and practically, the Chinese people were challenging the PRC leadership as never before. “As night fell,” Teiwes and Sun wrote, “the confrontation of the Chairman and the Premier, never possible while Zhou lived, now appeared symbolically in the rows upon rows of wreaths to Zhou on the Square facing Mao’s portrait on the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself. It was a serious challenge that the Politburo could not afford to overlook.”
After midnight, the square was cleared of both protesters and displays.
As dawn revealed the unexpected, and unexplained, removal of wreaths, anger reignited. Tens of thousands of people returned to the square, demanding the return of the wreaths and forcing their way into government buildings. A police van was overturned, and some were set on fire, as was the PLA command post on the square. The politburo determined that the square would be forcibly cleared, with heated debates about what level of force would be used. There was little violence until late that night when police moved in to remove what remained of the dwindling crowd, “in a brief spasm of violent beatings before carting off the victims.”
All traces of the protests were gone by April 6.
Emboldened by what had happened, the radicals in the government moved quickly to scapegoat Deng Xiaoping, removing him from all official positions on April 7. The “Tiananmen Incident” was labeled a counterrevolutionary movement, instigated by a handful of troublemakers.
When Deng managed to reestablish himself in the leadership, after Mao’s death, April 5 was reassessed. In December of 1978, the Central Committee declared the Tiananmen Incident to be a “revolutionary movement.”
The desire to find parallels between 1976 and 1989 may reside in this reversal. It took just two years for the verdict to be reversed, so when the Tiananmen protests of 1989 were declared counterrevolutionary chaos, many looked to the example of 1976 for hope that change was possible.
We are still waiting.
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
