Hua Guofeng

The Chinese premier who ushered in the post-Mao era

Hua Guofeng

1921–2008

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Shortly before he died, in 1976, Mao Tse-tung reportedly told his handpicked successor, Hua Guofeng, “With you in charge, my heart is at ease.” Hua’s leadership of China lasted barely two years. But by crushing the radicals who threatened to seize power in Mao’s wake, he helped ensure China’s emergence as a modern industrial nation.

Hua “had the good fortune to catch Mao’s eye at the right moment,” said the London Guardian. Born poor in central Shanxi province, he joined the Communist Party in 1938 and fought the Japanese during World War II. Following the ensuing civil war, he was a major functionary in Hunan province and became party secretary in Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace. His public works—which included a Mao memorial hall and a huge irrigation project built by 100,000 peasants in 10 months—so impressed Mao that in 1973, he elevated Hua to the Politburo. Within three years he was prime minister and, following Mao’s death, party chairman.

Hua had no time to enjoy his “meteoric rise,” said The New York Times. Radical elements led by the so-called Gang of Four—and spearheaded by Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow—aimed to continue the extremism of Mao’s decade-long Cultural Revolution, which “had left hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of millions traumatized, and China’s economy in a seemingly irreversible slump.” In a decisive move, made just one month after taking power, Hua ordered the Gang of Four arrested. By signaling the end of the Mao era, he began “easing China out of the paranoia and isolation” into which it had fallen. “Intentionally or not, Hua also permitted the more pragmatic Deng Xiaoping to emerge as China’s main policy­maker.” Under Deng, “the state’s suffocating grip on all commercial activity” started to relax, and China began its march toward superpower status.

Hua tried to speed that process, said the Los Angeles Times, by proclaiming a bold program of “Four Modernizations”—industry, agriculture, science and technology, and national defense. “He lacked a strong political base, however,” and critics said he’d never escaped Mao’s shadow. “At one point he even copied Mao’s hairstyle.” By 1978, the reform-minded Deng had ousted him as prime minister. Though he kept his seat on the Central Committee until 2002, Hua effectively lost all power by the early 1980s. “His last major public appearance was at a party congress in 2007 when a camera caught him gently dozing.”