Hua Guofeng (1921-2008)

August 20, 2008 

CHINA HAS been plunged into a state of unmitigated indifference on the news that Chairman Mao Zedong's last placeman and food tester, Hua Guofeng, has finally died at the age of 87.

While Deng Xiaoping is regarded as the father of modern China, Hua - party secretary and Central Military Commission chairman for a brief period after Mao's death - was responsible for putting an end to the Cultural Revolution, thereby euthanazing a miserable old regime that had come to stand for little more than obscurantism and poverty.

Hua's role in the construction of the Market-Leninist New China was, of course, inadvertent. Known as the main backer of the "two whatevers" principle - we must implement whatever policy decisions and whatever instructions Chairman Mao issues - Hua was an old-school Party functionary. Like Khrushchev, he managed to survive the tumults and purges of the Revolution with a small dollop of charm and a massive run of good luck. But he played a critical role in the arrest of the degenerate leftists known as the Gang of Four and in the rehabilitation of Deng.

Hua, born in Shaanxi Province, first won Chairman Mao's favour in the 1950s, when he served as the party secretary of the Great Helmsman's hometown of Xiangtan. To his credit, he even found the courage to speak, privately, about the devastation wrought by Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward.

"No one tells the truth like Hua Guofeng," Mao told his doctor, Li Zhisui.

Hua was appointed acting premier on the death of the urbane and popular Zhou Enlai in January 1976. His claim to full succession became credible when Mao - already half-mute, his internal organs on the verge of total shutdown - had scrawled on a note: "With you in charge, I am at ease."

But it was always a poisoned chalice.  Desperate, he begrudgingly rehabilitated and reappointed Deng and - with no stomach to fight for the absurdities of the ancien regime - he was quickly outflanked and out-thought by Deng and his team of reformists. By 1978, Deng was the big cheese, and by 1980, Hua was replaced as premier by Zhao Ziyang. A year later, he was dismissed from all his posts.