"With you in charge, i'm at ease"

In 1977, following the death of Mao Zedong, Beijing played host to China's first National Art Exhibition. According to the website Sinophilia, Chinese Literature (an official Chinese state literary journal) summed up the paintings by stating that “pride of place was given in this exhibition to the splendid achievements of our great leader Chairman Mao, our esteemed and beloved Premier Chou [Zhou Enlai]... as well as to Chairman Hua's [Hua Guofeng] revolutionary record...” Furthermore, the owners of Sinophilia have also uploaded images of the pictures featured alongside the text in the journal.

One of these is particularly striking. Follow this link and you will see at the bottom of the page a picture entitled 'With you in charge, i'm at ease'. This is a well known phrase in Chinese political history. As part of an effort to strengthen his claims to be the leader of the Party in the post-Mao era, Hua Guofeng claimed that the Chairman had written this message (in Pinyin: ni ban shi, wo fang xin) to him during a private meeting held a short time before he died. While Hua's opponents contested the validity of the story altogether or argued that Mao was referring to a a specific aspect of the government rather than to the whole thing, he attempted to portray the moment as Mao's symbolic handing over of power. To this end, Hua's regime commissioned (amongst other pieces of propaganda) this idealised depiction of Mao's faith in his successor. The Chairman is shown upright and attentive, and with his hand firmly on Hua's- quite literally a revolutionary 'laying on of hands'. Of course, there is little chance that the meeting transpired anything like this. In his waning years, Mao's movements were severely restricted, hence Hua's contention that he only just had the strength to write down those all important characters.

Review: 'The Dragon and the Snake' by M.A. Gates and E.B. Geelhoed

From 1974 for five years, American diplomatic interests in China were represented by the United States Liaison Office (USLO). Established after Nixon's famous visit to the People's Republic in 1972 and the 'Shanghai Communiqué' that resulted from it, the USLO prepared the way in Beijing for the normalisation of Sino-American relations in 1979-1979. Between May 1976 and April 1977, the Chief of the USLO was Thomas Sovereign Gates Jr., best known for his tenure as Secretary for Defence under President Eisenhower. 'The Dragon and the Snake' is an account of Gates' time as USLO Chief, written from the perspective of his wife, who was with him throughout his time in Beijing.

May 1976 to April 1977 was, as the book jacket suggests, a time of much “turmoil” in the PRC. The death of Premier Zhou Enlai in the preceding February and the decline of Chairman Mao Zedong throughout 1976 sparked off an intense period of factional struggle, with radical and moderate elements in the Chinese Communist Party vying to to position themselves to take over on Mao's death. The Chairman's passing in the early days of September led to a month of political conflict between supporters of Hua Guofeng, the extreme Maoists (led by the 'Gang of Four') and those allied to Deng Xiaoping and other long-time revolutionaries. This eventually resulted in the Gang's arrest on October 6th 1976, sparking off a six-month period that would see Deng rehabilitation and the beginnings of his rise to prominence.