A Tale of Two Chinas - Part I
The early 1980s is often marked as a point at which the Republic of China, bunkered away on the island of Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China in the Mainland, started to see broader and broader divergences. Buffeted by a series of labor reforms in the mid-1970s, Taiwan's economic growth began to seriously outpace that of the PRC, helped in large part not only by cheap consumer goods and electronics manufacturing but by increasingly sophisticated logistics and microchip operations, and the authoritarian shell both had sat under since 1949 began to crack east of the Taiwan Straits while in Beijing things were as top-down as ever.
Indeed, in the views of many senior Chinese officials, they probably had to be. The autumn of 1981 brought with it two major challenges that badly strained the Hua Guofeng regime's authority both with the CCP luminaries who surrounded him (known collectively as the "Seven Elders," many of whom were not particularly strong supporters of his) and the Chinese street. The first was the much-awaited trial of the Gang of Four, the group of ultra-Maoist ideologues who had steered much of public discourse during the late Cultural Revolution and sought to run China upon Mao's death, including the late Chairman's wife, Jiang Qing and a genuinely dangerous and ambitious young demagogue in Wang Hongwen. Part of the reason the Gang of Four had fallen from power and grace in 1976 was that, to put it simply, most people with power within the CCP genuinely despised them, as did the military, which by the late 1970s had formed something of its own power base. Hua, who had very powerful allies within the intelligence services on whom he relied to prop up his power within China, had been the leading figure in their arrest and charges of treason.
The actual trial of the Gang of Four, however, split opinion on Hua within the party. Elders such as Yang Shangkun and Peng Yen, who had been allies of the late Deng Xiaopeng and thus had never warmed to Hua to begin with, took the stance that Hua's chosen prosecutors were incompetent, and assumed that it was
Hua who had deliberately done so. Setting aside for a fact that in a system such as the PRC's the guilt of the Gang of Four was fairly plainly pre-determined, the trial of the Gang of Four - how it was reported on, what prosecutors discussed before the judge, how party members reacted - became part of a power struggle within the Politburo between Hua's enemies, the military, and the intelligence services. In the end, of course, the Gang of Four were all sentenced; Jiang, the infamous and colorful "Madame Mao" regarded as the most rabid enthusiast of the Cultural Revolution's excesses, defended herself and stood defiant, while Wang and Yao Wenyuan expressed repentance for not only their crimes but, perhaps more gravely in Red China, their "political errors." On December 1st, 1981, they were given sentences of twenty years apiece, which Hua's detractors took as evidence of his being too light.
[1] Hua, who had always been careful not to fully repudiate and reject the Cultural Revolution even as it was clearly time for China to move on, made an address flanked by his chief allies Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Ji Dengkui and Chen Xilian - now derisively called the "Little Gang of Four" - to declare "justice has been served against the political errancy of these four traitors to China and the memory of Chairman Mao" and suggested, "It is the hour to turn a new leaf." The "New Leaf Policy" became understood to not just mean China moving on from the Four with their sentences but the Cultural Revolution generally, mostly by pretending that it didn't happen, so that its diminishing but still-influential supporters could still tell themselves that it had been the proper implementation of Mao Zedong Thought against the bourgeois and feudal history of China that needed to be purified, and its detractors could persuade themselves that nothing like that would ever happen again.
[2] Indeed, the New Leaf Policy could have buffeted Hua tremendously, had he himself not been enamored with Mao's legacy and had the Chinese famine of 1981-82 not struck at approximately the same time.
The early 1980s famine was nowhere near as severe as infamous famines such as 1907 or 1928-30, to say nothing of the Great Chinese Famine of twenty years prior that was associated with Mao's mishandling of the Great Leap Forward, but it nonetheless was a major challenge for the government and estimates range from between four to five million Chinese, primarily children and the elderly, starving to death between the harvest of 1981 and late spring of the following year. While Western media access to China was always haphazard, photographs and footage showed emaciated youths and conditions in some parts of the Chinese countryside that looked more similar to parts of Sub-Saharan Africa than the confident People's Republic that was presenting itself to the world after Mao's death and Nixon's visit a decade earlier. It also was a very dark and grim reminder of the Great Leap Forward at precisely a time when Mao's legacy was being interrogated within the CCP's upper echelons (his legacy was to say the least not up for debate within its middle and lower levels of internal organs) and it was an open question of whether his mistakes should be recognized publicly and rejected a la Khrushchev's policy on Stalinism. The trial and famine together thus served to present the Chinese people and leadership, simultaneously, with potent reminders of the two largest blemishes on Mao's record, blemishes which for most Chinese over the age of thirty were within recent and living memory.
With Deng's death, Hua's rise and the advanced age of many of the Elders, however, finding a suitable power base opposed to Hua was difficult and had to come from outside of the circle around Yang and Peng. The famine, ironically enough, provided just such a figure - from Sichuan province, where most people would have asked "what famine?" thanks to the efforts of the experimental agricultural management practices of local functionary Zhao Ziyang,
[3] who had been rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution and had been regarded as having reached the limits of what he could achieve once his sympathizer Deng had passed. Sichuan's weathering of the famine and strong economic growth, especially compared with larger and wealthier provinces in the east, caught people's attention, however, and with that Zhao was invited back to Beijing to be within the Central Committee and help manage the end of the famine response, even if Hua didn't entirely trust the reasons for his enemies in the Politburo wanting the talented young reformer promoted higher...
[1] This is similar, though not exactly, to how the Gang of Four trial played out IOTL, where Deng's consolidated power and his broader support from the other Elders gave him much broader leeway.
[2] Suffice to say this is not how you generally solve problems
[3] Those familiar with Chinese history know why this name is important and why he's not going to click with Hua long-term, to say the least
