New York: Basic Books, 2012. ix, 273 pp. (Illus.) US$26.99, cloth. ISBN 978-0-465-01478-1.
Under Mao Zedong, China endured much turmoil, but the year 1976 witnessed the end of this era and became a fresh new start for Chinese leaders and ordinary people. The changes since 1976 have created a stronger and wealthier China in the twenty-first century, but not without exacting a heavy toll. If we were to believe in superstition or myth, such momentous political, economic and social change should be preceded by a good omen or a chilling portent by the gods. The British historian and travel writer, James Palmer, in his new book, Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes, masterfully weaves China’s story in 1976 from multiple perspectives in people’s lives. Revolving around the two biggest incidents in that year, the Tangshan Earthquake and the death of Mao, the historical events and the lives of people—elites at the top, cadres in the middle, and ordinary citizens at the bottom—are described with plenty of literary analogies from the East and West.
The book starts with a summary of the diverse background to the year 1976, focusing on the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s through to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, with special attention paid to political affairs. It successfully details the power struggles at the top in Zhongnanhai, the residential compound of the Chinese Communist Party leaders, as well as the starving and agonizing everyday life at the grassroots level, especially in Tangshan, where over one million people lived and engaged in various industrial activities. The death of Mao, the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four, the resurgence of Deng Xiaoping, as well as a lively young Tangshan woman named Yang Jianguo, who travelled all the way to Tianjin to buy a gold fish to detect the signs of a massive earthquake and which she named “little red,” are all equally important in the year 1976.
The exhaustive description of events before and after the Tangshan Earthquake, which probably cost more than half a million lives, as well as destroying 97 percent of commercial and residential structures in the city, helps us not just to absorb dry factual information about victims and survivors, but also to embrace their emotional and personal experiences. A virtue of this book stems from the author’s painstaking fieldwork to collect all these personal memories and stories of the Tangshan people. Unlike the detailed but somewhat redundant sketch of elite politics surrounding Mao, which can be found in many other books, the earthquake-related stories of a barber, a printing plant worker, a nurse; of a miner who was the sole survivor of his entire family; and many other stories about ordinary citizens nearly overwhelm the reader. The efforts and struggles of the seismologist officials and workers are vividly described, too. At the end of the book, the author, who was moved by the memorial wall for the Tangshan Earthquake victims, concludes the book with an astute and significant remark: “Tangshan’s [historical memory] is the first to recognize individual loss, rather than collective sacrifice [in modern China]” (247).
The book is not completely free of weaknesses, however, particularly the disjuncture between the description of elite politics revolving around Mao’s death and that of the Tangshan Earthquake. It is understandable because the original intention of the author seems to encompass a wide range of historical events in 1976. But suggesting that the tragic lives of the victims of the Tangshan Earthquake were distant from elite politics is not entirely accurate. The Tangshan Earthquake might have been a god-sent sign of the end of the Mandate of Heaven for Mao and his radicals (but, obviously not for the Chinese Communist Party as a whole!), but its political impact on the city of Tangshan and its citizens was not very well described except for the ceremonial visit of Hua Guofeng, the immediate and ultimately ineffective successor of Mao, and the military rescue missions.
In this regard, the connection between high and low politics is relatively weak. Within minutes of natural disasters such as an earthquake, the events become political. Rather than allocating many pages to describing the elite politics, the author could spend more time finding these links, such as the outrageous diminution of the tragedy of the earthquake by the Gang of Four (189) and the reason why China’s leaders rejected foreign humanitarian aid, which could have saved tens of thousands of lives and dramatically improved the survivors’ living conditions. Indeed, Palmer notes that a former military officer bemoaned the “stupid thing we’d done” (160). Perhaps comparing Tangshan with the Wenchuan Earthquake in 2008 and Japan’s Sendai Earthquake in 2011 would help readers understand this type of link better (240), as well as demonstrate similarities and differences between then and now. Even though this is a missing piece of the book, this type of work might be more suited for social scientists.
Without any scholarly jargon or pedantic expressions, Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes is highly readable for the informed and general public who are interested in how China, which was recently elevated to the status of G-2 with the US, started its miraculous surge over the last three decades and a half. To be sure, serious students of the history and politics of disaster should also find this book a good start for further study.
Wooyeal Paik
Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea
pp. 138-140