ON THIS DAY ·
Tangshan earthquake
28 Jul 1976 — Before dawn, an earthquake destroys the industrial city of Tangshan. It measures 7.6 in magnitude, or 7.8 on the Chinese scale. The official count is 242,000 dead, though other estimates are higher, and the government refused foreign aid. Many people followed an old tradition in reading the disaster as a sign that the Mandate of Heaven was passing.
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The moment in context
Mao’s government could carry its decisions from the center to the villages. The Party had local organizations; campaigns enlisted citizens to accuse and police one another; and the army was loyal to the leader. This was a party-state, a system in which one party controls government at every level, rather as a company owner appoints every manager. It unified China and raised life expectancy. Yet the same reach carried disastrous decisions downward. Nothing inside the system could stop an error at the top, whether in the famine or in Mao’s assault on his own party, the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966.
From Death and legacy of Mao Zedong, chapter 12 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1976).
The place: Tangshan earthquake — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — A succession Mao never settled. Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao had both been chosen as successors and then destroyed by Mao. In his final years he balanced radicals against veterans…
- The turn — 6 October 1976. The Gang of Four were detained at a Politburo meeting on 6 October 1976. Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing used the leadership’s guard unit…
- What it changed — The communes dismantled. At Xiaogang and elsewhere, secret contracts from 1978 returned responsibility for plots to individual households. The communes, Mao’s central rural…
Then ask the room: Should Mao’s rule be judged chiefly by what it built or by what it cost? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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