Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and three of her close associates,
collectively known as the Gang of Four, had been great
supporters of the Cultural Revolution and the resulting
repression. They intended to continue using this blueprint to
run the country under the dictatorship of the Communist
Party. On April 5, a spontaneous celebration of the life of
Zhou Enlai in Tiananmen Square turned into a protest
against the government. The Gang of Four blamed Deng
for the demonstrations, and he was once more stripped of
all his positions and dismissed. Instead of achieving the
removal of the leftists, Deng found that the leftists had
removed him. After the death of Zhou Enlai, Mao had
appointed Hua Guofeng as the acting premier instead of
Deng. In the relative power vacuum of 1976, Hua was able
to accumulate a great deal of personal power.
In September there was a critical juncture: Mao died. The
Chinese Communist Party had been under Mao’s
domination, and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution had been largely his initiatives. With Mao gone,
there was a true power vacuum, which resulted in a struggle
between those with different visions and different beliefs
about the consequences of change. The Gang of Four
intended to continue with the policies of the Cultural
Revolution as the only way of consolidating theirs and the
Communist Party’s power. Hua Guofeng wanted to
abandon the Cultural Revolution, but he could not distance
himself too much from it, because he owed his own rise in
the party to its effects. Instead, he advocated a return to a
more balanced version of Mao’s vision, which he
encapsulated in the “Two Whatevers,” as the People’s
Daily , the newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, put
it in 1977. Hua argued, “We will resolutely uphold whatever
policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly
follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.”
Deng Xiaoping did not wish to abolish the communist
regime and replace it with inclusive markets any more than
Hua did. He, too, was part of the same group of people
brought to power by the communist revolution. But he and
his supporters thought that significant economic growth
could be achieved without endangering their political
control: they had a model of growth under extractive
political institutions that would not threaten their power,