WI: Mao dies in 1972?

OTL, a few days before Richard Nixon was scheduled to arrive for his monumental talk with Mao, the Chairman passed out and nearly died. To quote from the excellent Penguin History of Modern China (Jonathan Fenby):
"Finally, on February 1 1972... there was a major scare. Mao began coughing and was so weak that he could not expel the phlegm in his throat. Unable to breathe, he collapsed. Li (Mao's doctor) ran to get emergency equipment, put an oxygen mask on the Chairman, and fitted an intravenous tube into his arm to pump medicine into the bloodstream. When he came round, Mao tried to pull the tube out. The doctor stopped him, explaining that it was keeping him alive..."
Clearly, having him die here is not at all implausible. So, what happens next? It seems a safe bet that Nixon's trip to China will be cancelled, but what effects will this have on the PRC's politics? Zhou Enlai is in Beijing at the time, so it seems safe to say he'd try to claim the succession- but would he be successful? The Gang of Four are still quite strong and always enjoyed the Chairman's backing; might we see them attempt a coup d'etat, possibly even a civil war in the PRC? How would the Americans react to such a thing? What would be the effects on the Sino-Soviet split (obviously, these points depend greatly on whether Zhou can grab power successfully.)

Thoughts?
 
Just to get things rolling, I'm gonna say the fact that the summit was going ahead in the first place showed that the forces represented by Zhou were on the ascendancy, and would likely be successful in thwarting any power-grab by the Gang.
 
Just to get things rolling, I'm gonna say the fact that the summit was going ahead in the first place showed that the forces represented by Zhou were on the ascendancy, and would likely be successful in thwarting any power-grab by the Gang.
This. Mao dying in 1972 leads to a Chairman Zhou. Liu Shaoqi is dead, Lin Biao just hit the dust, and the Gang of Four is still not at the point where they’re openly positioning themselves as Mao’s ideological successors.

We’re looking at Chairman Zhou and most likely a rehabillitated Premier Deng. Zhou will be a transition figure, he dies in 1976 and China gets Deng 2 years early.
 
You don't hear Xi talking about that much, eh?

I think that might qualify as cuurent politics.

Suffice to say my impression has been that, since the Deng years, the Chinese government hasn't trashed Mao directly, but has trashed major parts of his legacy, without getting into too much detail about his faults.

Even the much-vaunted Confucius Institutes are an implicit slap-in-the-face to the man who had Confucian temples burned to the ground and launched the Criticize Lin Bao Criticize Confucius campaign.

Interestingly enough, despite Mao's aforementioned habit of forcing himself on young women, one of the criticisms directed against Deng was that he ordered female flight attendants on Chinese airlines to start wearing sexy uniforms, which was considered an affront to Maoist principles.
 
I think that might qualify as cuurent politics.

Suffice to say my impression has been that, since the Deng years, the Chinese government hasn't trashed Mao directly, but has trashed major parts of his legacy, without getting into too much detail about his faults.

Even the much-vaunted Confucius Institutes are an implicit slap-in-the-face to the man who had Confucian temples burned to the ground and launched the Criticize Lin Bao Criticize Confucius campaign.

Interestingly enough, despite Mao's aforementioned habit of forcing himself on young women, one of the criticisms directed against Deng was that he ordered female flight attendants on Chinese airlines to start wearing sexy uniforms, which was considered an affront to Maoist principles.
Yes, that's more or less what I've heard as well- something like "for all his merits, the Gang of Four led him to gross errors in the last ten years of his life"
It's ironic when you think about it, but China today is probably closer to Chiang's vision than Mao's- a bureaucracy-ridden, hypercapitalist state which is nevertheless a superpower, built around government control and "rejuvenation" of culture.

As to the flight attendants, well, it goes to show what a bunch of hypocrites the Maoists all were.
 
China today is probably closer to Chiang's vision than Mao's- a bureaucracy-ridden, hypercapitalist state which is nevertheless a superpower, built around government control and "rejuvenation" of culture.

There's also an argument I've heard that the Cultural Revolution ended up paving the way for the current hypercapitalism, by eliminating the feudalistic Confucian bureaucracy that was thwarting the development of free-market liberalism.

(Not sure what to make of that argument, and in any case it's kinda morally repugnant.)
 
Last edited:
This. Mao dying in 1972 leads to a Chairman Zhou. Liu Shaoqi is dead, Lin Biao just hit the dust, and the Gang of Four is still not at the point where they’re openly positioning themselves as Mao’s ideological successors.

We’re looking at Chairman Zhou and most likely a rehabillitated Premier Deng. Zhou will be a transition figure, he dies in 1976 and China gets Deng 2 years early.

"According to a recent biography of Zhou by Gao Wenqian, a former researcher at the CPC's Party Documents Research Office, Zhou was first diagnosed with bladder cancer in November 1972.[187] Zhou's medical team reported that with treatment he had an 80 to 90 per cent chance of recovery, but medical treatment for the highest ranking party members had to be approved by Mao. Mao ordered that Zhou and his wife should not be told of the diagnosis, no surgery should be performed, and no further examinations should be given.[188] According to Ji Chaozhu, Zhou Enlai's personal interpreter, Henry Kissinger offered to send cancer specialists from the United States to treat Zhou, an offer that would eventually be refused.[189] By 1974, Zhou was experiencing significant bleeding in his urine. After pressure by other Chinese leaders who had learned of Zhou's condition, Mao finally ordered a surgical operation to be performed in June 1974, but the bleeding returned a few months later, indicating metastasis of the cancer into other organs."

Had Zhou received treatment earlier his life expectancy would almost certainly have been prolonged, at least by a few months, perhaps even a year or two.

I do agree though that Zhou would rehabilitate Deng, and Jiang Qing will almost certainly be immediately sidelined as in OTL. The economic reforms happen, but with the timescale shifted forwards a year or two.
 
"According to a recent biography of Zhou by Gao Wenqian, a former researcher at the CPC's Party Documents Research Office, Zhou was first diagnosed with bladder cancer in November 1972.[187] Zhou's medical team reported that with treatment he had an 80 to 90 per cent chance of recovery, but medical treatment for the highest ranking party members had to be approved by Mao. Mao ordered that Zhou and his wife should not be told of the diagnosis, no surgery should be performed, and no further examinations should be given.[188] According to Ji Chaozhu, Zhou Enlai's personal interpreter, Henry Kissinger offered to send cancer specialists from the United States to treat Zhou, an offer that would eventually be refused.[189] By 1974, Zhou was experiencing significant bleeding in his urine. After pressure by other Chinese leaders who had learned of Zhou's condition, Mao finally ordered a surgical operation to be performed in June 1974, but the bleeding returned a few months later, indicating metastasis of the cancer into other organs."

Had Zhou received treatment earlier his life expectancy would almost certainly have been prolonged, at least by a few months, perhaps even a year or two.

I do agree though that Zhou would rehabilitate Deng, and Jiang Qing will almost certainly be immediately sidelined as in OTL. The economic reforms happen, but with the timescale shifted forwards a year or two.
Considering that Zhou was politically quite close to Hua Guofeng, might he elevate Hua above Deng in his new regime, possibly leading to Hua taking over when Zhou dies? If so, that might set back the speed of reforms considerably, given that Hua only died in 2008. Of course, I'm not saying Hua would be a bat-crazy Cultural Revolutionary (on the contrary), but from what I know about the man he was much more of a *genuine* Marxist than Deng with regards to economic policy, and certainly was much more open in his veneration of Mao.
 
Considering that Zhou was politically quite close to Hua Guofeng, might he elevate Hua above Deng in his new regime, possibly leading to Hua taking over when Zhou dies? If so, that might set back the speed of reforms considerably, given that Hua only died in 2008. Of course, I'm not saying Hua would be a bat-crazy Cultural Revolutionary (on the contrary), but from what I know about the man he was much more of a *genuine* Marxist than Deng with regards to economic policy, and certainly was much more open in his veneration of Mao.
From what I gather, it was Mao that was always interested in Hua because Hua was Party Secretary in the region that was Mao's hometown. While he did have a lot of interactions with Zhou OTL, it seemed to be in the context of Mao's approval rather than because of Zhou's impression of him:

Hua was called to Beijing to direct Zhou Enlai's State Council staff office in 1971, but only stayed for a few months before returning to his previous post in Hunan.[3] Later that year, he was appointed as the most junior of the seven-member committee investigating the Lin Biao Affair, a sign of the strong trust Mao had in him. Hua was re-elected to the 10th Central Committee in 1973 and elevated to membership in the Politburo; in the same year, he was put in charge by Zhou Enlai of agricultural development. He became minister of public security and vice-premier in 1975, but his duties were far broader, as he was also chosen to deliver a speech on modernizing agriculture in October of that year which echoed the views of Zhou Enlai.[4]

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Guofeng

I don't think Hua would be elevated above Deng in the Zhou regime. Deng was the more senior and respected with the network in the PLA, Party, and Government. Remember, OTL Hua was a nobody who Mao happened to like, promoted, and saw as a compromise candidate (not belonging to any faction) to inherit the chairmanship.

Perhaps in the long term, without the handicap of being Mao's heir (and IMO, it is a handicap because that's the only card he could play OTL when Deng challenged him), he might have a role to play. But certainly not in the short term.
 
Could a replacement for Lin, more committed to socialist unity, be found in the nomenklatura?
Not likely, no. Lin's whole strength was the PLA, and they were mostly a more conservative group. His death kind of unpinned the whole system, forcing Mao to decrease his reliance on the Army. There's no one in the Army structure who jumps to mind that could carry as much gravitas as Lin while also being as radical- Ye Jianying threw his weight in with Zhou the first chance he got.
 
Confucian? umm, no- Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist state planning bureaucracy
Well, the authors of that thesis might have been thinking of stuff like the campaign against the Four Olds, which I don't think was directed against any form of Marxism.


Granted, I'm not sure how much of that old-school thinking survived among the Communist bureacracy. However, given that China had only been Communist for about 16 years when the Cultural Revolution was launched, I would think that a good number of the teachers, anyway, had been trained under the traditional systems. And teachers were a major target of the Red Guards, of course.
 
Last edited:
There's also an argument I've heard that the Cultural Revolution ended up paving the way for the current hypercapitalism, by eliminating the feudalistic Confucian bureaucracy that was thwarting the development of free-market liberalism.

(Not sure what to make of that argument, and in any case it's kinda morally repugnant.)
I've heard the exact opposite: that it proved that government messing with the economy was untenable in the long term.
 
I've heard the exact opposite: that it proved that government messing with the economy was untenable in the long term.

Well, the Cultural Revolution wasn't so much a case of the government messing with the economy, as it was a case of the government destroying itself.

Essentially, the CR amounted to a few people at the top of the government giving certain pseudo-autonomous groups the power to shut down large sections of the government(eg. Red Guards burning down universities and beating their professors to a bloody pulp). After a few years of such, the government itself would arguably be rendered nearly incapable of "messing with" anything.

I think the earlier Great Leap Forward better fit the idea of what we usually mean by a government "messing with the economy", ie. the government set certain economic goals(most notably an increase in steel production), and used batshit crazy methods to attain them. And yeah, the results of that were also pretty disastrous.
 
Well, the Cultural Revolution wasn't so much a case of the government messing with the economy, as it was a case of the government destroying itself.

Essentially, the CR amounted to a few people at the top of the government giving certain pseudo-autonomous groups the power to shut down large sections of the government(eg. Red Guards burning down universities and beating their professors to a bloody pulp). After a few years of such, the government itself would arguably be rendered nearly incapable of "messing with" anything.

I think the earlier Great Leap Forward better fit the idea of what we usually mean by a government "messing with the economy", ie. the government set certain economic goals(most notably an increase in steel production), and used batshit crazy methods to attain them. And yeah, the results of that were also pretty disastrous.
I've also heard an interesting argument: namely that the CR and the Boxer Rebellion more or less came from the same pool. The idea being that "the country is bullied and oppressed by foreign powers, and the leader is surrounded by evil fools who run counter to the Chinese dream".

Bullying/oppressive foreign powers= Westerners, Soviet Union
Leader= Mao, Cixi
Evil fools= Liu Shaoqi, the corrupt Manchu court, etc.

The idea being that the people must act for themselves and help the leader save the country.

Thoughts?
 
I've also heard an interesting argument: namely that the CR and the Boxer Rebellion more or less came from the same pool. The idea being that "the country is bullied and oppressed by foreign powers, and the leader is surrounded by evil fools who run counter to the Chinese dream".

Bullying/oppressive foreign powers= Westerners, Soviet Union
Leader= Mao, Cixi
Evil fools= Liu Shaoqi, the corrupt Manchu court, etc.

The idea being that the people must act for themselves and help the leader save the country.

Thoughts?

I don't think I know enough about the Boxer Rebellion to make a full comparison. I know I've heard it was heavily anti-foreigner, as was the CE(eg. Communists attacked British government buildings in Hong Kong), but there was also a pretty heavy attack on much of traditional Chinese culture by the Maoists. Was that latter sort of aspect present in the Boxer Rebellion?
 
Oh, and about the "evil fools close to the leader", certainly Deng and maybe(not sure) Zhou were seen that way by the Red Guards(who tossed Deng's son out a window, maiming him for life), but it's also the case that this demonization was being incited by people who were also very high-up in the party.

Not sure how that compares with the Boxers. Were they more spontaneously grassroots?
 
Top