The Year of the Tiger: 23 January 1974 – 10 February 1975
Chairman Mao’s main preoccupation at the opening of 1974 was to retain power amidst the growing scandal over the disastrous Mongolian War. Although he officially blamed Chouist conspirators and cast dark assertions about Lin Biao loyalists having pushed the country into the war with false information and fabricated intelligence - all in the service of a wider Soviet plot to undermine the People’s Republic - not everyone in the inner circle accepted this explanation. There was a growing sense that perhaps the war had come about due a combination of the Great Helmsman’s growing enfeeblement (some in the leadership were beginning to think the Chairman might be going senile) and the absence of Chou Enlai’s steadying hand in the background. 1
The tension arising from this in part resulted in Chairman Mao’s being retired from his official positions in 1974 and assuming instead the quasi-official but still influential status of “senior leader” within the Chinese Communist Party. This was a ruse on the older Mao’s part, both to distance himself from the recent disaster, and also to allow himself enough room to manoeuvre behind the scenes. It seems that once Mao determined that the tide was turning against him, he removed himself from the center, understanding implicitly that left to their own devices his rivals would seriously damage themselves in their competition for power. 2
In the course of the latter strategy, the role of Mao Yuang-gin began to gain increased significance. He began the year as a legman for his uncle, but ended it as the leading figure within the diffuse power structure that was now taking shape. 3
The so-called Gang of Four –Go4 (Chiang Ching, Chang Chunchiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hung-wen) with Mao Yuang-gin lurking in the background, moved first to take advantage of the situation. Of all the factions they had the least association with the disgraced Lin Biao, who had regarded the Gang as political enemies during his lifetime, and had been actively opposed to Chou Enlai’s policies with respect to international relations and domestic economic policy. They now delighted in the opportunity to wreck havoc in the name of “purification.”
Some have called the Go4 “purification” the Second Cultural Revolution and there were elements similar to the first Cultural Revolution (such as stilted propaganda theatre and denunciations). However, this time around there was a greater emphasis on economic re-organization, the extent that the Go4 “Revolution” could be thought of as an “Economic” or “Sociological” Revolution, or a combination thereof. Fairbank has dubbed the entire period “The Great Leap Backward” and that name has also stuck to describe the situation. 4
The extent of the younger Mao’s involvement in shaping policy, and how much of his influence was a communication of his Uncle’s intentions and how much he was freelancing for his own power, is the subject of controversy. The younger Mao did work very closely with the Go4 and it is reasonable to infer, based on his rise in power, that purification campaign was at least partially his design as it was theirs. 5 The unanswerable question is how much, if any, influence the aging Chairman actually had over it.
Once Mao retired, his nephew began to exercise greater control over access to the old man by others, and as result he began to control the information reaching the Chairman. 6 At the same time the younger Mao took control of his uncle’s health care and diet, to an extent that Dr. Lin Tsi-shi has variously accused him of drugging the Chairman with various toxins which rendered him even more enfeebled and susceptible to manipulation. Dr. Lin is adamant on this point, along with the assertion that the younger Mao was drugging his Uncle. While Dr. Lin claims not have been involved in the drugging, he writes extensively about how he had to take a cautious route to proclaim the Chairman in good health, as required by the younger Mao, while recording the symptoms and indications of the drugging. Dr. Lin also tried to alleviate the effects of some of what the younger Mao was doing, but as he noted, he had to proceed very carefully as he did not know exactly what drugs were being used. “[Chairman Mao] was so feeble by now that the wrong combination of drugs could easily have killed him. I seriously wondered if whoever was advising [the nephew] on the matter understood what the side effects of these drugs were. I know Yuang-gin did not, and he showed little sign of caring as long as his uncle remained compliant.” 7
The last foreigner to actually visit with Chairman Mao was Le Duan, the General Secretary of the North Vietnamese Communist Party, who was granted special permission to enter China in order to meet with Mao and the then acting Premier Hua Goufeng. The photo taken of Le Duan and Chairman Mao sitting side-by-side on January 29, 1975 is the last known photo of the old Chairman, and Le Duan’s the last verified account of the elder Mao being seen alive by an outsider. In the photograph Mao appears placid and generally unengaged beside a more animated, smiling Le Duan. Le Duan was later recorded as telling both Mikhail Suslov and French President Mitterrand (on separate occasions) that he thought the Chairman was drugged and that nothing he said made sense. “I understand enough [Mandarin] to know that what came from the Chairman’s mouth was gibberish and that his so-called translator was making up his words for him.” According to Le Duan, Mao Yuang-gin hovered in the background (but was not photographed) during the encounter. “He commanded the room,” according to Le Duan. 8
Dr. Lin’s account, together with Le Duan’s remarks, are largely used as to date the beginning of the younger Mao’s rule of the People’s Republic as sometime in mid to late 1974, in as much as he ruled through his Uncle who – according to Le Duan – was incapacitated and unintelligible when he did speak. Dr. Lin and Le Duan’s observations may be taken as incidental, but cannot be completely dismissed since there are no alternative encounters or anecdotes which serve to counter their impression of the old Chairman’s condition, and no one else outside of the inner circle is known to have seen him alive after Le Duan’s visit.
Pending some new scholarship or evidence to the contrary, the majority of historians and analysts have reached a consensus that by the end of 1974 the Go4 and Mao Yuang-gin were in day-to-day control of Chinese affairs, with the younger Mao’s power clearly in ascent.
Power in the Central Committee formed roughly around the Go4 who held a variety of titles, and Hua Guofeng who became Premier de-facto, although his title was only “acting Premier.” [Chairman Mao, though retired, retained titles as Communist Party General Secretary and Chairman of the State Military Committee]. 9 Posts such as Foreign Minister and President remained vacant. Although the secret police came under the sway of the Go4, Mao Yuang-gin seems to have acted swiftly, using his Uncle’s nominal authority, to become Secret Police Chief, something along the lines of Lavrenti Beria’s role at the height of Stalin’s power – again in fact if not formal title. 10 This almost immediately gave Mao Yuang-gin far reaching power which he used to build patronage networks across the People’s Republic, which he did exploiting fear of the Go4 and offering protection from purges and economic dislocation. This network building was to prove the wellspring of his long-term success. 11
Immediately, there was tension between Hua Guofeng and the Go4, not least because Hua, who had been chief of Chou Enlai’s Secretariat, was considered an “arch-Chouist” by the Go4, but was spared being purged by the residual authority of Chairman Mao who had personally cleared him. Although the Chairman himself was under a cloud at this point, his word in such a direct matter proved a tough barrier to surmount in accusing anyone. The Chairman had known that in purging Chou’s supporters, along with others in the military establishment, he was opening big door for the Go4, so to a certain extent he had elevated Hua to slam that door in their collective face, or at the very least obstruct their path to absolute power. Hua created an opposition pole, which resulted in a degree of paralysis and struggle between the groups. Mao Yuang-gin apparently thought it a good idea – or a useful cloak for his own activities – because once he gained control of his Uncle’s affairs he kept Hua in place until the middle of 1975. 12
Hua in effect ran the day-to-day technocratic details of government, to the extent he could amidst the chaos being caused by the Go4 and Mao Yuang-gin. The irony of the situation is that Hua must have realized the futility of his position, and that ultimately he would be sacrificed too, the undercurrents were too strong for things to go the other way, and apart from the patronage of the Maos he had no allies. He appears to have carried on out of a sense of duty, or a wilful blindness to the inevitable. 13
A word at this point needs to be inserted on the character of Mao Yuang-gin, who was the figure most in the shadows and yet perhaps the most significant in the long-run. Born in 1941, he was the son of Chairman Mao’s brother who had been executed in 1943. In 1960, the younger Mao was admitted to Tsinghua University, then transferred to the PLA Institute of Military Engineering and became politically important during the Cultural Revolution. In 1973 he became party secretary of Liaoning province, before becoming his uncle’s assistant and by all accounts general factotum. Mao Yuang-gin (who would acquire the derisive sobriquet of “the Lesser Mao”) had also developed a close relationship with the Gang of Four (Go4) during the Cultural Revolution. It was known that he adhered to the radical cause, and that he had a sadistic nature. Dr. Lin reported that in 1969 he had watched as several people were tortured to death in front of him – he apparently was fascinated with the sounds of breaking human bones. Rumour had it that he personally tortured at least one man to death by first breaking all the bones in his body. While the apocryphal information about a Caligula complex is treated with caution and scepticism in the literature (it is not uncommon for a leader’s enemies to blacken his reputation) there seems a clear pattern of ruthless behaviour on his part through the Cultural Revolution and during his year as Liaoning Party Secretary to indicate that he was an iron-fisted manager and had no qualms about spilling blood when he considered it necessary. Clearly he also had a strong drive for personal advancement, for Yuang-gin took his position as Chairman Mao’s leg man and rapidly converted it into the position of Deputy Leader of the PRC, and by mid-1975 that of sole dictator in all but name. 14
What has never been clearly defined is how much of what occurred between February 1974 and May 1975 was his doing, and how much was instigated by his aging Uncle. This fifteen month period was a time of transition between the two, a period when the Younger Mao isolated the Chairman and began drugging him, until by 1975 the old man was little more than an addled invalid who disappeared from public view altogether. That the Younger Mao did this to his Uncle, and yet manipulated the image of his Uncle as a great leader, gives an insight into the Younger Mao’s political acumen as well as providing testimony as to the ruthless determination of his drive to advance himself into the top leadership of his nation. 15
It was about this time that the Politburo revived a plan Chairman Mao had seriously considered in 1971 and then abandoned. That plan was to move much of Chinese heavy industry away from existing population centers in Eastern China and into more remote areas where they would be easier to defend from attack from the outside and sabotage. The inspiration for this may have come from the American bombing of North Vietnam which had seriously degraded that nation’s infrastructure. In 1972 an American B-52 bomber had crashed in Chinese territory (it was not even detected when it first entered Chinese air space); an incident which demonstrated to the Chinese how vulnerable they were to American air power, especially with their industry concentrations in the East, where the American Air Force could easily reach them from bases in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. During the Mongolian War of 1973 the Soviet Air Force had demonstrated too that it could master the skies over China if it chose. By contrast the People’s Liberation Army Air Force was weak and vulnerable, the majority of its aircraft outdated relics from the Korean War era. In the aftermath of the Mongolian War a new urgency was attached to moving Chinese industrial resources inland, to where they could be more easily defended with ground based anti-aircraft, and be out of range of shorter ranged aircraft launched from either the Pacific coast or from Siberia. 16
There were precedents for this in the Communist world. During the Second World War Stalin had moved whole industrial organizations across the Ural Mountains to get them out of range of the Germans. At the end of the war, the Russians had also removed industrial plants and infrastructure from Poland and Eastern Germany and moved it to Soviet territory. It was a vast and logistically complicated undertaking, but not impossible if the regime was motivated to pay the price in years of upheaval and reduced productivity. By mid-1974 a paranoia in this direction had taken hold and the ruralisation of Chinese industrial complexes was begun. (The anti-Chouist campaign articulated a theory that the Vietnam and Mongolian Wars had been fomented by the United States and the Soviet Union respectively to squeeze China and provide a pretext for a war of annihilation against the People’s Republic. According to this theory Nixon’s outreach to China had been an act of deception, and what had really occurred was that the United States under Nixon, Agnew and Gavin and the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Suslov had created an axis of power designed to destroy China and squeeze the underdeveloped world. What began as propaganda quickly took hold in many minds as a reality. Nay Sayers who denounced this sort of thinking as fantasy were quickly denounced themselves as CIA agents working for the Chouist conspiracy. At its height the anti-Chouists postulated that during World War II Germany and Japan had been agents of the United States and the Soviet Union who had created the war behind the scenes in order to manipulate global domination between them. This view of history became the official policy of the PRC for many years afterward). Factories were transplanted, and the worker and management communities that supported them were forcibly moved with them, quickly reducing the population in the urban centers. That population reduction was augmented by the removal of large numbers of people to the State plantations which will be discussed below. Social unrest, famine and discontent were blamed on the imminence of attack by the imperialist powers, and complainers were executed as Chouists or CIA (and/or KGB) infiltrators and provocateurs. 17
There was also an important psychological component for the new regime to empty out the cities. Most Chinese were used to living in crowded conditions; it was a natural part of urban life in China. Once the cities were emptied of workers sent to the new industries or to the plantations, the cities became empty, almost ghost towns. This was an eerie and disquieting landscape for those who remained – mainly government officials and some professional groups, along with students. It had an unnatural feel, which in turn set many on edge. The effect was to make everyone a little nervous, as a reminder that they too could easily fall into non-existence (exile or death). It also made those who were watched (which constituted just about everybody) feel that, because of the lack of people or crowds in which to lose oneself, one could be even more easily watched and your actions recorded. 18
Along with the industrial relocations was the re-distribution of workers and peasants to man the growing plantation infrastructure which was built-up in the South of China in Kwangsi and Yunan. The cash crop being grown was poppies, for opium and heroin production. In the 1974 the decision was taken, most likely by the younger Mao – with the tacit support of the Go4 – that the People’s Republic was going to get into the wholesale production and export of narcotics as a means of bringing in hard currency to the now hermitically sealed nation. With state sponsorship, and a safe haven guarded by the People’s Liberation Army (which became a junior partner in the profits from the trade with the wider state treasury) the PRC had the potential to become the largest global producer of drugs, and to do so on a scale that would give them dominance in the international market. 19
This decision was rooted in Chinese history and a brand of militant Maoist ideology as well as commercial greed. In the nineteenth century China and its people had suffered greatly at the hands of an opium trade encouraged by the western colonial powers. For the People’s Republic, in many respects an international outcast still, to adopt a reversed policy had an element of psychological revenge to it. It appealed to ideologues because it exploited the worst failings of capitalist societies, and while it spread misery and decadence to western and even Soviet controlled nations, it brought the wealth of those nations back into the PRC in unprecedented amounts. 20
Gingrich, who interviewed some of the survivors of the period, records that the younger Mao was inspired by a vision of the Opium Wars of the 19th century and the 1973-1975 Arab Oil embargo which did so much damage to the western economy during this period. In developing a means to corner a large share of the illicit heroin and opiates market, the younger Mao apparently saw how the PRC could become its own OPEC, acquiring large sums of foreign capital without debt and then investing that in the nation’s development, or in the case of the Mao Yuang-gin years, financing a massive industrial and military build-up. Along the way it also gave him a pool of national wealth which he used to distribute favours and court support from various clients. His support within the PLA was strengthened because, like the western addicts who consumed the product, the Army and its senior leadership became dependant on the share of the wealth they received as a junior partner in the enterprise. Within a few years the PRC became, for better or worse, a narco state on a gigantic scale. 21
This fuelled border conflicts and PRC interventions primarily in Burma and Laos. In Laos PRC interference (aimed at flanking any cross-border ambitions on the part of the anti-Peking North Vietnamese government) caused a split within the Pathet Lao, some of whose factions became Peking clients, while others who remained loyal to North Vietnamese control entered into a civil war with the Peking financed factions. Under Hanoi’s influence, the anti-Chinese factions of the Pathet Lao came to an agreement with the anti-communist Royalist faction in Laos to form a government of national unity. The Laotian Royalists, feeling they had been abandoned by the United States in the settlement that ended the Vietnam War in 1975 (the U.S. retained control in South Vietnam and Cambodia, but became officially neutral in Laos) sought to strengthen their own ties with Hanoi (and Burma – see below) in what was a common anti-Chinese front. The Royalists did not fully trust their new Pathet Lao partners, but the two factions fought side-by-side against the pro-Peking Pathet Lao and the Khmer Rouge remnants who joined with the pro-Peking factions, and as such developed a grudging respect for one another. 22
The PRC intervened more forcefully in northern Burma, where the direct intent was to put its competitors in narcotics production – various anti-Communist warlords such as the Shan United Army – out of business. This activity de-stabilized Burma, but also gave impetus to pro-Western groups who wanted to develop a closer relationship with the United States as a source of weapons and technical support. 23
Globally, Chairman Mao had ordered a retreat from international relations at the end of 1973. This act had precedents in Chinese history as well. It is not clear that the old Chairman intended this action to be permanent, most likely he wanted to purge his foreign ministry and take the time to build-up a dedicated cadre to replace them before sending them back out into the wider world.
The younger Mao seems to have taken the model of Chin Shi Huang (see below) more to heart and decided that his plans for China could best be fulfilled under a blanket of isolation. So he took a temporary measure and made of it a permanent policy. The fact that the PRC lost valuable allies and its seat on the U.N. Security Council seems not to have registered with Mao Yuang-gin- He was coming to regard China as the sole concern of his universe, and in many respects planning the conquest of other powers (here his ideas focused on the Russians, and perhaps Europe). To the extent he thought of the United States at all, he seems to have adopted an idea that the best solution was to drive the U.S. out of the Eastern Pacific). 24
Chou Enlai, meanwhile, remained under house arrest, his health deteriorating. He was not brought to trial, while so many of his followers, alleged followers and co-conspirators were. As long as he remained alive, Chou was potent symbol of the enemy as well as a scapegoat for the Go4 and Mao Yuang-gin. The younger Mao knew from his doctors that he had terminal bladder cancer, and so would die in short order anyway. He did not want to risk putting him on trial and then have him die in the middle of it, on the chance that this might stir sympathy for the old man. So Chou remained out of sight, vilified but unharmed. 25
The Terracotta Army, sculptures depicting the armies of Chin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, dating from 210 BC, were discovered in Spring 1974 by some local farmers in Lintong District, Xi'an, Shaanxi province, near the Mausoleum of the First Chin Emperor. The farmers were digging a well at the time. Just as the Cultural Revolution had sought to eradicate much of the ideas and relics of China’s pre-Communist past, the Go4 “purification,” was as much an ideological campaign to emphasise “Communist re-birth” (picking-up from the Cultural Revolution) as it was a political purge. It is likely that under the Go4 program these ancient relics of the feudal past would have been destroyed as “decadent” and “bourgeois” representations.
The ancient Terra Cotta warriors could speak to the greatness of the artisans of China’s past, which would not have been a welcomed message in 1974, not when the younger Mao and the Go4 were trying to pick-up where the Cultural Revolution left off.
Still, for the Younger Mao, there was a fascination with them, and with Chin Shi Huang, who in his own time had tried to destroy the records of the past and reset his reign over a unified China as the beginning of history. This was what the younger Mao felt he was doing now, and the terra cotta warriors were a powerful symbol of that, and of his own nascent military ambitions (he imagined China’s millions harnessed as a massive army for his own future conquests). Accordingly he had a few dug-up and kept them in his offices and residence. The rest he ordered re-buried for the future. He had executed the farmers who discovered them. 26
1974 also marked the year the former King of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk disappeared. At the beginning of the year he had been living in exile in Peking because the North Korean regime of Marshall Hyung had expelled him in December 1973. (He had been living in Pyongyang in a 60 room mansion under the patronage of the former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung). From Peking Sihanouk continued to organize his Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea as an exile government in opposition to the Lon Nol regime. However, his alliance with the Khmer Rouge began to compromise his effectiveness as U.S. backed operations in Cambodia began to administer heavy defeats to the Khmer Rouge throughout 1974, culminating in their decimation by April 1975. 27
Sihanouk himself began to run afoul of the Go4’s purification program; the urbane, well-spoken Sihanouk looked and acted like the Chinese image of a “bourgeois capitalist element” – an image underscored by his luxurious living standards in Peking. Sihanouk also indiscreetly criticized the Go4 and the direction of PRC policy in early 1974. At some point in 1974, and it’s not clear exactly when, he was arrested as part of the purges. Whether he was executed or shipped to a prison in the Chinese hinterland is unclear and killed later is subject to controversy – in 1991 one of the successor governments to the PRC officially claimed that Sihanouk had died in prison in 1977. However, that government could provide no proof other than the second and third hand hearsay of former guards and police officials who were themselves passing on gossip. The body that was presented as Sihanouk’s in 1995 was later proven not to be his through DNA testing. Scholars in the field have reached a consensus that Sihanouk died in Chinese custody, most likely sometime between May 1974 and late 1977. 28
Hong Kong:
By 1974 Hong Kong was showing signs of ceasing to be a British colony and becoming a Chinese society not as a result of governmental action but of spontaneous commercial change. By the time of Sir Murray Maclehose’s appointment as Governor the energetic Shanghainese who had fled their city in 1949 had rebuilt their fortunes and begun to emerge as leading players in the financial world , often supplanting some of the older Chinese magnates. Of these newcomers among the most prominent were shipping magnate Sir Yue-kong Pao. The other great entrepreneur, Li Ka-shing was not from Shanghai but was a native of Chiu Chow, in Guangdong. Both had started with small, modest businesses in the 1950’s and built considerable fortunes. Others followed their example, creating an array of private enterprises all concerned with growth and expansion. This made Hong Kong very much a vibrant commercial centre in Asia, one where literally fortunes were won and lost overnight.
The “new men” typified by Pao and Li were different from previous generations of magnates who had made a point of being closely associated with the colonial government. With that government very much in decline by the 1970’s, Li and Pao set out to be their own centers of power. Pao demonstrated how little the colonial government mattered when he met directly with Prime Minister Edward Heath and Chancellor Macmillan in London, by passing the colonial structure altogether. Li Ka-shing went him one better in 1975 when he was invited to a State Dinner at the White House and met one-on-one with President James Gavin.
Gavin’s Chief of Staff, Caspar Weinberger, observed in his diary that between them “Li Ka-shing and Pao Yu-kong [sic] are acting like the joint Consuls of an independent HK Republic.” 29
To a certain extent, with China closing-up and the British government receding in terms of its global reach, the two billionaires were filling a power vacuum, and to some extent acting like Consuls of the Roman Republic, in as much as they seemed to be the driving force behind both the colony’s economic survival and its continued independence. Both men realized that Britain could only be of limited help, so they each sought support from outside, especially the United States. They were concerned that Hong Kong not be swallowed-up by the increasingly toxic People’s Republic being run by Mao Yuang-gin, nor did they wish to be swallowed-up by Chaing Kai Shek’s dictatorship on Taiwan, as some there were suggesting.
The Independent Commission Against Corruption set-up by Sir Murray proved both a success (in terms of exposing corruption if not stopping it altogether) but also highlighted the limited scope of the old bureaucracy. Businessmen like Li and Pao were going to have to be even further in the forefront if they wanted to maintain an environment where confidence remained and the economy prospered against the grey wall being erected on the mainland.
Of course, the younger Mao in Peking also had a use for Hong Kong. He planned to use the underworld resident there (which had been largely expelled from China in 1949 by the Communists) to become his front men in his dealings with the world in the narcotics trade. He even envisioned creating a new breed of Li Ka-shings beholden to him and the illicit trade, all for the purpose of creating a giant money machine that would siphon dollars and other hard currency into China. Hong Kong was the ideal outpost from which they could operate.
Macau might have been a competitor in the beginning, but the anxious way in which the revolutionaries in Lisbon acted to get rid of it, to the point of declaring Macau an open city, undermined all confidence (Britain and the United States were at least ready to defend Hong Kong, which was an important prop to the economy there) and generated panic. The younger Mao eventually decided to take Macau, more as an act of contempt for the Communist Portuguese Governors who were so willing to give him what he really didn’t want. The irony of Macau was that it could have been his personal Hong Kong, but that for some reason it escaped his understanding of how to govern the place without strict Communist rule. Once Macau came under his control, it had to be made like the rest of the PRC, the man had no sense of compromise on the question. Better that Hong Kong should exist under foreign rule, and operate, than be forced to go the PRC way.
Not that this stopped him from squeezing Hong Kong with water shortages, all to appear more menacing to the inhabitants. The younger Mao, by taking Macau and squeezing Hong Kong, scared the hell out of the inhabitants, ensuring a stubborn reaction from the United States and Britain, both of which ratcheted –up their military assets in the colony, which was joined by several companies of troops from Canada and Australia, both of which had restive Hong Kong Chinese populations who put political pressure on their governments to help. The short term was shock, the long term was a renewed confidence that business in Hong Kong went on as usual, rain or shine. And of course, Hong Kong was the entrepot and trading point for access to the reclusive mainland, though of course this point was seldom articulated as much as it was observed by actual trading (technically illegal on both sides of the border, but it happened and became a significant sector of the Hong Kong economy. This only continued because British Governors and Communist overlords on both sides knew when to look the other way).
Taiwan looked on with envy, and the government in Taipei became ever more restive about the fact that the rights to govern the place should revert to it once the British lease on the New Territories expired. The Heath government ignored this legal technicality, and having severed relations with Taiwan in the heady days when the PRC seemed to be opening-up to the world, largely ignored Taiwan. The Healy government that followed it was the first to seriously address the issue of the lease and what should happen when it expired, but that was in the later 1970’s.
For the moment the entrepreneurial Consuls made their muscle felt, while the British cultivated civic leaders more in their mode, such as Anson Chan and Martin Lee.
There was a reflexive action against radicalism, which both the colonial authorities and the Consuls could agree on, and that was why Szeto Wah and his reform movement were given such a cold shoulder in the 1970’s, to the point that Wah was interned under Britain’s 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act. Szeto Wah made an unlikely fellow traveller with members of the PIRA, but with their brush he was tarred, a decision the British would come to regret.
Source: Welsh, pp. 489 - 501
Notes:
1- Chang & Halliday, p. 590
2 – Ibid, p. 591
3 – Gingrich p. 88
4 – Chang & Halliday p.590 & Hua Hofeng, p. 92
5 – Hua Hofeng p. 93
6 – Gingrich p. 90
7 – Dr. Lin p. 548
8 – Le Duan, p. 301 and Anonymous, p. 310
9 – Chung & Halliday, p. 591
10 – Gingrich p. 99 – 101
11 – Hua Huafeng p. 101
12 – Chung & Halliday p.549
13 – Ibid
14 – Gingrich, pp. 70 – 85; 92 – 96 & Hua Hofeng, p. 62 – 68
15 - Chung & Halliday p. 591
16 – Ibid; p. 592
17 – Hua Hofeng pp. 112 – 122
18 - Ibid;, Dr. Lin pp. 550 – 551
19 – McCoy, p. 119
20 – Fenby p. 196
21 – Gingrich p. 126 & McCoy pp. 121-126
22 – McCoy p. 128
23 – McCoy p. 131
24 - Man, pp. 36 – 39
25 – Chung & Halliday pp. 594 – 596
26 – Gingrich pp. 128 – 140
27 – Dr. Lin p. 594; Hua pp. 163 – 165
28 – Anonymous, p. 312
29 – Weinberger, p. 166
References:
Anonymous, Behind the Fortress Walls (1981, Macmillan)
Chang, Jun & Halliday, Jon, Mao The Unknown Story (2006, Anchor Books)
Dr. Li Tsi-shi, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994, Random House)
Fenby, Jonathan, The Penguin History of Modern China (2008, Penguin)
Gingrich, Newt, Mao Yang-gin: The Bloody Dragon (1992, Oxford University Press)
Hua Houfang, The Color of Blood: The Real Chinese Revolution (1975, Little Brown & Co)
Kissinger, Henry, Years of Crisis: Why the United States Failed in Asia (1982, Simon & Schuster)
Le Duan, Revolution in Asia: Liberation from Colonial Imperialism (1990, Hanoi State Press)
Lewis, Mark Lia Ka-Shing, Merchant Emperor of Hong Kong (1996, The Free Enterprise Institute)
Man, John, The Terra Cotta Army: China’s First Emperor and the Birth of a Nation (2007, Transworld Pubslishers)
McCoy, Alfred, The Politics of Heroin in China (1981, Yale University Press)
Spence, Jonathan D. The Fall of Modern China (1990, W.W. Norton & Co.)
Welsh, Frank A Borrowed Place: A History of Hong Kong (1990, Kolenasha International)
Weiberger, Capsar White House Diary (Unpublished; available at the Weinberger Center for Government, UCLA, Los Angeles, Calif).
