Deng Xiaoping’s Death: Mood in China Was Different in 1976 when Mao Died
By TERRIL YUE JONES
Associated Press - Feb. 23, 1997
Deng Xiaoping's death this week was greeted in China with sadness, curiosity or indifference. For most of the country's 1.2 billion people, daily routines went on largely uninterrupted.
But when China's previous leader, Mao Tse-tung, died 21 years ago at 82, one fourth of humanity came to a standstill.
Throngs of Chinese wept in the streets. Schools, parks and theaters closed, and the military went on national alert, fearing attack by the Soviet Union or the United States.
It was Sept. 9, 1976, and Mao, the visionary, revolutionary leader who both founded and convulsed modern China, left a country in shambles and a leadership wracked by a fierce power struggle.
I was 17 years old and had arrived in China three days earlier with my mother, a native of Beijing, to visit my 81-year-old grandfather in Shanghai. This was China before market reforms, before it opened up to the outside world. All our visits with my grandfather were closely monitored by a local member of the Communist Party.
It was China in the final weeks of the 10-year Cultural Revolution that officially ended with the arrest of the radically leftist Gang of Four, including Mao's widow, a month later.
The announcement that sunny Sept. 9 came ominously: Loudspeakers ordered citizens home early to hear "an important broadcast." A uniformed policeman, seeing I did not look quite Chinese (my father is an American of western European descent), politely insisted on escorting my mother and me to my grandfather's home.
The next few days were marked by ostentatious displays of grief.
Stone-faced citizens lined up four abreast at theaters and public halls hurriedly converted to places of mourning; many wept openly, some hysterically.
Funeral music similar to that which played this week on television for Deng was broadcast, but in 1976 it was on all radio and TV broadcasts, and from loudspeakers in the streets.
I was given a black armband bearing a small, white paper flower and the words: "The admirable leader and teacher Chairman Mao Tse-tung will forever persevere, and never diminish."
Staying at the Overseas Chinese Hotel, I was asked to help represent overseas Chinese in Shanghai. Another hotel guest and I carried a large wreath of paper flowers into a movie theater, television cameras rolling, and set it in front of a portrait of Mao that covered the entire screen.
We joined the line of mourners and bowed three times to the portrait, a gesture Deng forbade for his own funeral before he died Wednesday at 92.
On Sept. 18, the day of Mao's funeral, there was a three-minute silence, as there will be Tuesday for Deng.
At that moment I was at a Shanghai ceremony for overseas Chinese. I remember peering out of the 10th-floor window and seeing "Shanghai Minbing," the Shanghai People's Militia, standing every 10 feet on the street below, reflecting fears of an attack at China's moment of vulnerability.
Mao always will be revered for uniting and creating modern China. On one of my return visits to China as a journalist, covering the pro-democracy protests and the Tiananmen crackdown from May-July 1989, it was striking to see the respect that Mao commanded among student protesters despite recognition that he was behind some of China's greatest disasters.
While Deng's reforms set China on the path to modernization and prosperity, he is also viewed as the leader who ordered troops to clear Tiananmen Square, and history's view of him may be colored by the crackdown on democracy.
