Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes
The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao's China
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
When an earthquake of historic magnitude leveled the industrial city of Tangshan in the summer of 1976, killing more than a half-million people, China was already gripped by widespread social unrest. As Mao lay on his deathbed, the public mourned the death of popular premier Zhou Enlai. Anger toward the powerful Communist Party officials in the Gang of Four, which had tried to suppress grieving for Zhou, was already potent; when the government failed to respond swiftly to the Tangshan disaster, popular resistance to the Cultural Revolution reached a boiling point.
In Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes, acclaimed historian James Palmer tells the startling story of the most tumultuous year in modern Chinese history, when Mao perished, a city crumbled, and a new China was born.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A devastating temblor is the least of the shocks in this vivid history of a pivotal year in China's journey from communism. Historian Palmer (The Bloody White Baron) pens a gripping narrative of the 1976 earthquake, which leveled the city of Tangshan and killed hundreds of thousands of people during "the most concentrated instant of destruction humanity has ever known." But the disaster is mainly a metaphorical image within Palmer's larger account of the stormy final decade of Mao's reign, centered on the Cultural Revolution and the power struggle after his death. It was a period of constant, bloody upheaval, with Mao a doddering lord of misrule plotting breakneck political betrayals and goading pubescent Red Guards into fits of hysterical violence against their elders. The denouement is a comic opera in which Mao's dragon lady widow, Jiang Qing, and her ultra-radical Gang of Four are ousted by a centrist coup. Palmer gives readers a lucid, canny portrait, filled with telling details, of a society tamped down by repression, regimentation, and drab poverty, but seething with antiauthoritarian rage. His is one of the most illuminating studies of this little understood period, and of the crucible from which modern China emerged. Photos.
