The ‘Gang of Four‘—and Hua Kuo-feng: Analysis of Political Events in 1975—76

Early in March this year visitors to China reported seeing in Canton a wall-poster with the headline “ [I]t's not a ‘gang of four’ but a gang of five!” (pu shih ‘ssu-jen-pang,’ erh shih wu-jen-pang!). The poster alleged that the new chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and premier of the State Council, Hua Kuofeng, had been a loyal follower of the Cultural Revolutionary Left led by Chiang Ch'ing, Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao and Yao Wen-yüan from the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It went on to claim that although he had turned against the personnel of the Left, he nevertheless remained a supporter of Leftist policies even today. We do not know whether the wall-posters “vilifying Chairman Hua,” for which seven men and two women were reportedly executed in Hangchow on 11 March 1977, and 26 people in Shanghai in early April, had carried the same accusation. But there is some evidence that certain, as yet unidentified, forces in China take a different view of the policies and attitudes of Hua Kuo-feng during the intra-elite conflict of the last few years, from that of most foreign observers of Chinese politics. Such observers have generally argued, since the spring of 1976, that Hua is a “middle-of-the-roader,” a politician having more in common with the ideas and values of the now dominant complex of veteran cadres and generals than with those of their “radical” Cultural Revolutionary adversaries.