The World

On 25 June, Indira declared an emergency ‘to bring about a situation of calmness and stability’. Using old British legislation kept in force by India’s Constituent Assembly, Indira arrested opponents and censored the press, comparing India to a sick child and herself to its mother: ‘However dear a child may be, if the doctor prescribed pills, they have to be administered … When a child suffers, the mother suffers too.’ Her own child, Sanjay, who had disdained ‘lily-livered’ Indians who ‘lacked guts’, downplayed democracy: ‘Future generations won’t remember us by how many elections we had, but by the progress we made.’ Sanjay boasted of his power – his mother ‘obviously listens to my views, she listened to them when I was five’ – and launched a twenty-five-point programme of radical reforms to fight poverty, clear slums and control the rise in population. Indira promoted him to leader of Congress Youth and overlord of Delhi. He revelled in his power, living right next to Indira and constantly with her. They sneered at democracy, which ‘only throws up the mediocre person’.

Their arrogance led to abuse: fortunes were made in property development; 140,000 were arrested including 40,000 Sikhs; the same fate befell all opposition leaders. Sanjay oversaw a sterilization campaign to reduce the population: 8.3 million men underwent vasectomies, some of them by force, with the result that many died of infections. ‘Indira is India and India is Indira,’ declared her Congress courtiers, in ‘a form of oriental excess to which I pay no attention’. But Sanjay’s antics undermined her. ‘Those who attack Sanjay attack me,’ she said. ‘He isn’t a thinker, he’s a doer.’ Yet Sanjay was loathed. When Indira ended the emergency and called an election in March 1977, she was defeated so badly that she lost her own seat in the Lok Sabha – lower house – while Sanjay failed to win one. Soon afterwards she and then Sanjay were arrested. Indira and son were surely finished – just as Mao’s wife soared.

On 9 September 1976, just after midnight, attended by his nurse-girlfriends, his wife Jiang Qing and nonentity heir Hua, Mao died. The Gang of Four controlled the Party. Jiang Qing demanded that she succeed Mao as chairman.

LITTLE CANNON, THE EIGHT IMMORTALS AND THE SCORPION’S GANG

Hua Guofeng, now chairman and premier, was alarmed; so were Mao’s veteran henchmen, who secretly contacted Little Cannon, Deng, under house arrest in the leadership compound, Zhongnanhai. While Jiang suspected a conspiracy, Deng and her enemies planned a coup, recruiting the Central Guards, Unit 8341, the praetorians. On 6 October, Hua invited some of the Gang to discuss a new volume of Mao’s works. Two were arrested as they arrived; Mao’s nephew was nabbed in Manchuria; the vice-chairman Wang Hongwen resisted arrest, killing two guards; then Unit 8341 surrounded Jiang’s mansion on Fisherman’s Terrace and arrested her.

Hua had the top jobs but power flows fluidly to authority, not to office: unlike water, it always flows upstream. Deng held court at home, yet he held no office. Six months later, the seventy-three-year-old Little Cannon, as vice-chairman and chief of staff, took command, making decisions that would change the world: Mao, he decreed, was ‘seven parts good, three parts bad’, but the mistakes would be blamed on the Gang of Four, who were put on trial, Jiang Qing sentenced to death.^*

But his titanic decision was to open Chinese markets while maintaining the Party’s monopoly of power. ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat’s black or white; if it catches mice, it’s a good cat.’ The cat was good. His reforms, he said, were China’s ‘second revolution’.^* He recalled his old ally, Xi Zhongxun, in disgrace for sixteen years, only just out of prison, whom he appointed to run Guangzhou (Canton). Xi proposed an innovation: a trading region. ‘Let’s call them special zones,’ agreed Deng, adding a phrase from the Long March: ‘You have to find a way in, to fight a bloody path out.’ Xi Zhongxun’s son Jinping, who had spent years among the peasantry, returned to join the children of the elite – the princelings – who were aware that they would one day help rule China. Xi’s special economic zones would power China’s economic explosion. But in foreign policy ‘We should act calmly. Don’t be impatient.’ Britain watched anxiously: the lease on Hong Kong would run out in 1997. Here too Deng was flexible, conceding ‘one country, two systems’ while saying that China would ‘hide its capabilities and bide its time’.