The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China

by James Palmer

The Death of Mao opens in the summer of 1976, as Mao Zedong lay dying and China was struck by a great natural disaster. The earthquake that struck Tangshan, a shoddily built mining city, was one of the worst in recorded history, killing half a million people.But the Chinese Communist rulers in Beijing were distracted, paralysed by in-fighting over who would take control after Chairman Mao finally died. Would Mao's fanatical wife and her collaborators, the Gang of Four, be allowed to continue the Cultural Revolution, which had shut China off from the world and reduced it to poverty and chaos?Or would Deng Xiaoping and his reformist friends be able to take control and open China up to the market, and end the near permanent state of civil war? James Palmer recreates the tensions of that fateful summer, when the fate of China and the world were in the balance - as injured and starving people crawled among the ruins of a stricken city. 'The best account of Mao's last year that we have . . . It deserves to be a classic of modern Chinese history.' John Simpson

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Asia, Biography, Travel

286 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: James Palmer


James Palmer has traveled extensively in East and Central Asia and has worked with Taoist and Buddhist groups in China and Mongolia on environmental issues. In 2003 he won the Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing. He lives in Beijing.
source: Amazon

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

BLURB: 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.

Opening: On 9 January 1976, He Jianguo left Tangshan and took the train to buy a goldfish. She had been the only girl in her dormitory able to get time off that day, and her dorm-mates had picked her to go and get a pet – not for pleasure, but as an alarm system.
There had been at least two moderate earthquakes in the region every year for the previous six years; some of the older people said quietly it was a sign that things were bad in China. So Jianguo and the others had, like thousands of people in Tangshan, decided to get a goldfish, based on media reports that animals could predict earthquakes.

The title describes the start of my summer very well...

Palmer's writing is not pleasing to my eye, however it gets the job done, and has been up for awards. China in 1976 was generally like this:

Mobs harassed, tortured and murdered people for wearing too much hair pomade, for having studied in Europe, for having a globe of the world (for who needed to know about anything outside China?), for having had a Nationalist husband, wife or brother, for once owning land and so on. Anyone with any pretensions to intellectualism suffered.

Has it ever been known that a leader of a country has apologised for mismanagement? Life is so cheap to despots, especially those under meglomaniacal Cult of Personality figures.

Facing invasion from the north by Manchu horsemen in 1644, a desperate Ming dynasty had deliberately broken the levees on the Yellow River, causing mass flooding in an attempt to hold back the enemy, a tactic repeated 400 years later by the Nationalist government against the Japanese. Both times it killed hundreds of thousands of people, and barely slowed down the invaders. - page 60

The first hundred odd pages deal with setting the political backdrop; it is only after that we have the parallel incidents of vicious earthquake, and Mao on his deathbed. Well researched short read with extensive notes, acknowledgements and bibliography.

[Jeanette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew! You certainly cannot rate this book on an enjoyment scale. Both dichotomies of horrific events interacting? One was despicable and the other catastrophe.

What made me pick this up the second I eyed it on the "New" shelf was that it was Cultural Revolution specific in timing. There are certain movement techniques and agitations to anger that I find parallel to groups' use today in the USA. Because of this in the last 4 or 5 years I've read memoir or history of eyewitness Cultural Revolution experience, especially in the late 1960's.

And that is all here. The torture, the ostracism, the driving to suicide, the disdain, the imprisonment, the endless and endemic starvation. But overall the pure cruelty and ignorance itself championed.

And just as the MIGHTY LEADER is in his final death throes, comes a tragedy of earthy horror beyond my poor description. Or theirs.

But here is a quoted attempt:
"The 23 seconds of the earthquake were probably the most concentrated instant of destruction humanity has ever known. In Tangshan alone it did more damage than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, more damage than the firebombings of Dresden or Hamburg or Tokyo, more damage than the explosion at Krakatoa. It took more lives in one fraction of north-east China than the 2004 tsunami did across the whole of the Indian Ocean. The actual strength of the earthquake itself was not remarkable- 7.8 on the Richter scale, terrifying but not that rare. It was the speed, timing and placing of the quake that made it so devastating."

It was 400 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. July 28, 1976 at 3:42 am a sleeping Tangshan, with majority in their beds- nearly every structure (97%)collapsed. 240,000 dead but those estimates are most probably under estimated. As China's population is today, as well. This author details why. But the aftermath was even worse. Those in the country were absolutely ignored and medicine was completely "on your own". Starvation, which had been bad, now reigned to finish.

The last quarter of the book centers on the politico of the "Gang of Four". In some aspects, as I caught this author in assumptions that I KNOW are not true. (Looters don't exist after catastrophe. HUH!) And other bias that I can read that he holds, I think the entire lost an entire star. But other than that, the photos alone and his eye witness reports and bedside Mao conversations from witness were an incredible read. And after this lack of succor or relief (there was some because IN Tangshan the industry factories HAD to be replaced for Chinese Army supply). Yet there the signs were still raised in the make shift classrooms- "Father is good, mother is good, but Chairman Mao is best."

[Richard Burger · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's next to impossible to imagine what it was like on the ground at Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell on August 6, 1945. But what if the blast had been ten times more devastating than it was? Utterly inconceivable. There is no way to visualize it. And yet the Tangshan earthquake that tore the coal-mining city into rubble on July 28, 1976 was equal in magnitude to 400 Hiroshimas. In the 23 seconds that it lasted it killed about a quarter of a million Chinese and left only about three percent of the city's buildings standing and usable.

James Palmer, in his wonderful book Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes , brings the calamity to life.

The 23 seconds of the earthquake were probably the most concentrated mass of destruction humanity has ever known. In Tangshan alone it did more damage than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, more damage than the firebombing of Dresden or Hamburg or Tokyo, more damage than the explosion of Krakatoa. It took more lives in one fraction of northeast China than the 2004 tsunami did across the whole Indian ocean.

The full name of the book is Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao's China. The earthquake is at the epicenter of the story, but it is framed by the story of the end of Maoism and the rise of Deng. The cracking of the heavens is the fall of Mao's China. The earth's shaking is literal and figurative, of course. Nothing shook China like the Tangshan earthquake, or the political upheavals that would follow it only a few short months later.

No year was as pivotal for China as 1976. The Cultural Revolution was dying; the public was sick of the empty sloganeering and endless denunciations and rallies as the Chinese economy worsened. Zhou Enlai's death in January and the huge nationwide outpouring of grief was a signal that the Chinese were thirsting for change. Millions came to mourn Zhou in huge demonstrations in Tiananmen Square three months after his death. The masses were restless. It scared the Gang of Four to death. The Chinese people were exhausted. Most of them hated the Gang and wanted a return to sanity. They no longer had any confidence in their government. On top of this, everyone knew Mao was in poor health. China seemed on the brink of a precipice. And it was.

I've been lucky enough to meet James Palmer on several occasions (I still need to return a book he leant me in 2004) and I can safely say he's about the most brilliant person I've ever known. No exaggeration. His panoramic knowledge of history and literature has never failed to amaze me. This is the first of his books that I've read and its scholarliness and meticulousness do not surprise me.

What James does that I found most impressive was to crunch the history of the period, from the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 through the ascension to power of Deng in 1978. It is difficult to jam so much information into so little space and keep it from reading like a Wikipedia entry. James has a talent for telling a story that is brimming with facts, names and events that reads like a thriller. I read the entire book in two days, and felt I learned more about this brief period than I had from countless articles and more than a few books.

Your blood will boil as he recalls the murders and suicides, beatings and torture of the Cultural Revolution. This story is nothing new to anyone who bothers to read this blog, but Palmer manages to zero in on its very essence, giving us more than enough specifics, facts and figures to bring the period to life. He makes it seem so effortless, but this must have been painstakingly difficult to write. His thoughts about Mao and all that he wrought mirror my own. They are not good thoughts.

The earthquake itself is sandwiched in between the story of gathering political unrest in the spring of 1976 and the death of Mao in September. Palmer made several trips to the site of the catastrophe and interviewed survivors. He tells how when the earthquake struck at three in the morning people who were lucky enough to be practicing tai qi outdoors or farmers up early to head to market with their products had a far better chance of survival than those sleeping in their beds. Luckiest of all, surprisingly, were coal miners working the late shift deep under the earth. Only seventeen of the 10,000 miners at work died. The stories of horrifying deaths and inspiring heroics make the book a page-turner. So much went wrong. It took days for the PLA soldiers to arrive; they had to travel largely on foot, as the railroad lines had been ripped apart. When they did arrive, they were as exhausted and hungry as many of the survivors. The government arrogantly refused offers of foreign aid that could probably have saved thousands. Citizens whose sole crime was trying to get some food from the granaries to keep from starving were shot as looters. The soldiers, at great risk to themselves, pulled thousands from the rubble. But sheer chaos reigned for the first few days. There was no leadership. no one to turn to for counsel.

What to do about a broken limb with no doctor within a hundred miles? How to get a bull driven mad by fear back behind a locked gate? How do you move a broken bedstead out of the way to reach a trapped child when the bedstead may be the only thing holding up the mound she's buried under from collapsing? With the well blocked, where's the nearest source of clean water?

The unluckiest, as always, were the victims in the countryside. Tangshan was a major coal-mining center. The government had only one concern, to get the mines back in operation and to rebuild the city so business could be performed as usual. Those in the countryside simply didn't matter. Practically none of the food and other aid that poured into the city made it to the rural villages.

With all the tales of heroism and sacrifice, Palmer notes that the story People's Daily featured on its front page was of a cadre who, despite the shouts from his thirteen-year-old daughter to help pull her from the rubble of their home, ignored her (and his son buried alongside her) to dig out a local party chairman who lived nearby.

The article praised his political commitment, noting approvingly that he 'felt neither remorse nor sorrow' for the death of his children, but had sown 'a willingness to benefit the majority at the expense of his own children', which was an example to everyone.

As thrilling as the descriptions of the earthquake are, it was the political side of the story that most gripped me. Palmer takes us to Mao's deathbed and lets us know just how much of a shrew Jiang Qing was (not that I ever doubted that). He paints the Gang of Four as spectacularly incompetent and out of touch with the Chinese people, and we feel delighted to read of Hua Guofeng setting the traps leading to their arrest. We learn of the challenges the doctors encountered as they tried to pickle Mao's corpse for permanent display. The public mourns, but their sorrow never comes close to what it was for Zhou. People wanted Maoism to come to an end.

Although mention of Deng himself is relatively brief, it is clear that after Mao's death he had come to clean up Dodge, and immediately set the stage for a whole new Chinese mindset. For all his mistakes, he was what China needed at that moment, and he took control with his characteristic competence and shrewdness.

I can't recommend the book strongly enough. I knew next to nothing about the Tangshan earthquake and now I can picture it in living color, and I can hear the moans of trapped survivors. Even if you know China's history of the period, James casts it in enough of a new light to make it fresh and enthralling. It is not a fun read, although James injects plenty of wry English humor where appropriate. Beautifully written, meticulously researched, full of suspense and drama, Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes belongs on the shelf of anyone who wants to better understand China at its most critical juncture in modern history.

[Horza]

This is a great book.

"Heaven" is the rarefied air of the Party complex at Zhonganhai, where the Great Helmsman lies drooling, semi-conscious and not long for the world. "Earth" is the grim daily grind of the long-suffering everyday Chinese, the vicious currents of the Cultural Revolution in retreat but still pulling people under. James Palmer captures the sweep and the fine details of both as he weaves two pivotal decades of Chinese history in microcosm around the catastrophic Tangshan earthquake of July 28, 1976.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Also published under the title 'Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes'

'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 'The Death of Mao', 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.' From an alternate cover to the one on GR.

An absolutely fascinating account of the period surrounding the death of Mao and the emergence of a 'new' China. I remember this period, but how little we in the West really knew, never mind understood. What is fascinating and in a way horribly ironic, even though Mao had launched attacks of unparalleled murderous and destructive force against 'old ways', the Communist Party leadership was obsessed that people would believed that such a natural disaster as a disruption in the natural order of "heaven" (Tian) signified the loss of legitimacy (the "mandate of heaven") of the current government. Also China was still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and "belief in earthquake prediction was made an element of ideological orthodoxy that distinguished the true party liners from right wing deviationists", and it was everyone's duty to criticize those who doubted the feasibility of earthquake prediction which was inspired, like everything else 'Mao Zedong Thought' and and thus proof of the superiority of China's socialist system.

Just repeating that type of nonsense is a reminder of how different China's future under the 'gand of four' might have been.

[Christopher Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very interesting. Largely dwelling on 1976, the year that Mao died and there was an awful earthquake in Tangshen, killing more people than in the 2004 Tsunami but not much known about. It also fills in most of the history of China post 1949 in some detail. I did not know much about the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution but was amazed at the scale of it and how awful it must have been for those affected. The downfall of the Gang of Four after the death of Mao I do recall but did not know how exactly it happened. Recommended.

[Nitya Durga Potluri · Rating 4 out of 5]

To write about the politics of CCP is not easy as the official truth is always doubtful, but the author has captured the essence of politics in china between 1966-76 very nicely and in simple language. It's a good read for those who want to understand.influence of Mao, his cultural revolution, prominent allies and foes and why a common Chinese is considered to be materialistic and their necessity to remain so.

[Priscilla Yong · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 because it was an easy read. Narrative-wise, it could be rather bias, but otherwise great start for people who have zero knowledge about the Cultural Revolution.

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

On July 28, 1976, the region around Tangshan, Hebei, China was hit by a magnitude 7 earthquake with two strong shocks. There were also numerous aftershocks during the day as well. Most of the buildings and other structures were not built to withstand seismic activity, resulting in the destruction of about 85% of the buildings in the area. At the time of the earthquake, somewhere around 10,000 miners were underground in this region, some of the miners were stuck underground for two weeks. Major railways were destroyed and disrupted due to the shifting earth, despite the railway having an "earthquake resistant" design. Communications, electricity, and other utilities were majorly impacted. The loss of life was staggering. Official estimated are close to 250,000, but many historians put that total around 300,000.

I had never heard of this devastating earthquake, but I happened to find it on Audible and got it. I learned a lot about this event, and if you are interested in disasters and everything...check this book out.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent adjunct to Frank Dikötter's trilogy of the Mao years (1947-1976) in China, "Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes" provides a more in-depth look at one of the key natural disasters occurring near the end of Mao Zedong's decades-long rule. Perhaps more importantly, it also provides insight into Deng Xiaoping's return to power.

The Mao years are so very complex that no one book could possibly provide the details of even one of the major aspects of the period. The three main subperiods along (well, two main and one minor that set up a major) - Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom, The Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution - could use their own multi-volume works. Frank Dikötter's trilogy provides a balanced overview of these three periods but there is much more going on.

Palmer takes a similar path to Dikötter in that he provides a view of events from above - leadership actions at various bureaucratic levels - and below - how events played out for individuals. This certainly adds depth to the work. I can't help but wonder what kind of access to the Chinese archives Palmer had. Looking at his bibliography it appears he did NOT have access. He did use a number of newspapers published Beijing and one from Shanghai. Palmer also alludes to a number of oral interviews with Chinese who lived through the events (though he does not provide citations for these interviews).

This is an excellent, if narrow, view of one natural event that had a huge and lasting effect on the last months of Mao's rule. The era is much too complex to use this work alone to get a grasp on the history of the times. Nonetheless, it is well worth a read.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Other reviewers have mentioned that this book is a somewhat uneasy combination of earthquake and Communist China at the demise of Mao. They also mention that nevertheless, it works, and I agree.

I was drawn to this book after reading The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us, in which the Tangshan Earthquake is mentioned. Jones suggests that the Chinese efforts at earthquake prediction, which failed so completely in regard to Tangshan, might have had an odd connection with the Cultural Revolution. Here's her premise: the earthquake prediction science was developed not only because China is subject to such disastrous seismic events, but also as a clandestine way to shield some scientists from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. In other words, some scientists and academics may have survived being purged by being stashed in this very important project.

Of course, science is nowhere near being able to predict when and where earthquakes will happen, not with any degree of specificity, so the expectation that had arisen (China can predict earthquakes!) was dashed.

Anyway, I wanted to investigate this aspect more closely, but found little discussion of it. However, I learned a whole lot more about China and earthquakes, and that's totally worth it.

[Sebastien Hardinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed the book, which uses the Tangshan Earthquake to talk more widely about the latter years of Mao's China, the political machinations that brought about its end, and Chinese history since. The mashup of Tangshan and high politics is a bit awkward, but the book overall is a very readable look at an otherwise opaque area of history. And the author clearly has great familiarity with China, and writes with impressive detail about the lives of ordinary Chinese beyond the propaganda and orientalist takes from abroad

[Mia Manson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this book is a great starter introduction to this time period in China for anyone—everything was explained well and never felt too confusing. However, this book is not all about the Tangshan earthquake, so I wish I could’ve gone in with the understanding that the book was more about the time period rather than the earthquake itself.
I am giving a higher rating for this book because of how well it introduces its concepts so even someone with no knowledge like me could understand everything. I’m not sure if people already familiar with the topic would enjoy it though :’)

[Joann Pittman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!

[Abu Syed sajib · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stale,boring...

[Ombretta · Rating 4 out of 5]

1976 was a pivotal year in modern Chinese history. Often referred to as the "Year of Fire Dragon", it marked the end of the Cultural Revolution era, through the deaths of key leaders and the catastrophic earthquake in Tangshan. That devastating event further weakened the existing political order.

[Santo · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Honest history is hard to do in China, given the determination of Beijing to put forward a historical narrative that presents an essentially benevolent Communist Party guiding China from weakness to strength and occasionally going astray through no fault of its own”.
– James Palmer, “The Death of Mao”

As a self-proclaimed “China observer”, I’ve had my share of reading elaborate accounts of this fascinating country’s turbulent past. Some have been biographical accounts, written with the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution as their backdrops. Others have been gone further back in history, highlighting, among others, Zheng He’s voyages and the Opium War.

But none of them beat James Palmer’s The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China in terms of readability (is that even a word). Anyways, it was a pleasure to read this gem of an account, which narrates the year 1976 in China’s modern history. A year when the much beloved Premier Zhou Enlai died; Chairman Mao Zedong laid helplessly on his deathbed (he would also die in 1976); the Cultural Revolution was a national wound that kept on being reopened; the infighting among the political elite reached its apex; and Deng Xiaoping re-entered politics;

It was the year when earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale hit the small, industrial town of Tangshan in Hebei Province, killing around 650,000 people. People who lived through the tragedy remembered the earth moving as if attacked by an atomic bomb; not one, not two or three, but four hundred Hiroshimas.

To say the least, 1976 felt like a cursed year for many Chinese people. The mandate of heaven seemed to have run out on Mao, as China was on the brink of political collapse. Economic wise, the country was a basket case, after purges spread economic inefficiency, killed many of China’s bright minds, and destroyed the people’s competitiveness.

In general, the people were tired of the violence and propaganda of the political elite. While Jiang Qing (Mao’s ultra-leftist wife) watched imported movies daily, the people were hungry, unsheltered, afraid, down, and beaten. The Tangshan earthquake, which was also felt strongly in Beijing, was a nail on Mao’s coffin, even as he was still gasping for his last ounce of air.

Obviously, this book is not only about the earthquake. Yes, there are photos of the destruction. Palmer also described the scenes during and after the earth shook. But it was just enough. Not too much tugging at the heart strings or gory descriptions of the impact of the quake. What James Palmer did was to tell the story of China in those days with the earthquake tragedy at its center.

Many things were elaborated, including the monstrosity of the Cultural Revolution; how it came about and how its excesses scarred the Chinese population for years to come. The book also talks about Zhou Enlai, the venerable leader loved by the people. “The other leader” who worked diligently while Mao built a modern empire on the blood, sweat, and tears of the Chinese proletariats. And of course, it talks about Tangshan, as symbol of how life was in a city neither as big as nor as near to Beijing, but constantly affected by the follies of the political elite in the country’s capital.

The book also highlights the “problem” with the writing of history in Chinese books. Honestly, I have never had the pleasure of reading about Chinese history from books usually given out to students; my Mandarin is nowhere at the level to comprehend such thick texts. But I could imagine the events and perspectives that may have been left out in order to paint a rosy picture of the government, and most importantly, the Chinese Communist Party. I lived through Indonesia’s New Order era, and I know very well previous attempts to re-write Indonesia’s history according to the preferences of Suharto and his clique.

The Tangshan earthquake is often remembered in China as a moment of grief. The Chinese history books may put up pictures of the PLA working hand-in-hand with the local people to help survivors. But the truth is that Beijing’s unwillingness to accept international assistance demonstrated the government’s lack of empathy. It showed that while the propaganda of the Party continued to eschew the fight for the people, in actuality the people were suffering from policies after another hammered down by the political elite.

The Tangshan earthquake was a moment when the death of so many people underlined the ineptness of the government at the time, thus ushering the desire for changes to happen. Palmer described a bit of this towards the end book, as if setting the stage for analyses on present-day Chinese politics by other “China observers”. I, for one, am thankful of Palmer’s narration, as I try to understand more and more about this country where I may be spending more time in the future.

[Jesse Field · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much depends upon an earthquake that razed an entire region, right beside its dying king. James Palmer is at his best with journalistic prose describing exactly what happened in Tangshan, China on Wednesday, July 28, 1976 at 3:42:53:

Li Hongyi was a nurse working on the late shift at the No. 255 hospital, the biggest in Tangshan. At 3:30, she decided to get some fresh air, and went outside to sit at a stone table underneath a large oak. Everything was unnaturally still, and she felt nervous in the dark on her own. Suddenly, she heard a shrill sound, ‘like a knife cutting through the sky’. Scared, she ran back inside, sat down and bolted the door. Then the sky turned a bright red, and there was another noise ‘like hundreds of trucks all starting at once’. She’d heard the same sound before, because she’d been caught in the Xingtai earthquake ten years previously. As the building shook, she struggled to unbolt the door, but could only force it open a few inches. Squeezing out, she ran instinctively to the shelter of the tree as the hospital collapsed behind her, hugging on to the trunk with all her strength. The earth roared, and she and the tree both collapsed into an open pit. (from chapter 4)

The earthquake was devastating to the city of Tangshan and the surrounding region, so the book falls within that somewhat dubious genre of books about disasters. But the full story of the wreckage involves more than seismometers, compasses, and fault lines; one should understand that China turned down international aid for the disaster, because it was basically a closed country at the time, though one struggling through a transition of power that would eventually end the 37-year period of political revolution and point the nation-state in the direction it remains facing today, towards free enterprise without political reform.

The fact that ancient custom associates earthquakes with major power shifts makes the disaster narrative always already a political narrative. Palmer's account follows the association to its logical end, telling a shifting story about the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of the new era, and giving Tangshan its due as a generous window on the political, the social, and the personal.

Heaven Cracks is a deceptive achievement. Full of steadfastly anti-Communist pronouncements, summaries of previous historical research, and good-old gumshoe journalism, it feels like a book any committed traveler could write. Maybe everyone should. But its delicate and efficient prose style folds together personal stories of pain and suffering with an account of the political intrigue at the top to give us a richly-textured portrait of China. Such work is never easy.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a nice effort to explain the political and social mood in China in 1975/76 as the Chinese experience the loss of Zhou Enlai, a terrible earthquake in Tangshan, and the death of Mao. It was probably not the best read for me, as I was looking for more detail regarding the earthquake and less of the political details. I have read several other more exhaustive tomes on the subject of the political climate of the time and so was less interested in that aspect. This book was about 30% earthquake and 70% politics. There were some really interesting stories of survivors. One section I particularly liked was about the Quinglong district and how their leaders, who happened to be very interested in earthquakes on a personal level, took the warnings and signs very seriously and made a big effort to prepare their district. It is possible that their efforts led to fewer casualties in the rural areas than some of the other districts experienced.
Another story told about how soldiers worked in 10 minute shifts through the night to open the floodgates of the Douhe reservoir: The reservoir's floodgates had to be opened and the water let out into the spillway before the dam gave out under the strain, but the electricity that fed the dam's controls was dead. In an astonishing feat of physical endurance and communal spirit, the artillerymen seized the winding mechanism that controlled the floodgate, never designed to be moved by hand, and began to lift the fifty-ton gate millimeter by agonizing millimeter. It took eight torturous hours to lift the floodgate and release the water, sparing Tangshan from a second disaster.
Overall, this was a pretty decent read, well researched and fairly insightful for such a short book.

[Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

About two-thirds of this book concerned the decades before and after the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, most specifically the political maneuverings of various leaders, especially during and just after the Cultural Revolution. In the center of the narrative is the protracted death of Chairman Mao, with a focus on the motives and political fates those who jockeyed for position around his deathbed, such as the Gang of Four, Hua Guofeng, and Deng Xiaoping (though admittedly the latter, in disgrace at the time of Mao's death, was nowhere near Mao's deathbed). The most interesting parts of the book for me dealt with how the country dealt with the chaotic legacy of the Cultural Revolution, and particularly how Deng bloodlessly moved China onto a path of economic recovery.

However, I'm not entirely sure that grafting this political narrative onto the devastating earthquake made much sense. At times I was irritated by the author's tendency to flit episodically from recounting one person's experiences during the Cultural Revolution or that person's life after the the earthquake, shuttling back and forth between times and places. There was a loose organization to the book that never made much sense to me. At times I felt the author was more interested in cherry picking the most sensational personal stories rather than engaging in meaningful analysis. If the book had focused on either the earthquake or the behind-the-scenes political machinations, I think I'd have gotten more out of it.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would recommend this to absolutely anyone who is even slightly interested in China, or in the world in general.

The 1976 Tangshan earthquake was one of the most devastating earthquakes in human history. It was a 7.8 quake the epicenter of which was directly under the industrial city of Tangshan, home to more than a million people. The quake hit at 3:42AM and most people were indoors, sleeping in shoddily constructed concrete buildings, most of which where flattened in the first quake and finished off in an aftershock the following afternoon. Low estimates of the death toll are around 240,000 dead, high estimates are around 650,000 dead. The damage was compounded by the fact that China was at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, Mao was deathly ill and the country was in political turmoil and had largely isolated itself from the rest of the world.

This book is both an incredibly informative glimpse at one of the major turning points in modern Chinese history, and also incredibly readable. I would, for example, recommend this to a book club. Fascinating, in-depth historical picture-painting and analysis, well-written, accessible and generally illuminating. The book places the Tangshan earthquake in its historical context as just one of numerous catastrophic events in China's modern history.

[Sher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I may have felt slightly differently if I had read this book instead of listened to it, but . . . the tone is definitely journalistic. That is okay when I don't feel like the tone is so strong and in this case filled with sensational negatives lacking balance. I wanted a better sense regarding where Palmer's sources came from. The reader is introduced to Mao and his policies and his political intrigues, the Gang of Four, the earthquake, and what came politically after it (well sort of) Also, for me the content was too broad. In addition, I felt I was being manipulated through language again and again making it tough for me to make up my own mind about the topics the author was covering.

The earthquake is supposed to set the foundation for change and reflect the idea in Chinese culture that tragedies of this sort are a portent for change. But, I did not come away with a strong sense of what this change is. This review says a lot about me as a reader, and probably doesn't impart an accurate reflection of the quality of the book. From the first chapter I experienced a strong negative emotional response to the way the story was told. The tone raised my hackles and made me suspicious of slant all the way along. Yes, I did finish the book. And my lower review is one of few. I prefer well written scholarly accounts of people, places, and events.

[Robert Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book tries to do two things, and does them both well, but it is hard to see why they were connected in the same book. Palmer does a great job of briefly explaining the leadership struggles that occurred during and after the Death of Mao. You could no doubt write thousands of pages on the intricacies of these months in 1976, but Palmer provides a great intro in a couple hundred. Fascinating stuff. Palmer also does a great job describing the run-up to the Tangshan earthquake, and using that description to describe what life was like in post-cultural revolution, pre-Deng China. I loved reading about the two topics, but they didn't make the most sense to me. I felt like this could have been better as a much longer book. But then I may never have picked it up...

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned so much in this book. I'm almost utterly illiterate when it comes to modern Chinese history, so every single minute of this book was new knowledge for me to soak up.

Several of the stories about the survivors and those that did not make it through broke my heart. I think what affected me the most though was learning about the abuse, murder, and utter torture that the teachers across China went through because of idiots and horrible children.

This is not light reading. There is almost no part of this book that will make you not feel like crap. It might even bring some people to tears. That said - it IS an important book. Human nature can be brutal and horrible, and we all need to recognize that these things really do happen.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a book who's premise seems to promise more in-depth analysis about the Tangshan earthquake, it covers relatively little ground. It dedicates a chapter to discussing the actual events of the quake and its aftermath, plus some in the conclusion to how Tangshan remembers the even today. But 70% of the book goes towards explaining the political situation in China in 1976 and the unsteady shift in power at the time of Mao's death. I never got the strong connection between the events of the earthquake and the turbulence of politics, the influence didn't seem as strong by the end as I anticipated. Overall, I read the book hoping for insight on the earthquake itself, and those chapters were by far the most compelling. I just wish they had composed more of the material.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Palmer begins by discussing the utterly devastating Tangshan Earthquake of 1976 and weaves that with the narrative of the death of Mao Zedong and the factional infighting that followed. With eye-witness statements and well-written research, Palmer is able to argue that 1976 marked a watershed in Chinese politics, although his focus on the eye-witness and personal stories mean that the political infighting that followed Mao's death is not explored fully. Nevertheless, Palmer's account of natural disaster and politics is good historical research and very readable; and with an epilogue focusing on the Sichuan earthquake, he draws parallels between China then and now.

[Vicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very difficult to read. It is disturbing to read about the horrors behind the Cultural Revolution in China and the regime of Mao. Many times I had to put the book away and try to distract myself with some lighter reading. The history of China in the 20th century is a chapter of inhumanity, pain and suffering. The regime that ruled this country is responsible for millions of dead and damaged of its countrymen. Our imagination struggles to comprehend the scale of this tragedy and to find any answers why did it happen.

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written narrative of the last year's of Mao's reign. My main issue was that the author came to this work with some very clear biases. While the history is well done, he makes several personal attacks on leaders of the party that, substantiated or not, detract a bit from the book's validity. I'd recommend it for people just entering or relatively new to "China-watching." It's a good introduction to many of the political and historical influences that affect China today, but I'm hoping to find something with a bit more meat on its bones.

[Larissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting approach to Cultural Revolution and post-Cultural Revolution politics. The parts I enjoyed most dealt more with the idea of political legitimacy and natural disasters. I would have enjoyed more analysis in that vein. At times I found the author's connection between the earthquake and Beijing/national politics strained. I would have liked him to cite the sources for some of his assertions.

[Latro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and readable, paints a picture of China recent past that, as always, is normally hidden by our own mental prejudices and bias in the West. The parallel stories of the political turmoil from the Cultural Revolution to the death of Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four and the Tangshan earthquake are woven into a portrait of the country and its political and social changes that is very informative.