Background
Born in Jiaocheng county, Shanxi province in 1921 (under the name of Su Zhu).
Born in Jiaocheng county, Shanxi province in 1921 (under the name of Su Zhu).
Hua Guofeng was educated in Shanxi province, China.
In the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Hua vigorously promoted land reform and agricultural cooperativization campaigns in Hunan. In 1954-1955, Hua, as CCP Secretary of Xiangtan district (Mao Zedong’s home district),implemented policies that accelerated the pace of rural collectivization and escalated the level of cooperativization in Hunan. Hua most likely attracted the attention of the Chairman for his political leadership in Hunan at this time. In 1957, Hua became an alternate Party secretary of the United Front department of the Hunan CCP committee. In July 1958, he became the vice-chairman of the Hunan Provincial People's Government. Hua strengthened his position as a Maoist in Hunan politics through the Great Leap Forward period and in the Sanmian bonggi (Three Red Banners) campaign, and brought these credentials into the political struggle “between the two lines" and the Cultural Revolution which erupted in the 1960s.
Hua was instrumental in organizing Hunan’s Cultural Revolutionary Committee and became its deputy chief in 1968. In October of that year, at the Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee (CC) of the CCP, Hua was given the task of reading the winvestigative reportM on Liu Shaoqi, Mao5s nemesis in the Cultural Revolution. In 1969, Hua entered the arena of national politics as a member of the Ninth CC of the CCP. Reelected to the Tenth CC in August 1973, he became a member of the Politburo. In January 1975, Hua attained the position of a vice-premier of the state council and was appointed minister of Public Security.
In early 1975, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, it appeared as if the political climate in China could return to a semblance of stability, which seemed to be the desire of the top-ranking leadership of the CCP— Premier Zhou Enlai and other weldersw of the Party and state structure, and even, ostensibly, even Mao Zedong himself. In January 1975 Deng Xiaoping, a Zhou protege who had been branded as wthe No. 2 capitalist roaderw in the Cultural Revolution but who had been reinstated in 1973, took over running the day-to-day affairs of the Chinese government as the ranking vice-premier as Zhou began to succumb to cancer. Nonetheless, even though Mao himself publicly endorsed Deng5s leadership, a Maoist- ultra-Leftist faction, led by what would come to be known as the Gang of Four, continued throughout 1975 to attack Deng and his policies for undermining Mao's ideology and subverting the revolution. In these political struggles, Hua Guofeng, loyal Maoist, generally aligned himself with the tide of anti-Deng criticism that brought down Deng5s leadership toward the end of 1975.
Ironically, it was the Gang of Four, even more than Deng, that was taken by surprise and angry with dismay at Mao’s choice of Hua to succeed to Zhou’s mantle as premier. With Mao’s own health rapidly failing,the Gang, as well as its opponents, quickly mobilized forces, political as well as military, for an eventual show-down that would be precipitated by Mao's demise on September 9, 1976. Hua was, at first, indecisively caught in the middle. His Maoist ideological leaning would have put him in a closer alignment with the Gang, and yet it was also clear that the Gang of Four considered him an upstart and denied his mandate for leadership. When the Gang pressed their own claim to succeed Mao at two Politburo meetings on September 19 and 29, Hua was finally moved to throw his lot in with the Gang’s opponents. On October 6, under Hua’s orders,the members of the Gang of Four (Mao’s wife Jiang Qing,Yao Wenyuan,Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen) and their principal supporters were arrested. Hua assumed the position of chairman of the CCP and of its Military Affairs Commission (to go along with his premiership) on the following day.
With the Gang of Four incarcerated, Hua began forming a platform for his leadership of Chinese politics. In line with his deep-seated Maoist ideological position, and in light of the fact that his primary perhaps even only claim to legitimacy had rested with Mao's blessing, Hua formulated what he believed would ensure for himself the mandate of Mao's legacy. Among other things Hua coined a slogan that was intended to perpetuate the legacy of Mao and Mao Zedong thought: "Whatever policy Chairman Mao had decided we must defend with determination; Whatever directives Chairman Mao had issued we must firmly obey, Hua’s stubborn adherence to the Maoist legacy may have legitimated his leadership for a while, but in the end it would spell his downfall. In March 1977, at a Central Work Conference, Hua reaffirmed the MTwo Whatevers, repeated Maoist formulas for China's ucontinuous revolutionaryw future, reiterated the condemnation of the 1976 Tiananmen incident as counterrevolutionary, and repudiated any attempt to reverse the verdicts of the Cultural Revolution.” For a while,the old guard of the CCP,who had rallied to Hua in the struggle against the Gang of Four, gave Hua a modicum of support in the interest of stability and a calm transition. They did not, however, see Hua as one who could lead China into the future. For this, they were already turning their sights to the twice-fallen Deng Xiaoping, who,although ostensibly willing to support Hua, had been openly, if still tactfully, critical of the Maoist ideological rigidity expressed in the MTwo WhateversM formula, and called for a more pragmatic assessment of Mao's legacy and Mao Zedong thought. The same Central Work Conference in March 1977 paved the way for the third reinstatement of Deng,while continuing the acknowledgment of Hua’s “supreme leadership.
Aside from the ill-fated “Two Whatevers,” Hua’s brief tenure at the helm of Chinese politics was also characterized by the launching of the so-called Ten Year Plan of social and economic reconstruction in February-March 1978. While on the surface the plan was to realize the Four Modernizations program which had been broached under Zhou Enlai's (and Deng's) leadership in 1975, the ideological underpinnings of the plan were still inflexibly Maoist, and in real substance repeated the unrealistic visions of Mao in the late 1950s. The plan never got off the ground and its failings only served to underscore that a successful post-Cultural Revolution, post-Mao recon¬struction of Chinese society and economy simply could not be built upon the sand of ideological rigidity. The failure of the aborted Ten Year Plan precipitated a wave of criticism in the second half of 1978 which reopened the issue of the legitimacy of the Cultural Revolution and the wrongs that had been done to CCP cadres who had been victimized by Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At a Central Work Conference in November 1978, Hua made several concessions, including a reassessment of the 1976 Tiananmen incident, but it was too little, too late. At the same time, a brief but crucial expression of sentiments among the populace in November (the De-mocracy Movement) in which criticism of Mao and support for Deng were openly manifested also helped to pave the way for the denouement of the Hua-Deng struggle. At the Third Plenum of the Eleventh CC of the CCP in December 1978, in a decisive swing away from Maoist Leftism, Hua's wTwo Whatevers55 was criticized and the Maoist theory of continuous revolution” was repudiated. While the plenum stopped short of rendering a decisive overall wreappraisalM of the Cultural Revolution and Mao5s legacy, it indicated an irreversible trend toward Dengist pragmatism. With a large number of Deng allies returning to the highest echelons of political leadership, including membership in the Politburo, as a result of the actions of the third and subsequent plenums (the Fourth Plenum in September 1979 and the Fifth Plenum in February 1980),Deng’s control was strengthened and the elimination of Hua's faction became inevitable. A Politburo meeting in August 1980 resolved that Hua should relinquish his position as premier, and at another Politburo meeting in November and December, Hua was censured for grievous errors, his tenure in leadership was subject to merciless criticism and he asked to be relieved of all his posts.
That decision, however, was not formalized until the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh CC of the CCP in June 1981. While his adherence to Mao Zedong thought may have resulted from his loyalty to the man who elevated him out of relative obscurity as well as his own deep-seated Maoist past, it debilitated a man who stood at one of the most critical crossroads of post-1949 Chinese history the end of the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist period with a wealth of opportunity in his hands. Unable to transcend an ideological obstinacy that was obsolete in a Chinese society that had emerged from the ravages of turmoil which ideological rigidity had caused and equally unable to claim any mastery of the opportunities of change, Hua remains on the annals of Chinese history as an example of failed political leadership.
Hua Guofeng began his political career in the “Chinese People’s Resist-Japan and Save-the-Nation Vanguard” in 1938, the same year he became a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Throughout the war against Japan, Hua mobilized and conducted propaganda for Communist forces in Shanxi, and carried this work into the period of the Third Revolutionary Civil War (1945-1949), rising to head the propaganda department of the CCP in the No. 1 Central Shanxi District in early 1949. That summer, Hua went to Hunan to carry out political organizational work for the advancing Red Army. Thereafter Hunan became the primary location of Hua's political activities and career until the early-1970s.
Quotations: "Zhonghua Kangri Jiuguo Xianfengdui" (中華抗日救國先鋒隊, Chinese Resistance against Japan Nation-saving Vanguard)
Hua moved with the PLA to Hunan in 1949, where he married Han Zhijun in January, and remained there as a local official until 1971.