Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China

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. (Jan.)