CHINA: Missing Leader

Hua ‘s post is in doubt

What ever happened to Hua Guofeng? That question occupied the center of the Peking stage last week, over shadowing that other current piece of political drama, the trial of the Gang of Four.

All week Hua was the object of a crescendo of speculation by Chinese and foreigners alike that he was being forced to step down as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, theoretically the country’s most powerful position. There was no official confirmation — or denial. Nonethe less, it seemed a good bet that some abrupt bit of palace intrigue had indeed toppled Hua from his post, though the change may not formally take place until a party Congress can be convened next year. Hua’s most likely successor is a man who has lately been receiving unusually prominent treatment in the Chinese press: Hu Yaobang, 65, the party’s current Secretary-General and an ally of China’s dominant leader Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping.

The most immediate sign that Chairman Hua is in trouble was that he has not been seen in public for more than three weeks. Last week he even failed to turn up for a visit by a Greek Communist Party delegation; the group was received instead by Hu Yaobang. Hu, like Deng, is one of the few survivors of the Long March. Like Deng, too, the peasant-born Hu has been twice purged and twice rehabilitated. His resurgence was signaled last February when he was named head of a restored party secretariat, a post that gives him control of the party’s day-to day functionings.

Hua’s political demise would mark an unusually rapid rise and fall for such a top-level Chinese leader.

When he succeeded Mao Tse-tung as Party Chairman in 1976, after all, he was a mere Minister of Public Security.

Some analysts felt that there was a connection between Hua’s abrupt departure and the Gang of Four trial. According to their theory, Hua may have agreed to step down in exchange for an agreement that his damaging past associations with the “evil gang” would not surface during the trial’s proceedings. More likely, Hua may have recently collided with Deng’s faction over the quickening pace of de-Maoization, which Hua is known to oppose.

Possibly, the dispute became so sharp that it was necessary to push the Party Chairman out of the way.

Hua might yet prevail and be reconfirmed as Party Chairman. Still, China’s leaders were doing nothing to dispel stories that he had lost power. National newspapers lavishly displayed an article that was filled with oblique but unmistakable criticisms of Hua. “The party’s prestige is not high now,” the article declared, hardly needing to mention that Hua Guofeng has been the party’s leader for nearly five years. Some leaders of the Central Committee made mistakes even after the downfall of the Gang of Four, the article went on, pointing specifically to a “cult of personality.” As every Chinese knows, just such a cult swirled around only Hua for several months in 1976 and 1977 when his pictures were displayed side by side with Mao everywhere.

In fact, Hua has for months appeared to be losing out in his contest for power with Deng, TIME Peking Bureau Chief Richard Bernstein reported. Last September Deng elbowed him out of the country’s premiership to make way for younger, more pragmatic government leaders. In Deng’s controlled press, articles indirectly accused Hua of blocking the dismissal of venal provincial officials, opposing economic reforms and acting like an old-style palace eunuch who rose to power by toadying to the Emperor—in this case, Hua’s onetime patron Mao.

The campaign against Hua also seemed to presage a stepped-up purge of other party officials considered by Deng’s forces to be disloyal or inept. Last week every major newspaper in China frontpaged a toughly worded statement by Vice Chairman Chen Yun that was cited by Secretary-General Hu Yaobang. It warned that changing the bad “work style” of some leaders was a “matter of life and death for our party.”

The dramatic trial of the Gang of Four and six other “evildoers” meanwhile resumed in Peking after an unexplained four-day recess. It entered its “debate” phase, in which defense lawyers can, in theory, argue the innocence of the accused. Since most of the defendants have already admitted their “counterrevolutionary crimes,” the lawyers’ role had been reduced to pointing out the defendants’ contrite attitude and asking for lenient sentences. The main exception to that pattern is likely to be Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow, who in her last court appearance was hustled from the chamber after she angrily attacked both a witness and a judge as “liars” and “traitors.” When it comes her turn to make her defense, possibly this week, Jiang Qing is almost certain to make a highly embarrassing claim: that all her allegedly criminal actions were legally approved by the party authorities at the time, including her husband Mao and China’s late Premier Chou Enlai.