I’ve compiled a brief survey over at The China Beat of the various homages, obituaries, and ‘who died?’ pieces published this past week. Most of them make note of Hua’s passing while dismissing him as a transitional figure forced to make way for Deng Xiaoping after being in power only a few short years. In essence, Hua was political roadkill on the superhighway of China’s economic miracle.
It’s not entirely fair. Now, granted not everybody gets my fascination with Hua, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m the guy who puts Frank Stallone CDs on at parties.
Hua’s rise to “power” was not quite as sudden as most believe, neither is it likely that Hua was Mao’s son as is sometimes rumored. After a decade as Party Secretary in Hunan province, currying favor with the Great Helmsman by praising Mao’s policies, turning Mao’s home into a revolutionary shrine, and overseeing a factory whose claim to fame was producing over 30 million Mao buttons in a single year, Hua was brought to Beijing in the early 70s, first as a staffer to Zhou Enlai and then to help oversee the investigation into the Lin Biao affair. Hua handled the latter task well enough that in 1975 he was named Minister of Public Security. Hua had arrived, but he was still in many ways a provincial official, without the networks and ties to power which characterized his fellow Central Committee members. In the short term, this lack of political connections would mark him as the perfect compromise candidate, but in the long term his inability to compete with Deng Xiaoping at the age-old game of calling in political chits doomed Hua to irrelevance and then to obscurity. Such is often the lot of candidates chosen through compromise.
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