The Death of Mao

China is a superpower. A generation ago, it was a basket case. This book is about the moment when everything changed. As a terrified country waited for Mao's death, the country was struck by natural disaster.

James Palmer tells the dramatic, truly epic story of how a vast country came to a historical crossroads and chose to turn its back on one kind of totalitarian madness.

In 1976, the city of Tangshan was struck by a terrible earthquake. As half a million people died in the ruins of a shoddily built industrial city, the Communist rulers were more concerned with saving machinery than lives. In Beijing, Mao's inner circle was paralysed by in-fighting as to who would succeed the Great Helmsman.

Would Mao's fanatical wife and the Gang of Four be allowed to continue the violent nihilistic policies of 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 allies be able to take control, open China up to the market and end the near-permanent state of civil war?

This is intimate history of a kind rarely written about China.