On the evening of October 6, 1976, members of People’s Liberation Army Guard Unit 8341, the force responsible for protecting China’s top Communist leaders, arrested four of their charges. The victims, variously detained in their homes in Beijing or on arrival at a hastily summoned meeting, were Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s widow, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan — the “Gang of Four” whose attempt to consolidate power after Mao Zedong’s death four weeks earlier and perpetuate the Chairman’s Cultural Revolution were thus brought to an abrupt end. It proved a defining moment in China’s modern history: a rejection of Mao’s vision of revolutionary purity and economic self-sufficiency that had already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and had kept China weak and divided for two decades. And to a large extent it was the — somewhat reluctant — work of one man: Hua Guofeng, Mao’s handpicked successor.

Hua’s role in ending the dangerous ambitions of a radical coterie led by the redoubtable but deeply unpopular Madame Mao during a time of acute uncertainty vindicated an otherwise long but relatively undistinguished career in Chinese politics. But both at the time and since, most Chinese have had cause to be grateful that he helped to bring down the curtain on the calamity of Mao’s rule. Had he not responded to the urgings of his allies in the Politburo, the murderous factionalism that characterised court politics under Mao would almost certainly have continued and inflicted even more misery, poverty and oppression on the Chinese people.

It might even have meant civil war. The Gang (a pejorative epithet fashioned by opponents), furious that an ailing Mao had chosen Hua rather than one of their own to lead the Communist Party, seemed ready in the days after the Chairman’s death to take matters into their own hands. There was a whiff of rebellion in the air, particularly in Shanghai, where their support was strongest. Instead, thanks to Hua’s pre-emptive strike, the Gang were publicly disgraced, subjected to a show trial and consigned to the demonology of party history, where they have served ever since as scapegoats for the excesses of Mao’s personal rule — excesses they encouraged, and from which, while their mentor lived, they were the principal beneficiaries.

Yet Hua’s role in the arrest of the Gang did not absolve him from criticism for very long. No less a beneficiary of the revolutionary fantasies of an ageing Mao than those he ambushed on the night of October 6, 1976, Hua was pushed into a corner by popular demands that much of Mao’s work during the previous ten years be undone. More to the point, he was no match for the leading figure most closely associated with such demands, the recently disgraced but soon to be triumphant Deng Xiaoping. Although Deng and his allies spared Hua the physical indignities then customarily inflicted on those whom the party criticised, his reputation was publicly shredded and he was dispatched to the margins of politics, a fate that illustrated only too well the problems of succession and legitimacy that dogged Chinese politics for much of the 20th century and, to some extent, still do.

Times archive, 1949: the New China

The men who took titles of office in Peking are victors in a revolution as great in its consequences as Russia's in 1917

BACKGROUND

• Archive, 1976: Obituary of Mao Tse-tung

• Regret at passing of a world leader

• Four contenders struggle for power

• Mr Hua asserts his power by ousting radical leaders

• Mr Hua: sound government rather than revolution

Multimedia

• Watch a newsreel of Shanghai under Red control

• Watch a newsreel of China in 1959

BACKGROUND

• Chiang Ching 'gang of four' said to be under questioning

• Why China has turned against Mao's wife

• Suspended death sentence on Jiang Qing

Hua’s problem was that he was utterly unequal to confronting the almost cosmic forces with which he was obliged to wrestle in Beijing during the 1970s. Mao’s life was moving to a close and the succession stakes — no less than a chance to control the destiny of the Chinese nation — were enormous. He faced formidable foes and could count on few allies, at least for very long. With hindsight, his position was unenviable in the extreme.

Yet he had one particular credential that rivals lacked: Mao’s blessing as the next leader of the Communist Party, expressed in the phrase that the ailing Chairman is alleged to have muttered in his protégé’s ear in April 1976: “With you in charge, I’m at ease.” It was a measure of how little, rather than how much, Chinese politics had changed, despite the many upheavals of Mao’s rule, that a sick-bed utterance from the emperor mattered much more than any of the legal niceties found in the Communist Party charter or the state constitution regarding the transfer of political power. Mao had (so, Hua claimed) spoken: the succession was settled.

Mao’s choice of Hua can only be understood in the context of the times. The search for revolutionary immortality rarely seems to have been far from the Chairman’s mind and, ultimately, this boiled down to choosing a successor who could be trusted to persevere with the revolutionary cause as defined by its principal architect: Mao himself.

The problem here was twofold. First, those whom the Chairman at first encouraged as worthy successors were subsequently found to be not only inadequate, but traitors who threatened China with disaster. This, Mao came to believe, was the case with President Liu Shaoqi, whose alleged “Soviet revisionism” was one of the principal targets of the Cultural Revolution. So far from entering into his inheritance, Liu died in a prison cell in 1969. It also proved the case with Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s second handpicked successor, who championed the Cultural Revolution but believed he should take over from its architect sooner rather than later. His attempts in 1971 to do so by means of a coup were thwarted, and he was reported to have died in a plane crash in Mongolia while trying to flee to the Soviet Union.

The other problem of succession was that the nature of Mao’s revolutionary quest itself kept changing. To some extent this was tactical; the Chairman was concerned to keep his enemies off balance. But it also reflected contradictions in his personality and political outlook. Despite a number of broadly consistent themes in his approach, there was almost a Mao for every season during the almost 30 years that he ruled China.

Mao seems to have finally settled on Hua Guofeng as the man most likely to carry forward his revolutionary ideals in 1975, by which time it was plain that age and ill-health meant that there was now little time left in which to make his dispositions. The Chairman wanted his successor to safeguard the “fruits” of the Cultural Revolution, preserving a revolutionary dynamic or tension in public life that would prevent China from lapsing into bureaucratic socialism (“revisionism”) of the kind found in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Mao wanted to keep in check both the radicals, led by his wife and her allies, and the home-grown “revisionists” whose leader was Deng Xiaoping, back in a position of power after 1973 following dismissal and disgrace at the start of the Cultural Revolution. In these circumstances, Hua Guofeng seemed the best man for the job.

The two became acquainted after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, when Mao made rare but high profile visits to his birthplace, Shaoshan in the southern central Hunan province. Hua was the local party secretary and took his stewardship of the village of Mao’s birth seriously. He was a northerner himself, having been born in Jiaocheng, Shanxi province, in 1921 and moving to the neighbouring Shaanxi province with his family as a child. He joined the Red Army at the age of 15, when Communist forces moved into the area after the Long March from south China. In 1938 he became a full party member.

During almost 25 years in Hunan, Hua proved an enthusiastic champion of Mao’s policies. He pursued land reform with vigour in the early 1950s and earned the Chairman’s gratitude at the end of the decade when he denied (falsely) that Hunan peasants were starving as a result of the forced collectivisation involved in the Great Leap Forward. He was no less committed to the Cultural Revolution, during which he prospered, securing appointment to the Central Committee in 1969 — a position he retained until 2002. He was temporarily transferred to Beijing in 1971 after the fall of Lin Biao and, two years later, joined the Politburo.