Hua Guofeng

Biography

Hua Guofeng was born Su Zhu in Jiaocheng, Shanxi, in 1921 and lost his father at seven. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1938, during the war against Japan, and took the revolutionary name Hua Guofeng. After years as a guerrilla in the Eighth Route Army he moved with the advancing communist forces to Hunan in 1948, where he would spend more than two decades. As party secretary of the Xiangtan district, which included Mao Zedong's birthplace, he built a memorial hall to Mao and won his favour.

Hua defended Mao's policies at the 1959 Lushan Conference, led the Cultural Revolution in Hunan and in 1970 became the province's party first secretary. Called to Beijing, he sat on the committee investigating the Lin Biao affair, joined the Politburo in 1973 and was put in charge of the Ministry of Public Security. After Zhou Enlai's death in January 1976 Mao made him acting premier, and after the Tiananmen Incident that April, premier and first vice chairman of the party.

A month after Mao's death, on 6 October 1976, Hua and Marshal Ye Jianying had the Gang of Four arrested, and he became party chairman and chairman of the Central Military Commission while remaining premier. He ended the most disruptive campaigns of the Cultural Revolution and rehabilitated many purged cadres, but his 'Two Whatevers' loyalty to Mao's decisions left him exposed. From the December 1978 party plenum Deng Xiaoping and his allies steadily displaced him, and by June 1981 he had lost his top posts. He stayed on the Central Committee until 2002 and died in Beijing in 2008.