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.“He’s dead,” said Chiang Ch’ing in a low voice.“He died at ten minutes past midnight.Our time has come.”19A week later, standing on one of the ceremonial mourning platforms that had been erected around the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, Kao did his best to hide his growing sense of anxiety.A few feet away, prominent among the crowd of Central Committee members and army leaders, he could see the stocky, determined figure of Marshal Lu Chiao.His uncle had avoided looking at him directly as they took their places, gazing instead at the great sea of human faces that filled the Square of Heavenly Peace.Like the other green-uniformed generals and marshals clustered around him, Chiao was conducting himself with an ominous aloofness that made Kao feel increasingly uneasy.Before a bank of microphones on the top plinth of the monument, the rotund Party vice chairman, Hua Kuo-feng, was reading a sonorous eulogy from a typescript, but Kao was listening with only half his mind.His eyes strayed repeatedly to the bulkier, self-possessed figure of Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, the minister of defense, who stood at Hua’s right shoulder.A white-haired, bespectacled veteran of the Long March, Marshal Yeh seemed to Kao to radiate the same quiet air of confidence as his uncle and the other military leaders, and a suspicion began to grow in Kao’s mind that before a crowd of a million mourners, the military leaders might be attempting to make some kind of silent pledge about the future.“The whole Party, the whole army, and the people of the whole country are immersed in boundless sorrow at the passing of Chairman Mao Tse-tung,” intoned Hua, pausing to glance out over the vast crowd that had gathered under lowering gray skies.“It was under Chairman Mao’s leadership that the disaster-plagued Chinese nation rose to its feet.That is why the Chinese people love, trust, and esteem Chairman Mao from the bottom of their hearts.On Hua’s left, with a dark veil draped over her head and shoulders, the chairman’s widow stood alongside her closest supporters — an austere vice premier, the Party’s chief propagandist, and the youthful Party general secretary.Dwarfed by the lavender granite memorial which reared above them, they bowed their heads in grief, and Kao noticed that all looked more frail physically than the aging soldiers ranged on Hua’s right.Suddenly Kao felt a twinge of panic deep inside himself, and the words uttered by his uncle on the night of the earthquake echoed again through his mind: “You’ve been living on borrowed time for many years.I think perhaps that time’s nearly run out now.”Above the square, red flags on all the tall public buildings drooped at half-mast in the gray light, and inside the main auditorium of the Great Hall of the People, the already embalmed corpse of Mao Tse-tung was still lying in state on a flag-draped catafalque.Hundreds of thousands of Chinese had filed past the body during the past week while the Politburo was holding heated meetings about who should succeed him, but each day when the official minutes and records of the discussions were returned to the Secretariat’s offices, Kao found to his growing dismay that no satisfactory agreements about the new Party leadership had been reached.Fierce arguments had raged too about whether the chairman’s body should be cremated or preserved in a public mausoleum, and even on this pressing problem no consensus had yet been achieved.The uncertainty among the Party’s leaders was reflected also in the country at large: almost daily, reports of disturbances continued to flow onto Kao’s desk from provincial Party headquarters.The toll of earthquake casualties, which was still mounting, suggested that perhaps a million people had either died or been badly injured in the disaster.Beyond the Square of Heavenly Peace itself, the narrow, crumbling streets of old Peking were still littered with stacks of bricks, heaps of lime, and other building materials.Many homeless families were still camping on the pavements and roadsides beneath tarpaulins, and these makeshift arrangements were spawning more crime and other social disorders.Amid all these new strains, after many demanding months, Kao had begun to feel physically drained and worn out, and he often performed his duties like an automaton, not taking full account of what was going on around him.“.In honoring his great memory, we must never forget the cause of the proletarian revolution in China which Chairman Mao pioneered,” said Hua, his unremarkable voice reverberating across the densely crowded square through hundreds of loudspeakers.“We must turn grief into strength, unite and not split.We must deepen the struggle to criticize Teng Hsiao-ping and repulse attempts by the right deviationists to reverse correct verdicts.We must always keep in mind Chairman Mao’s warning: The bourgeoisie are still in the Communist Party.They’ll never give up.They’re still on the capitalist road.Kao’s spirits lightened on hearing the familiar references to themes central to the dead chairman’s political philosophies.Their inclusion seemed to confirm that Vice Chairman Hua had not sold out after all to the confident-looking marshals.His fears, Kao told himself, were being magnified by the unrelenting stress of the past few weeks; the eulogy had suddenly made it quite clear that Comrade Chiang Ch’ing and her powerful supporters would win the battle for control of the Party and the nation.When the address ended, the Party and army hierarchy led the multitude of people in an organized act of mass obeisance.Three times they bowed low in the direction of the giant thirty-foot colored portrait of Mao Tse-tung which hung permanently above the central arch in the Gate of Heavenly Peace.Kao joined in and the experience moved him deeply; a strong feeling of hope rose in him again, despite his weariness, and when a massed band of five hundred instruments accompanied the choir of a million voices in an emotional rendering of “The East Is Red,” he added his voice to the mighty musical tide that engulfed the square.Singing the familiar words of the majestic anthem, Kao felt an oceanic sense of communion with the rest of the swaying throng all around him: “The East is red! The sun rises.China has brought forth a Mao Tse-tung!.He is the people’s great savior.This mystical feeling of communication with every single Chinese in the square persisted even after the ceremony ended, and Kao’s mind remained dazed and distracted as he moved down from the stands toward the long line of gleaming Hung Ch’i limousines drawn up in front of the Great Hall
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