The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China

James Palmer

Faber & Faber

256 pages, £18.99

In the summer of 1976, as Mao lay dying, China was struck by a great natural disaster. The earthquake that struck Tangshan was one of the worst in recorded history, killing a quarter of a million people. But the Chinese Communist rulers in Beijing were distracted, paralysed by infighting over who would take control after the Great Helmsman. Palmer’s account captures the moment when Mao died and China entered a dramatic phase of transition from the xenophobic Cultural Revolution to the economic lifting of the Bamboo Curtain.