The Day Mao Died : The Impact Was Even Greater Than When Kennedy Was Shot Here. : Peking Journalism Students Remember Where They Were.

Ten years ago this week, on Sept. 9, 1976, Mao Tse-tung died. In this century, no individual has stood so much at the center of so many lives. There was not one but several Maos--soldier, revolutionary, poet. To some he appears a kind of patron saint, a man who led China out of war and famine and feudalism; others--victims of the Cultural Revolution--remember that the same man who led them to salvation later led them to the brink of self-destruction.

These essays were written by students of the Graduate Institute of Journalism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Peking. The assignment was not unlike asking a group of Americans what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was shot: Where were you, what were you doing, the day Mao died?

SHEN JI was born Sept. 20, 1963 , in Nanjing in Jiangsu province, a flat , densely populated area of east China. In 1969 his family moved to Shanghai. A graduate of the Institute of International Relations, Shen was too young to be sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He has been a student all his life. His father is Communist Party secretary at a clock factory, and his mother works in a telecommunications research institute.

That afternoon I sat beside my classmates in the Foreign Languages Publishing House, part of the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Languages. There was a movement criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius, which was an indirect attack on Chou En-lai, and we were given stacks of paper in English. We were to make sure the pages were in order, and then staple them together into pamphlets.

I remember the telephone rang, and you could hear it over the entire 200 square meters of the workshop. The 48 junior middle school students looked up. We were there in response to Chairman Mao’s call to integrate ourselves with workers and peasants. We didn’t mind. After all, the work rescued us from boring books and preachy classes--in those days, even math lessons began with a quote from Chairman Mao.

Later, we left the workshop for the school, some 500 meters away. It was drizzling. We were ordered to sit still and listen to the loudspeaker that hung in the classroom. Precisely at 4, on the Central People’s Broadcasting Station, a man announced: “Comrade Mao Tse-tung, the great leader of the Chinese people, died early this morning. . . .”

I was shocked. Mao dead? The first words we learned to speak were “Long Live Chairman Mao.” The first words we learned to write were “Long Live Chairman Mao.” He was God. God never dies. His portrait hung in the bedroom; on my father’s dresser was a plaster bust of Mao.

But the facts kept entering my ears, forcing me to believe the news. My classmates sobbed, then burst into tears. I tried to do the same, but failed. Emotional as I was, my tears never came at critical moments. “Come on, boy, tears, tears,” I said to myself. I shouted at myself, but my eyes were still dry.

I looked to my teacher for help. Just then, she too looked up and our eyes met. Her flat face, always so kind before, now seemed to recoil. Her small handkerchief was soaked with tears. Her eyes swept the classroom and then focused again on me. “My God,” I thought, “she must see that I am sitting here tearless.”

How would she react? Would she criticize me or report me to the school authorities, saying that I had no love for Mao? At that moment I knew I was finished. My career was ruined, my dreams of being a Communist Party member dashed.

My classmates were now crying so rhythmically that I began to feel a deep admiration, and jealousy. My heart ached. And then--my eyes moistened. I could do it. I could . Tears ran down my cheeks.

That night I tossed and turned in bed. I thought of Mao, for whom, to this day, I have maintained a persistent love and respect. But much of the time I thought of my own future, and how my tears had come just in time.

LI HUAILIN was born in Shaanxi province on March 3, 1950. A Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, he traveled the country on the railroads, attending mass rallies. At 15, he took part in one of many Red Guard “Long Marches,” walking more than 450 miles from city to city in homage to Chairman Mao. In 1968, while a junior middle school student, he was sent to the countryside to work in the fields with the peasants. Three years later, he was recruited by the Luoyang coal mine, where he worked for the next six years. There he was in charge of the Communist Youth League. Like many of his generation, he lost his opportunity to attend university. Later he studied at a teachers training school and at a technical institute. For five years he taught English at a vocational university. He and his wife, an accountant at a clothing factory, have a 5-year-old daughter. His mother is a retired doctor; his father is a retired hospital administrator.

“I tell you something I just remembered,” he said recently. “Once I had no money. Nothing to eat. I had only a few Mao buttons. They were oblong and unusual. I gave them to a friend and he gave me three meals. In this way we paid honor to Mao, too.”

It was nearly 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I had just been lifted in an elevator from the 250-meter-deep pit in the Luoyang coal mine. I entered the bathhouse and was surprised at the quiet.

Usually when the coal miners surfaced, they would be joking, shouting or singing. That day there was none of that. I guessed that I must have been among the first workers to surface. But when I stepped into the pool and began to wash the coal off my body, I found the water was already dark. I was not early.

“Huailin! Why are you so late today?” asked Liu, whose job it was to clean the bathhouse. “Most of the miners are listening to an important announcement.”

“What important announcement?” I asked myself. Every day there were so-called important announcements.

“Somebody said that Chairman Mao has died, and a lot of workers left their post ahead of time,” said Liu.

“What?” I was dumbfounded. I dressed quickly; in the mirror I saw there were still spots of coal on my nose and cheeks. I wiped my face with a towel and ran toward the office. Passing the janitor’s room I heard the radio announcer listing those who would attend Mao’s funeral. I knew then that Liu’s words were true. Mao was dead.

Since mid-summer, Chairman Mao had directed all those in administrative and managerial positions to work, study and live with the workers; this was how the young radicals began to seize power at the grass-roots level. We were to learn from them. Between 1974 and 1976, I had been sent four times to “remold” myself. This time, I was told to quit my office job; for the next three months, I shoveled coal into a cart with a spade. I was not a supporter of the radicals--followers of the Gang of Four, and less concerned with production than with politics--but did as I was directed.

Since August of that year, I had been assigned to work the day shift with the coal miners in the pit. I followed the director of the mine and the other senior administrators, who were trying to reduce disruptions to production. Our task was to promote coal production through what was called “revolutionary criticism of right deviationist tendencies,” which meant a criticism of Deng Xiaoping (China’s current leader).

Though the mess hall was crowded that night, no one said a word. The miners got their meals and ate silently.

“Huailin,” said Xiao Lu, a truck mechanic and classmate. “I heard the news about 5. I went to see you but you weren’t in. What do you think?”

“I haven’t had time to think . . . ,” I answered. After supper we walked to the dormitory.

“We have lost three great leaders this year, Chou En-lai, Chu Teh and Chairman Mao,” said Zhang Jianmin, a driver. It is just as those who believe in superstition say: There were omens before Mao’s death--the earthquake at Tangshan and a shower of meteorites in Jilin province, he said.

I suggested we go to the department store and buy black cloth to make armbands, the Chinese way of mourning for the dead. We got to the store at half past 6. It was closed, but we knocked anyway. A man opened the door and let us in. He cut the black cloth for us. We took the material to a worker’s home, and his wife used her sewing machine to make armbands.

At 7 there was a workers’ meeting. Some young radicals proposed suspending production to hold a memorial service for Chairman Mao and drafted a list of slogans for the director to approve. But the director rejected the proposal. He said production must not stop and warned that all the slogans in remembrance of Chairman Mao should be in keeping with the Central Party Committee’s position.

This led to an argument between the young radicals and the more conservative old cadre--a sample of the factionalism between radicals and conservatives that was tearing at every work unit then. The director’s position ultimately won. Of course I was for the director.

I knew that the conflicts would continue. That added greatly to the tense atmosphere of those days.

TONG HAIYAN was born June 25, 1958, in Peking. Just after the Cultural Revolution, from 1976 to 1978, she lived and worked in the village Du Jia, north of Xian, in central Shaanxi province--as a peasant, planting and harvesting wheat, rice and cotton. After graduating from the Xian Foreign Languages Institute, she taught English at Northwest University in Xian for three years. Her husband is currently studying at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind. Tong’s mother is a pediatrician and her father an administrator in the Xian city government.

Mornings are often the busiest time in a hospital. So it was on Sept. 9, 1976, at Xian Central Hospital, where my mother works. Doctors made their rounds, nurses distributed medicines, and patients were taken to the various rooms for treatment. For me, it was time to clean the 10 wards and the corridor on the third floor of the ear, nose and throat department. I was working in the hospital as a janitor.

Most of the patients in the clinic were victims of the Tangshan earthquake of July, 1976, which killed an estimated 250,000 people. Victims had been dispersed to hospitals around the country. No one city had enough hospitals to hold them all. “Thanks to the chairman and our party, we are getting good medical treatment, new clothes, shoes, and food--all free of charge,” the patients would say.

A little before noon we were told that there would be an important radio broadcast at 4. It was an anxious afternoon. Half an hour before the broadcast, people began to gather around the loudspeaker in an outside courtyard.

“Is it about the earthquake?” someone asked. It had been rumored that Xian, about 900 kilometers (560 miles) from Tangshan, was also going to have an earthquake.

“Please, not that,” said someone else. Since the Tangshan earthquake, it had become the most frightening thing people could imagine. Someone else suggested the announcement might be an important speech from the party.

At 4 p.m. on the dot, an unusually deep voice came over the radio, accompanied by funereal music. “Who could it be after Premier Chou En-lai and Commander-in-Chief Chu Teh both died this year?” I wondered. My heart tightened.

The obituary notice began: “The wise leader of the Chinese people, the most outstanding proletarian fighter . . . Mao Tse-tung. . . . “ We were stunned. No one spoke or moved. I felt a lump in my throat and tears slid down my cheeks. I grabbed the hand of Aunt Fu, a stout 60-year-old woman who helped me clean the wards. She was trembling.

A few feet away an old woman cried “Chairman Mao! Chairman Mao!” as she pulled at her clothes. Another muttered repeatedly, “You saved us. You gave us a second life. You can’t go!”

On the way home that day the buses were crowded as always, but no one spoke. There was little said at our supper table that evening.

Ever since I could remember, I had been taught to say, “Long Live Chairman Mao!” I had no notion that he would die one day like ordinary people. From books and school I learned that he was the greatest leader. When we followed him we went from victory to victory. Now he was dead. Could China exist without him?

That night, lying in the dark, I found it hard to sleep. In the days that followed, the whole country grieved. There were no bright clothes, no movies, no marriage celebrations, no jokes, no laughter. Only mourning bands, white paper flowers and wreaths.

Even the weather reflected people’s moods. On the day of Mao’s funeral, heavy rains poured down on Xian, and the weather turned unexpectedly cold. Aunt Fu stared out the window and spoke softly to herself, “Even God shows sorrow for Chairman Mao’s death.”

She was not the first one I heard say so.

YAN WENBIN was born April 10, 1963, the son of country peasants. As a boy he tended the cows and worked in the paddies, planting rice. His mother, father, three brothers and sister are all rice farmers. His mother can neither read nor write, except for her name and a few simple words. Yan Wenbin graduated from Xiangtan University near Shaoshan -- the birthplace of Mao Tse - tung, he says proudly -- in Hunan province.

Village leaders had urged the peasants to destroy their altars to God and replace them with a bao shu tai, or a “treasured book stand,” to Mao. In his home there had been a bao shu tai containing four volumes of Mao Tse-tung’s works, given to his family by the village brigade leader. Above the books hung a portrait of Mao, and nearby stood a limestone statue of him. Some villagers, he recalls, wrapped the books in red silk.

The bell rang and the last class of the day was over. Ten of us rushed out of the classroom with our school bags. Chasing and shouting, we noticed a skinny boy running toward us. He was barefoot and wearing the rough, black cotton clothes of a peasant boy. He was a classmate, a boy we nicknamed “truant” because he was so mischievous.

When he was 20 meters away, he came to a breathless stop: “Hey! Shocking news! Chairman Mao has died. I’m your son if I lied,” he cried out, using the most solemn oath we knew.

“I don’t believe it!” shouted another boy. “Don’t we often say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao?’ ”

“No,” murmured a fat boy beside me. “My sister visited Mao’s birthplace. She told us he was raised in a village hut. He is not a rising sun as we have so often said. He may die like others.”

We argued then about whether Mao could die. As a boy I had been told Mao could live 10,000 years, and I believed it. Our argument was interrupted by the loudspeaker along the road: “My commander, Chairman Mao, passed away early this morning.”

Hearing this was like an electric shock. I stood still for a few seconds before it registered. “We are finished. We are finished,” we said as one.

I was 13. I didn’t know what it meant to lose a leader like Mao. I only knew that we had lost everything. I thought that I, myself, would die in no time. I ran away from my friends. When I got home, I searched from room to room for my mother. Finally, I realized she must be at work in the fields, and ran outside. In the distance I saw about 30 peasants, mostly women, picking cotton. “Mama! Mama!” I shouted.

“Are you still a baby crying for your mother?” a woman in the fields asked.

“Chairman Mao has died!” I cried. Everyone in the fields stopped working and looked up at me with wide eyes.

“Oh, my God!” said my mother. “Never say it again! You’ll be imprisoned if the brigade leaders find out.”

“It’s absolutely true,” I told her. “I heard it on the loudspeaker just now.” At this, the women in the fields started moving toward their homes. I was astonished that they were brave enough to leave the fields without getting approval from the leader.

The first thing my mother did when she got home was to turn on the radio. “Our great leader and teacher Chairman Mao Tse-tung died at 10 minutes after midnight on Sept. 9, in Peking,” the broadcaster announced.

It was then 5:30 p.m. My mother, brothers and sister listened to the obituary over and over again. My father listened, too, his head cocked to one side and the soil from the fields still caked on his legs. I sat beside my mother, my school bag still on my back. Dusk had fallen. On the winding road the moon was shining faintly. By 9, the village was silent except for the sobbing that came from our neighbor’s house.