1976 was not an auspicious year for China. That “cursed year” of the dragon saw the deaths of Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong and anywhere between 242,000 and 650,000 people killed in a 23-second quake that nearly obliterated China’s coal mining capital.
As historian and author James Palmer writes in his latest work, Heaven Cracks Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earth…