THE DEATH OF LIN BIAO

...Mao's full victory was celebrated at the Ninth Party Congress of 1969...

...it is even harder to understand why his coup d'etat should not have succeeded...

...From now on, the future belonged entirely to the man whose armies were running the whole country...

...The Lin Biao affair, as presented by the Maoist sources, was nothing but a smokescreen that ill concealed an even more shocking and gruesome reality: Lin Biao had been assassinated, in China, on Mao's order...

...Today we could paraphrase this saying: "One true piece of information is worth two...

...Yet, is this account factually true...

...among all of us, he is the only one who never opposed Chairman Mao...

...now, with the smooth and efficient assistance of Zhou Enlai, he had dispatched Lin Biao...

...Two years later—in September 1971—Lin Biao suddenly disappeared...

...Yet Mao did not lose everything at Lushan: he obtained the replacement of Peng Dehuai by a man of his own choice, Lin Biao...

...This is a paradox only in appearance: actually there is a direct relationship that logically links the eclipse of rationality to the relentless hunt for exclusive or sensational news that obsesses our society...

...his constant rule was never to go into battle if not 100 percent sure of victory...

...How could his unique combination of superior tactical genius with massive military might and unlimited political resources come to such a lamentable end, even before one single move was made or one single shot fired...

...It did not reach full completion only because Zhou was lucky enough to have a cancer that eventually developed faster than the chairman's schemes...

...with Lin Biao in this key position, Mao was like a chess master who, by the early move of one inconspicuous pawn, ensures his final victory...

...Lin Biao was a shadowy, frail and colorless figure who made himself remarkable for two things: (1) an unconditional, absolute, and unwavering devotion to Mao Zedong...

...Earlier on, it is quite possible that the son might have drafted the absurd and puerile "571 Outline": he was reckless and harebrained enough to have conceived such a project...

...As a result of the 1959 Lushan Conference, Mao was effectively "kicked upstairs" or, as the Chinese say, laid to rest on a sidetrack...

...Now Mao's "Cultural Revolution" was well and truly launched: no one would be able to put the fire out before the entire party had been blown to smithereens...

...At every turn of this ferocious fight, coups, countercoups, purges, plots, and assassinations have been studiously ignored by our leading political anaIf Lin had really organized a conspiracy, how shall we explain the fact that, after he had been killed and his conspiracy had been exposed (September 12), his coconspirators were still active on the national stage several days later...

...At the last minute, the publishers rejected it—allegedly, Yao Ming-le's representatives had objected to its 'excessively polemical" character...

...Amid all this terror, madness, blood and devastation, Mao would find his way to victory...

...We can easily grant that Lin Biao had no moral qualms whatsoever (after all he had been a practicing Communist all his life...

...Mao should thus be spared any public setback and, to this end, Peng would be formally reprimanded and demoted from his official post...

...On the way, for obscure causes, his plane crashed in Mongolia...

...It was there for the first time that Mao rebuked him publicly...

...The psychology, the behavior, and the life-style of the ruling elite are here faithfully portrayed...

...Why should he have fled to a remote and hostile Soviet Union (which, of late, he had so forcefully opposed in public...

...On the basis of thorough investigations that he had carried out in the countryside, at the grass-roots level, witnessing the distress of the hard-pressed peasants, Peng denounced Mao's "petit-bourgeois hotheadedness," his megalomania, his egocentrism, subjectivist idealism, and increasing divorce from reality...

...I do not know its author...

...in a state of total panic, he allegedly tried to escape to the Soviet Union...

...The troops of Lin Biao brought the Red Guards back to heel (in some places they simply massacred them) and imposed a new, rigid order all over China...

...As it was imperAs I pointed out in my book Chinese Shadows (New York: Viking, 1977, p. 180), the Russians, with direct access to the site of the crash, have known all along that Lin Biao was not on the plane...

...2 The fumbling and awkward lies that Peking was hastily proffering in guise of an explanation merely made it more obvious that the entire case was rigged...

...For Chinese officials to go there and freely take photos would be about as likely as you or I taking an after-dinner stroll on the moon...

...For the Chinese public, it made very little difference whether Chairman Mao had successfully murdered Vice-Chairman Lin, or Vice-Chairman Lin had unsuccessfully tried to murder Chairman Mao...

...Actually Mao had, by means of this appointment, put in place the fundamental stepping stone that would eventually enable him to return to power...

...Needless to say, there were loopholes enough in this bizarre tale to let an entire herd of mammoths gallop through...

...In practice, this substitution trick proved to be of limited use...

...It confirms the basic contention of all serious China observers that Lin Biao was assassinated in China, on Mao's initiative...

...First, the Red Guards were unleashed against Mao's political enemies, who were thus 318 flushed out of their shelters, hunted down, lynched and murdered...

...What other interests may be furthered by this publication...

...The border region where the plane crashed is precisely one of the sensitive areas where, for years, the Soviets have been emplacing their military machine against China...

...At the time, they made no secret of this fact, but neither did they give it special publicity, not knowing which version of the episode could best serve their own interests...

...Having outlived his usefulness, Lin had become too successful and too powerful for the chairman's taste...

...Indeed, in Peking, the Central Committee immediately entrusted a group of their henchmen with the entire organization and management of the Cultural Revolution, and officially approved the group's first report of activity in February 1966...

...Our age, which takes pride in the unprecedented scope, speed, and sophistication of its information, will probably go down in history as the Age of Credulity...

...Why did he not try to take refuge in southern China, among his own loyal troops...

...And now, for the most decisive move of his entire life, how could he have failed to draw contingency plans to deal with unexpected hitches...

...In order to appreciate this point, one must go back in time, to the 1959 Lushan Conference.' This momentous conference had been convoked as an attempt to sort out the chaos created by the catastrophic failure of Mao's "Great Leap Forward...

...lysts: "No, no...

...The manuscript of this book landed on my desk two weeks ago...

...As a majority of Central Committee members were gathering around Peng's banner, a third protagonist took advantage of this conflict to reap all the benefit for himself: Liu Shaoqi...

...An Italian bishop once observed: "One true miracle is worth two...

...they assured us each time, "Chinese politics do not work this way," there are no power struggles in China, only "some policy problems on which honest revolutionaries disagree...

...After this operation, the army stepped in to restore discipline and to replace the party, which had been completely wrecked in the turmoil...

...Why should he plot to seize the power that he practically possessed already...

...Chen Yi, an influential member of the old Communist ruling clique, who knew what he was talking about, declared a few years before Lin Biao's mysterious downfall: "Comrade Lin Biao is a truly great man...

...The sociological accuracy of this narrative is thus beyond question...

...At the time of his alleged conspiracy, Lin Biao was the most powerful man in China...

...We dismiss the technicians who fail to mend our cars or our leaky bathroom faucets, but whenever the political reality belies the analyses of the Experts, we dismiss the reality...

...The Lin Biao affair well illustrated this point: one of the main reasons why, 11 years ago, public opinion in the West swallowed so easily the preposterous tales hastily and crudely concocted by the Chinese propaganda is simply that, in the absence of any true information, even palpably false information will always appear as the next best thing...

...Its narrative tallies with all available evidence...

...and one would have thought that it could eventually have served as Lin's epitaph...

...The whole country would be laid waste, millions of people would die—but what would it matter...

...This temptation to dismiss the reality should be particularly strong in this case, as sensitive souls may find that the light that the Lin Biao affair sheds on the nature and the workings of the Chinese Communist leadership is unbearably crude...

...However, for Mao, the price to pay for this face-saving solution would be heavy: he would have to relinquish in fact his actual power into the hands of Liu Shaoqi (who subsequently became the head of state) and Deng Xiaoping (secretary of the party...

...Several Military Regions were under the command of his closest followers...

...The repeated attempts that he made to regain his lost power were successively foiled with ease by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who kept a tight hold over the everyday operations of the party...

...Earlier in his career, Lin had undergone lengthy medical treatment in the Soviet Union...

...No follower of the Maoist gang convicted during the same trial benefited from such leniency...

...After an awkward silence, Peking produced, in bits and pieces, an incredible story...

...Western audiences have been particularly ill-prepared to confront the gruesome realities of the power struggle that rages permanently within the Communist ruling clique...

...But I cannot disprove them, nor prove my point.' And I must admit that, on the whole, the picture presented in Yao Ming-le's account is plausible and coherent—although all the implications it may present for Sino-Soviet relations should be received with the greatest critical caution...

...It should also be noted that the Soviet Union, which had kept quiet on this whole affair, suddenly began to leak reports a few weeks ago reminding us that, indeed, Lin Biao was not in the Trident that had crashed in Mongolia...

...Is it a pure coincidence that this manuscript— which exposes the deviousness of Mao and shows that Lin's conspiracy presented at least an element of self-defense—reached Western publishers precisely at the time when, in Peking, the leading military personalities who had been condemned to heavy sentences for their participation in the Lin Biao conspiracy were suddenly released, barely one year after having been sentenced...

...Using the troops that for the last six years he had been readying for this particular political mission, he launched a military coup that secured for the Maoist camp full and direct control of the Peking Military Region...

...he merely had to wait a few more years for the old man to die, and he could have enjoyed the full array of imperial paraphernalia...

...If the sinister political milieu described in this book will without doubt shock and scandalize many Westerners, for any Chinese reader these pages evoke a reality that is all too grimly familiar...

...321...

...The ruin of China was a small price to pay if, in the end, this savage chaos could enable him to destroy his rivals and to recover the power that they had forced him to relinquish in 1959...

...The publishers could only tell me that he is a Chinese whom they have good reason to trust...

...They were freed allegedly because of old age and ill health...

...The fact is that without Lin Biao it would have been impossible for Mao ever to launch his "Cultural Revolution...

...Whatever little moral credit and prestige the Chinese Communist party had still managed to salvage from the successive crises of the last quarter of a century, and specially after the murderous madness of the "Cultural Revolution," was, finally, unable to survive this last blow...

...He failed in his attempt...

...In particular, the contention that the armed clashes between the two countries could be merely ascribed to the private schemes of one ambitious individual seems a crude simplification, to say the least...

...This activity had in fact consisted essentially of neutralizing and defusing the revolutionary potential of the "Cultural Revolution...

...As a military commander, Lin Biao was legendary for his cold, cautious, and calculating mind...

...Who is helping whom, and for what purpose...

...Is he merely trying to serve the historical truth...

...he could easily have turned Guangzhou into an impregnable fortress...

...I confess I would personally question some aspects of these new revelations (I still find it difficult to believe that Lin actively conspired against Mao...

...Under their guns, the Central Committee was reconvened, and dutifully denounced in May the very report it had just approved two months earlier...

...he was killed in the crash, thus meeting a just reward for his cowardice and treachery...

...First came the "571 Outline" (draft plan for an armed uprising...

...As a result of the delirious policies of the Leap (for which Mao was solely responsible), famine was looming in the countryside—it was to claim millions of lives over the next three years—and the Chinese economy lay in ruins...

...This assassination, coming a few years after the equally ruthless elimination of Mao's previous heir-designate, Liu Shaoqi, was merely fulfilling a set pattern: Mao had used the Red Guards to destroy Liu, then used Lin Biao to destroy the Red Guards...

...It provides a wealth of new elements and illuminating details...

...Not knowing the author, and not being able to check his sources, I can of course draw no conclusions regarding the historical accuracy of his narrative...

...with a few of his own cronies, he attempted to fly away from China (he was himself an Air Force officer) and crashed in Mongolia...

...Even if we suppose that, in a sudden wish to advance the clock, he indeed actually conspired against Mao (whom he had served with such unfailing loyalty during his entire career...

...At last, in 1965, using a far-fetched "cultural" pretext, proceeding by the circuitous way of Shanghai, Mao finally escaped their vigilance and managed to light the fuse that would lead to that huge explosion, the "Cultural Revolution," a year later...

...How could a conspiracy masterminded by such a man, from such a vantage point, simply burst like a soap bubble, without producing the slightest commotion, without leaving the faintest scar...

...Qiu Huizuo, for instance, made a public appearance on September 24 at Peking airport where he went, together with Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying, to bid farewell to a Chinese economic delegation leaving for Hanoi...

...Lin was solemnly anointed as the new heir-designate...

...Keeping all these reservations and unan320 swered questions in mind, I read this book with fascinated interest...

...Even ending in failure, a coup really organized by Lin Biao would have rocked the entire country, if not started a civil war...

...His position as Mao's heir-designate had just been enshrined in the Constitution...

...At least it makes sense —which is more than could be said for the official Peking version of the Lin Biao affair...

...The mutiny was led by a forceful and prestigious personality, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, a military hero, immensely popular for his honesty, out' Not to be confused with the 1970 Lushan Conference (second plenary session of the Ninth Central Committee) which was to mark for Lin Biao the beginning of the end...

...moreover, Outer Mongolia is, 319 for all practical purposes, Soviet military territory...

...The actual decisionmaking and implementation of policies were now entirely under the control of Liu and Deng...

...he had access to exclusive, secret information, and needs to retain complete anonymity...

...if such a conspiracy ever existed, it must have been a last-minute desperate attempt, when Lin realized that he was already cornered...

...To say that the party leaders behave like gangsters would be a gratuitous slur on the latter's reputation: after all, even in the underworld some kind of twisted morality is still being cultivated, some principles are still respected, a certain concept of loyalty within the gang is still valued...

...The Peking propaganda organs subsequently released various "documents" purporting to substantiate Lin Biao's crimes...

...As for Zhou Enlai himself, a similar fate was prepared for him a few years later...

...Liu suggested that such an open fight would be utterly harmful to the authority of the Communist leadership...

...For Mao, the years that followed Lushan were a crossing of the desert...

...The official slogan that emerged during the "Cultural Revolution," "Comrade Lin Biao is Chairman Mao's closest comrade-in-arms," was somewhat simplistic yet essentially accurate...

...China Experts are fortunate indeed: the public never extends to them the elementary standards of professional competence that are normally expected from modest mechanics and plumbers...

...2) a military genius that has often been compared by independent scholars to Napoleon's (actually some of his battles have become models for study in military academies...

...But in order to believe that he was the author of this ludicrous document, whose intellectual level would barely fit the requirements of a Boy Scouts' game on a Sunday outing, we would have to deny him not only the intelligence that even his enemies credited him with but also basic common sense...

...Later on, doctored photographs of his body and his wife's, allegedly taken in the wreck of their plane, hardly improved the credibility of the official Peking version: bodies incinerated in the crash of a jet aircraft seldom preserve such easily recognizable features...

...At that time, this statement was absolutely accurate...

...There was, however, one shadow on his triumph: the Congress, marking the establishment of a purified Maoist party, turned in fact into a personal apotheosis of Lin Biao...

...According to this official version, Lin Biao had organized what appeared to be—from the documents released by the official propaganda organs—a grotesquely incompetent plot to assassinate Mao and to seize power...

...Moreover, I do not know what the author's motivations are...

...He could have waited in complete security, since he had supreme authority over the guns—out of the barrel of which, as Mao rightly observed, comes all political power...

...For the sake of order and national unity, it would be essential to preserve intact the prestige of Mao, at least in a symbolic fashion...

...Mao, whose leadership had till then never been challenged, found himself suddenly confronted with a mutiny in the highest levels of the party...

...ative for Mao's prestige that his latest crime be kept secret, the propaganda organs simply lent to Lin the absurd cogitations and unsuccessful escape of his son...

...In this respect, the Lin Biao affair will remain a landmark in the history of the party: with it, the moral bankruptcy of the regime was totally exposed to the public, and as a result, the cynicism and political demobilization of the Chinese populace reached a point of no return...

...It was at this precise juncture that Lin Biao entered on stage and completely reversed the situation in Mao's favor...

...At the time, the designation of Lin Biao as new defense minister did not raise any objection among the leaders: appreciated for his military competence, this otherwise dull and shy character, utterly devoid of eloquence and charisma, was not likely to attract attention or stir controversy...

...the Russians had enough medical information to identify his body with certainty, had he been among the passengers on the wrecked Trident...

...Liu and Deng were at first quite confident that they would once more be able to regain control and manipulate this potentially dangerous new movement, keeping it under their own close supervision...

...317 spokenness, frugal life-style, and down-to-earth common sense...

...Needless to say, these pages will appear most unsettling to a great many readers...

...The assassination of Lin Biao threw his son —a useless playboy—into a panic...

...In his largely ceremonial capacity as chairman of the party, he could still deliver occasional speeches and address the nation, but he talked in a complete vacuum...