by Philip Short
At one level, this was merely a courtiers’ squabble. Jiang Qing described it later as ‘a literati quarrel’.22 To Mao, however, it had much weightier implications. Chen had rashly launched a factional attack to try to bring down a man whom Mao regarded not merely as his wife's ally but as a key member of his own political camp. Why? And who might be behind it? As delegate after delegate praised Chen's intervention for ‘enhancing their understanding of Vice-Chairman Lin's speech’, it was all too easy to make the connection. Lin's behaviour over the head of state issue had already aroused Mao's suspicions. Now Chen's attack suggested that a conspiracy was afoot.
In fact Chen's diatribe was as much personal as political. He had not forgiven Zhang for Mao's rejection of his draft of Lin's report to the Ninth Congress a year earlier, and had seized on the ‘genius’ issue as a way to get back at his rival. The other members of Lin's group – Wu Faxian, Huang Yongsheng, Li Zuopeng and Qiu Huizuo – had piled in, seeing it as a heaven-sent opportunity to weaken Jiang Qing and her cohorts. However, many of those who joined them, like Wang Dongxing, were Mao loyalists. Yang Dezhi, the Jinan Military Region commander, who had been with the Chairman since the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927, wrote later:
Everyone hated Zhang Chunqiao, so we criticised him severely. Zhang Chunqiao was so nervous and frustrated that he smoked one cigarette after another. Every day the ashtray in front of him was filled with cigarette butts. Watching him in such an awkward plight, we were extremely delighted. For the first time since the Cultural Revolution began, we finally got a chance to vent the anger in our hearts.23
That, in Mao's view, was the worst part of all. Lushan in 1970 was turning into a re-edition of Lushan in 1959. Then Peng Dehuai and his supporters had opposed the excesses of the Great Leap Forward. Eleven years later, Chen's attack had shown that many of the delegates to the plenum felt the same way about the Cultural Revolution. Nearly half the members of the Central Committee were military men. The old adage that ‘the Party controls the gun’ was being called into question. Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and their followers, whatever their failings, could be relied upon to uphold Cultural Revolution policies. With Lin, Mao was no longer quite so sure.24
On the afternoon of August 25, he called an enlarged Standing Committee meeting, at which he accused Chen of violating Party unity. He ordered that discussion of Lin's speech, which had served as the springboard for Chen's action, be terminated. Finally, after six months of uncertainty, he quashed once and for all the idea that he would ever agree to be state chairman.25 A week later, addressing the Politburo, he denounced Chen, who had been at his side since 1937 and had played a pivotal role in promoting his ideas, as a ‘political fraud’ who had ‘launched a surprise attack’, ‘tried to blast Lushan to pieces’ and used ‘rumour-mongering and sophistry’ instead of Marxism-Leninism.26 On Mao's orders, Chen was incarcerated in the Qincheng high security prison, outside Beijing. Two months later, a campaign was launched within the Party, accusing him of being an ‘anti-Party element, sham Marxist, careerist and plotter’.27
In formal terms, Lin emerged unscathed.
Yet the doubts that had been sown in Mao's mind would grow to poison Lin's relationship with the Chairman as insidiously and just as surely as if he had challenged him head on. Mao had no special desire to see his succession plans fall through a second time. He therefore stayed his hand – ‘shielding’ Lin, as he put it later28 – in the hope that the Defence Minister would find a way to retrieve the situation. That was still possible. Lin could have made a self-criticism for promoting the ‘genius’ and ‘Head of State’ issues, while blaming Chen Boda (and, perhaps, Ye Qun) for the factional attack on Zhang Chunqiao. That is what Zhou Enlai would have done and it was certainly what Mao expected. But, whether because he was too confident in his new status as the Chairman's successor, or because of the climate of generalised mistrust existing within the leadership, he did not.
That would turn out to be his second major misjudgement.
In October, when Mao read the written self-criticisms submitted by Ye Qun and Wu Faxian, his attitude hardened. Both had made pro-forma admissions of error, but blamed it on their ‘low level of understanding’. The Chairman vented his irritation in angry marginal comments. Ye Qun, he wrote, ‘refuses to do as I say, but dances immediately when Chen Boda blows his trumpet’; Wu Faxian ‘lacks an open and upright character’.29
At this point Mao began whittling down Lin's power. He described his strategy as ‘mixing in sand, throwing stones and digging up the cornerstone of the wall’.
In November, he added two new members to the Working Group of the CPC Military Commission, which was headed by Wu Faxian (‘mixing in sand’).30 The following month, the Beijing Military Region party committee held a work conference, chaired by Zhou Enlai, at which Chen Boda was labelled a ‘traitor, spy and careerist’ (‘throwing stones’), and the regional commander and political commissar, accused of being Chen's allies, were replaced (‘digging up the cornerstone of the wall’).
However, Mao's misgivings persisted. When, in March, Ye Qun and Wu Faxian produced further self-criticisms, he found them as unsatisfactory as the first. Those eventually submitted by the other three generals, Huang Yongsheng, Liu Zuopeng and Qiu Huizuo, were no better. They had ‘boarded the pirate ship of Chen Boda for so long’, he fulminated, that it had taken them six months to begin to tell the truth.31
In another revealing decision that winter, he dismissed his young partners from the PLA dance troupes, lest they turn out to be Lin's spies.32
Beyond the inner circle, not the slightest hint was allowed to seep out that anything untoward was afoot. Even those closest to Mao, like Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing, were uncertain how seriously the Chairman was taking Lin's problem.33 Not only to the country at large, but to members of the Central Committee, the Defence Minister was as much his ‘successor and close comrade-in-arms’ as he had ever been.34 Nor did anyone outside the Politburo know that the four generals were in trouble. They retained their posts, and went about their normal duties.
Lin himself seems to have had the keenest intuition of what might lie ahead. By March 1971, he had become morbidly depressed. That month, his 25-year-old son, Lin Liguo, who had a senior post in the air force, began holding secret discussions with a small group of fellow officers on ways of safeguarding Lin's position. The Defence Minister was apparently unaware of these meetings. However, one of the documents the group drew up included a devastatingly accurate assessment of Mao's political tactics which clearly reflected Lin's views:
Today he uses this force to attack that force; tomorrow he uses that force to attack this force. Today he uses sweet words and honeyed talk to those whom he entices, and tomorrow he puts them to death for some fabricated crimes. Those who are his guests today will be his prisoners tomorrow. Looking back at the history of the past few decades, is there anyone he supported initially who has not finally been handed a political death sentence? … His former secretaries have either committed suicide or been arrested. His few close comrades-in-arms or trusted aides have also been sent to prison …35
The group referred to Mao as B52 because, like the US long-range bombers then being used against North Vietnam, he set off explosions from a great height.
Lin Liguo and his colleagues concluded that the Defence Minister's position was not yet under threat, and that the likeliest eventuality was still an orderly succession when Mao died. They examined the possibility of Lin seizing power beforehand, and drew up a rough contingency plan for that purpose, called Project 571 (a homonym for ‘military uprising’). However, the consensus was that this was to be avoided if at all possible because, even if it succeeded, politically there would be ‘a very high price’ to pay.36
None the less, the fact that such discussions were being held at all – even if without Lin Biao's knowledge – testified to a deep malaise within the Defence Minister's camp.
At the end of April 1971, events took a more ominous tur
n. With Mao's authorisation, Zhou told the four generals and Ye Qun that they were suspected of factional activities and ‘mistakes of political line’.37 Panels bearing Lin's calligraphy in the Great Hall of the People were quietly removed.38 At the same time Mao created a new power base for Jiang Qing and her allies, who were given control of the two key Central Committee departments responsible for propaganda and personnel matters.39
As the year advanced, Lin became more and more withdrawn. He ceased to work and his behaviour was increasingly erratic. On May Day, he pleaded ill-health as an excuse not to attend the celebrations. Zhou persuaded him to change his mind, but when finally he arrived – contrary to protocol, after Mao – the Chairman, irritated by his lateness, ignored him.40 Later that month Mao ordered Zhou to take all the members of the Military Commission Working Group to Beidaihe, where Lin had retired to his seaside villa, to report to him on recent developments. Lin made only one comment: ‘One often harvests what one did not sow’. It is not clear whether Zhou told Mao about that remark: there is some evidence that he tried to protect Lin by claiming that, during the meeting, Lin had criticised the four generals. In any event, soon afterwards, Mao summoned a Central Committee work conference, expecting that Lin would now also make a self-criticism, which might have defused the situation. But the Defense Minister remained obstinately silent.41
At that point, Mao decided that a confrontation could no longer be avoided.
In July he told Zhou Enlai: ‘The [generals’] self-criticisms are nothing but fake. What happened at Lushan is not over, the basic problem is not at all solved. There is a sinister scheme. They have someone behind them.’42 The next month he set off aboard his special train for Wuhan, where he held the first of a series of meetings to canvass support from political and military leaders in the provinces. Everywhere he went, his message was the same: at Lushan, there had been a full-fledged line struggle, in essence identical to the struggles against Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai and Wang Ming. ‘A certain person’, he said, ‘was anxious to become state chairman, to split the Party and to seize power.’ What, therefore, should be done? ‘Comrade Lin Biao’, Mao answered his own question, would have to bear ‘some responsibility’. Some of his group might be able to reform; others would not. Past experience had shown, the Chairman noted drily, that ‘those who have taken the lead in committing major errors of principle, of line and of direction, will find it difficult to reform’.43
It was a measure of how few real allies Lin had in the regional military commands that not until the night of Monday, September 6 – a full three weeks after Mao started his tour – did word reach Beidaihe of what the Chairman had been saying.44
The following six days were utterly surreal.45
Lin himself spent much of his time discussing his children's marriage plans. During the Cultural Revolution, he had asked Xie Fuzhi to organise a search in Beijing and Shanghai for good-looking high-school girls as candidates to wed Lin Liguo – just as, under the Empire, young women of good family had been sought as imperial concubines. Several hundred girls were interviewed, but in the end Liguo had taken as his fiancée a young woman from a PLA dance troupe. A similar search had been undertaken to find a husband for Lin Liheng, Lin Biao's daughter, but Ye Qun had disapproved of her choice and she had tried to kill herself. She, too, was now about to become engaged.
As the Vice-Chairman's political career slipped away from him, it was these family matters that absorbed his attention.
On the afternoon of September 7, Lin Liguo told his sister that Mao was planning to purge their father. ‘It is better for us … to wage a struggle than to wait for our doom’, he said. Liheng was appalled. ‘[Mao] can make the heavens clear and then make them dark again,’ she retorted. ‘He purges whoever he wants to and no one dares struggle against him.’ In response to her questions, her brother said he had not broached any of this with Lin himself, but he thought one possibility was for his father to go to Canton and set up a rival government there. Over the next four days, Liheng repeatedly alerted Lin's security staff that her mother and brother were plotting behind her father's back, but the relationships within the family were so dysfunctional – it was well known that Liheng and her mother hated each other – that no one believed her. On September 8, Liguo returned to Beijing and showed his ‘sworn brothers’ – the small group of fellow officers with whom he had been discussing Project 571 – a note which he said Lin had written that day, enjoining his supporters to ‘act according to the orders of Comrades Liguo and Yuchi’ – a reference to his colleague, Zhou Yuchi. Whether the note was authentic, or whether Liguo forged his handwriting, is not known. But even if Lin did write it, it was so vague that it could have meant anything.
On the basis of Lin's alleged instruction, Liguo and his fellow officers began discussing ways to assassinate Mao. They agreed that the best prospect was to attack his special train.
Various plans were considered – most of them so juvenile they might have come from a child's comic strip: flame-throwers were to be used; or an anti-aircraft gun, aimed to shoot horizontally; an oil depot near the tracks would be blown up; an assassin armed with a pistol would shoot him. Not only was no attempt made to carry out any of these hare-brained schemes, but the conspirators never even reached the stage of making serious preparations.
Appearances notwithstanding, Lin Biao had never been plotting against Mao. Mao was closing in on Lin.
Within hours of Liguo's arrival in Beijing, the Chairman received word of unusual activity at the PLA air-force headquarters. His personal security was reinforced. Soon afterwards, he left Hangzhou for Shanghai. But instead of spending several days there, as had been planned, he received the Nanjing commander, Xu Shiyou, on Saturday morning, and then set out immediately for Beijing, not stopping until his train reached Fengtai, a suburban station on the southern outskirts of the capital, on the afternoon of Sunday, September 12. There he spent two hours with the newly appointed Beijing Military Region Commander, Li Desheng, whom he briefed on much the same lines as he had the provincial commanders in the south.
While Mao was at Fengtai, Lin Biao and a tearful Ye Qun were attending their daughter's engagement party at their residence in Beidaihe.
Lin Liguo, on learning of Mao's precipitate return, held a panic16-stricken meeting with his colleagues, at which they agreed that the best option was for his father to move the following day to Canton. Immediately afterwards he commandeered an air-force Trident to fly to Beidaihe, where he arrived at about 8.15 p.m. just as Mao was returning to Zhongnanhai.
The Defence Minister and his family were to have spent the evening watching films with the newly engaged couple and their friends.
Instead, Lin Biao retired to his room. Liguo told his sister that they were going to have to leave for ‘Dalian or Canton or Hongkong: anywhere depending on the situation’. Soon after, one of Lin's orderlies told her that he had overheard Ye Qun trying to convince Lin to move to Canton, but ‘Lin had remained silent’. Convinced that her mother and brother were trying to manipulate her father, she slipped away to warn the head of the guard unit charged with Lin's security, who this time agreed to report to Beijing. When she returned, Lin had already gone to bed.
By then Zhou Enlai had been called out of a meeting in the Great Hall of the People to take an urgent telephone call. He was told that an air-force jet was at Beidaihe without authorisation, and that, according to Lin Biao's daughter, the Defence Minister was to be taken to an unknown destination, possibly against his will.
Zhou immediately telephoned Wu Faxian and told him to have the plane grounded.
When this news reached Beidaihe. Lin Liguo and Ye Qun realised that the game was up. It may have been then that they decided to make straight for the nearest border – which meant heading north, towards Mongolia and Russia. Whether Lin himself was aware of the new plan is not known: he was under strong medication and in any case had already taken his sleeping pills. In an attempt to disarm suspicion, Ye Qun telephone
d the Premier to inform him that they were planning to move next day to Dalian. At midnight, Lin Biao's armoured limousine pulled away from their residence, sped past a cordon of guards and headed for the airport. On the way Lin's chief bodyguard leapt from the moving vehicle and was shot and wounded.46
Despite Zhou's order, the Trident had been refuelled. Lin, Ye Qun, Lin Liguo, another air-force officer and their driver clambered aboard, and at 12.32 a.m. on Monday, September 13, with its navigation lights turned off and the airport in total darkness, the aircraft took off.
Zhou ordered a total ban on aircraft movements throughout China, which remained in force for the next two days. He then reported to Mao.
One of the many unresolved questions surrounding Lin Biao's flight is why the central Guard Unit, which answered to Wang Dongxing, made no attempt to stop them. Lin Liheng told the unit's Beidaihe commander, Zhang Hong, at about 9.15 p.m. that her mother and brother were forcing Lin to make a precipitate departure. For the next three hours, the unit – apparently on instructions from Beijing – refused to intervene. At one point, Zhang told Liheng that ‘the Centre’, which she took to mean Mao, wanted her to accompany Lin and the rest of the family when they left. She never found out why. Another mystery concerns Mao's role during the crucial hour between Zhou Enlai informing him, probably some time after 11pm, of the events at Beidaihe, and the aircraft's departure just after 12.30 a.m. Nothing is known of his reactions until after the plane had taken off, when Wu Faxian telephoned Zhou in his presence to say that it was heading for Mongolia and to ask whether it should be shot down. Mao was said to have responded philosophically: ‘The skies will rain; widows will remarry; these things are unstoppable. Let them go.’47
At 1.50 a.m. the aircraft left Chinese airspace.I
Mao moved, for security reasons, to the Great Hall of the People, where, at 3 a.m., the Politburo convened, to be informed of his return to the capital and the sensational news of Lin's flight.
