by Jung Chang
Lin and his wife and Tiger decided to flee abroad at once. They planned to depart from the nearby airport at Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea. Tiger flew to Peking on the 8th to secure planes for the escape. He brought with him a handwritten note from his father: “Please follow the orders relayed by comrades Li-guo [Tiger] and Yu-chi [Tiger’s closest friend]. (Signed) Lin Biao 8 September.” The man in charge of dispatching planes at Peking military airport agreed to bypass regular channels to get Tiger the planes.
But Tiger did not want to flee without first making an attempt to assassinate Mao. At that moment Mao was in the Shanghai area, where officers loyal to Lin held key positions, and even had partial charge of Mao’s security in the outer ring. It seems that at the eleventh hour, Lin Biao agreed that Tiger could try. Mrs. Lin was all for having a go. When Tiger kissed his fiancée goodbye at Beidaihe, he said: “In case something happens to me, you don’t know anything; I won’t incriminate you.”
In Peking, Tiger asked the deputy chief of staff of the air force, Wang Fei, to mount an assault on the compound where Mme Mao and her coterie were living, the Imperial Fishing Villa. Tiger told him that simultaneous action would be taken “in the south,” where Mao was. Wang Fei was a good friend, but his reply was disappointing. He did not think he could persuade any troops to do what Tiger was asking. In any case, his troops were not allowed to carry weapons into Peking.
Next, Tiger met a senior air force officer called Jiang Teng-jiao, who was the youngest general in China, and who, for various reasons, hated Mao. Tiger asked him to try to kill Mao while Mao was still near Shanghai. Jiang agreed, and the two aired various ideas. One was to shoot up Mao’s train with flame-throwers and bazookas; another was to shell it; a third was for the Shanghai military chief, a man trusted by the Lins, to shoot Mao on his train. The fourth was to bomb Mao’s train from the air. But the man they approached to drop the bombs, a Korean War ace, replied that there were no bomber aircraft available. He took fright, and asked his wife, who was a doctor, to rub salt water and old aureomycin into his eyes so that they would swell up, and he thus got himself hospitalized. The other ideas also proved non-viable, as it was impossible to get lethal firepower anywhere near Mao’s closely guarded and heavily armor-plated train.
Over the next couple of days, tense discussions continued. “I just can’t stomach him any longer!” Tiger would shout, waving his fists. “OK,” he would say, “the fish dies, but it breaks the net!” indicating that he was ready to make a suicidal attack if that was what it took to bring down the Mao regime.
Fast running out of ideas, Tiger sent a friend back to Beidaihe on the 10th to get his father to write to Army Chief of Staff Huang Yong-sheng, asking him to cooperate with Tiger. Lin wrote the letter, but it was not delivered. The plotters could not trust Huang not to betray them.
It was also too late. Next day, news came that Mao had left Shanghai by train. Several of Tiger’s friends offered to fly helicopters on a suicide attack against Mao on Tiananmen Gate on National Day, 1 October. Tiger vetoed the idea, in tears. He had not anticipated any action of this magnitude.
All assassination plans were aborted, and Tiger decided to revert to the plan to flee to Canton, and then Hong Kong. On the evening of 12 September he flew back to Beidaihe in Lin’s plane, a Trident, intending to leave with his family next morning.
Mao had returned to Peking late that afternoon, completely unaware that an assassination plot had been afoot. His train stopped outside the capital at a station called Fengtai, where he was given a routine briefing by his newly appointed Peking commanders on what had been happening in the capital. The meeting opened with a report about an army delegation’s visit to Albania. Back in Zhongnanhai, it was like the end of any other trip. Mao’s security chiefs and the head of his guards, who lived outside the compound, went home. Some of them took sleeping pills. Mao, too, went to sleep.
AT THE TIME Mao and his entourage went to bed, the Lins were getting ready to decamp. Tiger had reached Beidaihe about 9:00 PM, and went over plans with his parents. The staff were told that the Lins were leaving at 6:00 AM for Dalian, a nearby port city, which was an old haunt of Lin’s, so this did not arouse suspicion. Then, fatally, Tiger asked his sister Dodo to be ready to leave in the morning.
Two years older than Tiger, Dodo was a very brainwashed young woman. Her parents had not wanted to let her in on their escape plans, in case she might turn them in. But Tiger was worried about what might happen to his sister after they fled, and had disclosed part of the plans to her a few days before. As their parents had foreseen, she got scared. Unlike her brother, Dodo was a product of the fear and twisted logic of Mao’s China. For her, attempting to flee abroad was defection, and therefore treason, even though she knew that her sick father, whom she loved, was not likely to survive long in prison under Mao. When Tiger told her they were leaving the following morning, she reported the news to the Praetorian Guards who were stationed in a separate building at the bottom of the drive. This action doomed her family.
The Guards phoned Chou En-lai, and he began to check on the movements of planes, particularly the Trident, which was Lin’s plane. Tiger’s friends immediately let him know that Chou was asking questions, and Lin Biao decided to leave at once rather than wait till morning. He also decided to fly not to Canton, but to their fallback destination, Russia, via Outer Mongolia, as this route would mean much less time in Chinese airspace, just over an hour.
Tiger rang his friends about the change of route, and phoned the captain of the Trident to get the plane ready. Unaware that Chou’s enquiry had been triggered by his sister’s betrayal, Tiger told Dodo they were taking off right away. She went straight back to the Praetorian Guards and stayed at their post.
Around 11:50 PM, Lin Biao, Mme Lin and Tiger, plus a friend of Tiger’s, sped off for the airport, accompanied by Lin’s butler. As the car raced out of the estate, the Praetorian Guards tried to stop it. At this point Lin’s butler surmised that they were going to flee the country. Thinking of the fate that awaited his family if he became a defector, he shouted “Stop the car!” and jumped out. Gunshots followed, one hitting his arm. The shot came from Tiger, the butler said; some suggest that it was self-inflicted, to protect himself.
The Praetorian Guards set off in hot pursuit, in several vehicles. About half an hour later the Lins’ car screeched to a halt beside the Trident at Shanhaiguan airport, with one pursuing jeep only 200 meters behind. Mrs. Lin hit the tarmac screaming that Lin was in danger, shouting: “We are leaving!” Tiger had a pistol in his hand. The group clambered frantically up the small ladder to the pilot’s cabin.
The Trident took off in a rush at 12:32 AM, carrying the three Lins, plus Tiger’s friend and Lin’s driver. Out of the full nine-man crew, only four, the captain and three mechanics, had had time to get on board. The mechanics had just readied the plane for departure, and were only beginning to refuel it when the Lins arrived and Mrs. Lin yelled for the fuel tanker to be moved away. As a result, the plane had only 12.5 tons of fuel on board, enough for between two and three hours in the air, depending on altitude and speed.
They had to fly low for most of the time to dodge radar, and this used up more fuel. Two hours later, over the Mongolian grassland, they would have had only about 2.5 tons of fuel left — at which point the fuel gauge would have been flashing for some time. At 2:30 AM on 13 September 1971, the plane crash-landed in a flat basin and exploded on impact, killing all nine people on board.
A HEAVILY SEDATED Mao had been woken up by Chou soon after Lin’s plane took off. Mao stayed in his bedroom, which was one of the former changing-rooms of the swimming pool in Zhongnanhai. The nearest telephone was in a room at the other end of the 50-meter pool. When the people monitoring Lin’s plane rang, the head of the Guard, Wang Dong-xing (whom Mao had forgiven for supporting Lin at Lushan a year before), would rush to the phone, then back to Mao, then to the phone again. The plane did not cross the border into Mongolia until
1:50 AM, so Mao had about an hour to act.
It seems Mao was only presented with one option if he wanted to strike: interception by fighter planes. China apparently had no usable ground-to-air missiles. Mao vetoed interception. The unspoken reason was that he could not trust the air force, which was honeycombed with Lin men. Instead, Mao had every plane in China grounded, while the land army took over all the airports, blocking the runways to prevent any planes taking off. The only planes allowed into the air were eight closely monitored fighters sent up later to force down a helicopter carrying three friends of Tiger’s. When the three men were brought back to the outskirts of Peking, they agreed to shoot themselves together. Two did. The third, who had said that his last bullet was “reserved for B-52,” meaning Mao, weakened at the last moment, and fired into the air.
Mao was moved to his Suite 118 in the Great Hall, where there was a lift to a nuclear-proof bunker and a tunnel to the Western Hills. His servants were told to be ready for war, and his guards went onto top alert, and started digging trenches around Mao’s residences. The head of Mao’s guards for twenty-seven years said he had never seen Mao look so strained, so exhausted and so furious.
Mao remained sleepless and wiped out until the afternoon of 14 September, when news came that the Lins had crashed in Mongolia. This was an ideal outcome from his point of view, and he swigged some mao-tai, the powerful liquor he did not normally touch, in celebration.
But Mao’s relief that Lin was dead was quickly overshadowed by the news that there had been a plot to assassinate him, which came to light right after he heard that Lin had crashed. This was the first assassination plot against Mao by his top echelon, and it came as a profound shock. Equally alarming was the fact that quite a few people had known about these plans, and not one had informed. For days Mao hardly slept, in spite of downing fistfuls of sleeping pills. He ran a temperature and coughed incessantly. Breathing problems made it impossible for him to lie down, so he sat on a sofa day and night for three weeks, developing bedsores on his bottom. Then a heart condition was discovered. On 8 October, when he met Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, he barely spoke a word. One official present, who had last seen Mao the day before Lin fled, less than a month before, could not believe how washed-out Mao looked. Chou brought the meeting to an early close.
Mao had to struggle to deal with endless details in order to tighten his already incredibly tight security. Everybody near him had to report in detail on their every dealing with the Lins. A deputy chief of the Praetorian Guard, Zhang Yao-ci, owned up to having received some bamboo shoots “and two dead pheasants” from Mrs. Lin one New Year, and to having given her some tangerines. Mao’s warning to him tells a lot about the bleak world surrounding the Boss:
Don’t cultivate connections;
Don’t visit people;
Don’t give dinners or gifts;
Don’t invite people to operas [i.e. Mme Mao’s model shows] or films;
Don’t have photographs taken with people.
An altogether more monumental task was sorting out the armed forces, which were crammed with Lin men, especially at the top. Mao had no way of knowing who was involved in the assassination plot, or where anyone’s allegiance lay. One small but alarming incident came days later when senior air force officers were gathered to be briefed about the Lins. One of the men raced to the top of the building, shouted anti-Mao slogans and jumped to his death.
The only marshal Mao could trust to take over running the army was Yeh Jian-ying. He had been a faithful follower in the past, but had spoken his mind against the Cultural Revolution, and as a result had been cast into semi-disgrace, for a while living under virtual house arrest. At the time Mao brought him back to high office, several of his children and other close relatives were still languishing in prison.
But Mao had nobody else. He was also forced to reinstate purged Party officials, because they were the only alternative to the people installed by Lin’s network. These officials were mostly in camps. Now many were rehabilitated and re-employed. Mao loathed having to let this happen, and tried to limit the scale of the rehabilitations. He knew that these officials felt extremely bitter towards him after the appalling ordeals they had been put through. One former deputy chief of the Praetorian Guard spoke for many people when he told us how he felt then: “What Chairman Mao, what Party? I stopped caring about any of them …”
At this juncture, Marshal Chen Yi, one of the more outspoken opponents of the Great Purge, who had suffered much in it, died of cancer, on 6 January 1972. The memorial service was scheduled for the 10th, as a low-key affair, with limitations put on the size of his portrait, the number of wreaths, how many people could attend — and the number of stoves permitted to heat a big hall: just two. Mao had no wish to attend the funeral.
But in the days after Chen Yi’s death, although the news was not announced, word got out, and large numbers of old cadres gathered outside the hospital, demanding to be allowed to bid farewell to his corpse. The mood of the crowds was angry as well as mournful. And there was no doubt that the anger was directed against the Cultural Revolution — and against Mao himself. Mao felt tremendous pressure to make a gesture to placate the old power base which he had treated so abominably, and on which he now had to rely again.
On the day of the service, shortly before it was due to begin, Mao suddenly declared that he would attend. His staff observed that “his face was hung with dark clouds” and he looked “irritated and frustrated,” remaining totally silent. But he could see it was wise to go and use the occasion to put across the message to old cadres that he “cares for us.” He also did some scapegoating, telling Chen Yi’s family that it was Lin Biao who had “plotted … to get rid of all us old stagers.” Word went out that the persecutions in the Cultural Revolution were Lin Biao’s fault, and that Mao was coming to his senses. Afterwards, a photo was published of Mao at the service, looking suitably sad (though with his unshaven stubble airbrushed out), with Chen Yi’s grief-stricken widow clinging to his arm, and this did much to abate the bitterness among “capitalist-roaders.”
The day of Chen Yi’s funeral was bitterly cold, but Mao was in such a foul mood at having to go that he refused to put on a warm coat. His staff tried to get him to dress sensibly, but he pushed the clothes away. He ended up wearing only a thin coat over his pajamas, and that was all he had on for the whole service in the poorly heated hall. As a result he fell ill. He was seventy-eight, and he got sicker and sicker. On 12 February he passed out, and lay at the brink of death.
Physical and political vulnerability forced Mao to allow the rehabilitation of cadres to be speeded up, and the regime became markedly more moderate for the first time since the start of the Cultural Revolution nearly six years before. Abusive practices in prisons decreased greatly. Violent denunciation meetings were scrapped, even for Lin Biao’s men, who, although detained, suffered little physically compared with Mao’s previous routine. Incredibly, given that an attempted assassination — of Mao, no less — was involved, not a single person was executed.
After years of living surrounded by daily brutality, and with almost nothing constructive to see or do in the way of entertainment, tension in society had built up to an almost unbearable pitch. An Italian psychoanalyst who was in China just before this time observed to us that he had never seen anything like the number of facial tics and extreme tension in people’s faces. Now there was a let-up. A few old books and tunes, and some leisure activities, were allowed again. Some historical sites were reopened. Although relaxation stayed within very strict limits, still there was a lightness in the air when spring came in 1972.
A letter from Chou to Mao on the night of 13 September shows unequivocally that the plane was not shot down by the Chinese.
The Russians sent their top investigator, KGB general Aleksandr Zagvozdin, to Mongolia to make sure it really was Lin on the plane. Zagvozdin dug up the corpses. But, he told us, his report failed to satisfy his bosses, and he was sent ba
ck to exhume the bodies again from the now frozen ground. The corpses of Lin and his wife were boiled in a huge pot and the skeletons taken to Moscow, where Lin’s was checked against old Russian medical records and X-rays from his earlier visits, and a squeamish Yuri Andropov and Brezhnev were finally satisfied that it really was Lin.
Among those detained was Lin Biao’s daughter Dodo.
53. MAOISM FALLS FLAT ON THE WORLD STAGE (1966–70 AGE 72–76)
MAO’S ULTIMATE AMBITION was to dominate the world. In November 1968 he told the Australian Maoist leader Hill:
In my opinion, the world needs to be unified … In the past, many, including the Mongols, the Romans … Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and the British Empire, wanted to unify the world. Today, both the United States and the Soviet Union want to unify the world. Hitler wanted to unify the world … But they all failed. It seems to me that the possibility of unifying the world has not disappeared … In my view, the world can be unified.
Mao clearly felt that he was the man for the job, as he dismissed America and Russia as possible unifiers, using arguments that rested solely on China’s huge population. “But these two countries [America and Russia],” he went on, “have too small populations, and they will not have enough manpower if it is dispersed. Further, they are also afraid of fighting a nuclear war. They are not afraid of eliminating populations in other countries, but they are afraid of their own populations being eliminated.” It was hardly necessary to read between the lines to see that the ruler with the largest population — and the least fear of it being wiped out — was Mao himself. He saw China’s role as follows: “In another five years, our country … will be in a better position … In another five years …”
It was for the sake of this world ambition that Mao had embarked on his Superpower Program in 1953, insisting on breakneck speed, and taking hair-raising risks in the nuclear field. The most scary of these came on 27 October 1966, when a missile armed with an atomic warhead was fired 800 km across northwest China, over sizable towns — the only such test ever undertaken by any nation on earth, and with a missile known to be far from accurate, putting the lives of those in its flight path at risk. Three days beforehand, Mao told the man in charge to proceed, saying that he was prepared for the test to fail.
