Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The case of Lin Biao is this very, very, murky episode when the chosen heir apparent, his name written in the Party constitution, allegedly plotted to assassinate Chairman Mao. Then, when fleeing in the direction of the Soviet Union, his plane crashed with his family in Mongolia. This is a very, very judicious and well-researched work on this episode, and the authors show that the likelihood of Lin Biao plotting against the chairman is very small – because it goes against all his previous behaviour in the Cultural Revolution.
Tell me about the book about Lin Biao, Mao’s heir apparent, and his mysterious death.
Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, both of whom teach in Australia, have produced a series of books looking back at the Maoist period and just after, trying to revisit ideas about what happened on certain major occasions, with access to Party historians and new materials. My own view, frankly, is that it’s probably a little early to write books, articles would have been better. But, nevertheless, they have done extraordinarily valuable work. In the case of Lin Biao, it’s this still very, very, murky episode when the chosen heir apparent, his name written in the Party constitution, allegedly plotted to assassinate Chairman Mao. Then, when fleeing in the direction of the Soviet Union, his plane crashed with his family in Mongolia.
The important thing about Teiwes and Sun, is, apart from the fact it’s a very, very judicious and well-researched work on this episode, is that they prove, I think conclusively, that the likelihood of Lin Biao plotting against the Chairman is very small – because it goes against all his previous behaviour in the Cultural Revolution. Lin Biao had always been very careful to wait and see what Mao did, and then to sign his name on the document after him. And not to push ahead. And in my view, the one time he really angered Mao, when he did push ahead, was when he thought he was fulfilling what Mao wanted. Mao was alleging in the summer and early fall of 1969 that the Soviet Union was going to launch a surprise attack on China and the words Pearl Harbor were bandied around. So Lin Biao, who was the executive vice-chairman of the Military Affairs Committee and Minister of Defence, decided, for the first time, to do what he was supposed to do – which is to get the country ready for the attack that Chairman Mao had predicted. And he did some inspections and made sure that the airfields were not going to have the planes in position so they’d be destroyed immediately by an attack, as happened at Pearl Harbor. And he did other things, so that hundreds of thousands of troops and ships and tanks and aircraft were moved around. It was a massive movement which was even detected in the US – and no one in America knew what was happening. And the whole thing was billed as Deputy Commander in Chief Lin Biao’s order number 1 and then there were order numbers 2, 3 and 4. Mao was apparently furious, and I think the reason he was furious was not because Lin Biao was doing what his duty was, to protect the country, but because Mao suddenly realised that his main bulwark of support throughout his career, the military, could be moved by someone else, and that therefore, conceivably, there was a threat to him personally. And I think it was from that time on that Mao started the process of pressuring Lin Biao in order to try to get rid of him.
So Lin Biao wasn’t planning a coup, he was just running away because he was scared?
We don’t even know that, because it is said Lin Biao was asleep, having taken sleeping pills. His son and wife decided that the situation was dangerous, and it was the son who was supposedly entrusted by Lin Biao with an attempt to assassinate the Chairman. And the son and the wife hurried Lin Biao, half asleep, into a car, rushed off to the airport and took off. So we don’t even know what Lin Biao’s role was.
And the plane wasn’t sabotaged? It just crashed over Mongolia?
We don’t know anything. The story is so obscure, even to this day. Some years ago there was an allegation that Lin Biao and his wife had their car rocket-attacked after they had had a pleasant dinner with Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai in the Western Hills outside Beijing. And if someone, in this case a Chinese with an alias, can write that, then obviously there is much still to be discovered…
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Roderick MacFarquhar is Harvard University’s Leroy B Williams Professor of History and Political Science and formerly Director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His publications include The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals; The Sino-Soviet Dispute; China under Mao; Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971; The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao; the final two volumes of the Cambridge History of China (edited with the late John Fairbank); The Politics of China 2nd Ed; The Eras of Mao and Deng, and a trilogy, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. He was the founding editor of The China Quarterly, and has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Royal Institute for International Affairs. In previous personae, he has been a journalist, a TV commentator, and a Member of Parliament. His most recent, jointly-authored book on the Cultural Revolution, entitled Mao’s Last Revolution, was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2006.
