Lin Biao

Chinese military and political leader

• Born: December 5, 1907
• Birthplace: Huanggang County, Hubei Province, China
• Died: September 13, 1971
• Place of death: Near Öndörhaan, Mongolia

Lin, a military officer, was an early adherent of Mao Zedong’s armed rural revolution and achieved notable battlefield successes, especially in the Chinese Civil War from 1947 to 1949. He was a champion of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and in 1969 he became Mao’s designated successor.

Early Life

Lin Biao (lihn byow) was the second of four boys born to parents of few means in a rural district in China’s inland Hubei Province. He was sent to a modern school in the inland city of Wuhan, where he and his elder cousins associated with nationalistic young students. That group became an early cell of the communist movement in China. In 1925, Lin went to Shanghai, and there he joined the Chinese Communist Youth League, whose leaders included his Wuhan school friends. At this time, the Communist and Nationalist parties were cooperating, and Lin entered the Nationalist Party’s Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou (Canton). He received a year of training before becoming a junior officer.

In 1927, Lin participated in the Nationalists’ long-planned Northern Expedition, which sought to unite China by military means. Lin served as a junior officer in Communist-led units stationed at Wuhan. After Chiang Kai-shek turned against the Communist movement in April, 1927, the Communists responded to growing Nationalist power, most notably in the Autumn Harvest Uprising at Nanchang on August 1, 1927. That attack is celebrated today as the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Lin was numbered among the twenty thousand Communist-led troops in that unsuccessful uprising.

Life’s Work

Following the failed Autumn Harvest Uprising, Lin was only twenty years old, yet his decision to remain with the defeated Communist forces brought him into the inner circle of Mao Zedong’s followers, who have ruled China since 1949. Lin rose steadily in the ranks because of his battlefield prowess and his loyalty to Mao. During the period of the Kiangsi Soviet (1930-1934), Lin commanded the communists’ First Army Corps and became associated with Mao’s faction. Lin led this same unit on the Long March and again proved himself as Mao’s loyal subordinate. Lin was numbered among the small cadre of Communist leaders who set up the new headquarters in Shaanxi Province in 1936.

In 1937, when the war with Japan broke out, the Communist forces were reorganized into the Eighth Route Army. Its commanders were Zhu De and Peng Dehuai; Lin commanded its 115th Division of fifteen thousand men. In September, 1937, Lin’s division had a notable victory against a Japanese force in northeast Shaanxi Province. Lin became a practitioner and author of the style of guerrilla warfare that the Communists advocated during the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945).

Lin was a small man, thin and gaunt even in his thirties. He was seriously injured in 1938. First, he returned to the Communist base headquarters of Yan’an and then in 1939 went to the Soviet Union for treatment, remaining there for three years. On returning to China in 1942, Lin did not return to the battlefield but took up administrative duties. In 1945, he was named to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

Following the Japanese surrender, Lin led an army of 250,000 troops into Manchuria. Initially, in spite of some Soviet assistance, his army was unsuccessful, but in 1947 his enlarged forces achieved a series of victories that destroyed Chiang Kai-shek’s control of this crucial region. Then Lin’s army moved into North China, where the Nationalist commander of Beijing surrendered to him in the winter of 1948-1949. In the spring of 1949, Lin’s army, now known as the Fourth Field Army, crossed the Yangtze River and marched to Guangzhou (Canton). There Lin assumed command of a huge military region encompassing about one-third of China’s total population.

When China entered the Korean War in the fall of 1950, Lin’s Fourth Field Army participated, but Lin remained behind because of poor health, which is believed to have been a consequence of tuberculosis. Lin remained largely inactive through 1959, although he continued to hold many prominent titles. In the military, Lin’s star was eclipsed by Peng, who had led the Chinese Volunteer Forces during the Korean War.

In the summer of 1959, a year after the beginning of Mao’s campaign called the Great Leap Forward , a conference was held to evaluate the situation. Peng criticized Mao’s efforts at a breakthrough in socialist organization and production as wasteful, foolish, and harmful to China’s national defense. Mao accepted some criticism but insisted on keeping the newly created communes while demanding Peng’s removal as minister of defense. Lin was appointed in his place.

In the early 1960’s, Lin began to play a major role in Chinese politics. He stressed a radically egalitarian, frugal, and selfless style for the PLA. Following Mao’s direction, Lin advocated that the PLA lead all of China back to the simple, selfless dedication shown during the war against Japan. That approach, known as Yan’an Way after the communists’ wartime headquarters, stressed self-reliance, active participation in physical work, and spontaneous adaptations in difficult circumstances. It opposed detailed planning, bureaucracy, and privileged lifestyles for anyone. The whole of China adopted this approach in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Lin also fed Mao’s personality cult, which reached its highest pitch in these years.

As minister of defense, Lin carried through a program of military modernization. In 1964, largely on the basis of their own efforts, the Chinese developed a nuclear bomb. Beginning in 1964, China began relocating defense plants away from the coastal regions and devoting one-half of the state investment to construction of transportation links and defense facilities dispersed widely in the interior. This strategy, now called the Third Front approach, was meant to help China survive if it were attacked by its enemies. The “enemy” meant the United States initially, but increasingly in the 1960’s the Chinese came to fear the Soviet Union. Lin’s programs combined the simple, nontechnological style of the Yan’an Way with an emphasis on creating China’s own advanced technology. This combination is summed up in the slogan “walking on two legs,” reflecting a desire to harness all available resources to create a socialist China. In these efforts, as earlier in his career, Lin was closely guided by Mao.

Lin threw the PLA’s weight behind Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution. Mao began that effort in 1965, but only in the summer of 1966, when the PLA put its resources behind the student Red Guards, did the Cultural Revolution take off. Wild attacks on the Communist Party, the regular government, and most established institutions followed and brought great disruption to China’s society and economy. The Cultural Revolution weakened even the PLA, but nevertheless it remained as the last stable institution. As efforts to reconstitute some order began in late 1967 and 1968, the PLA provided the necessary resources to end the struggle and to re-create the governmental structure. Lin had replaced the disgraced Liu Saheqi as Mao’s chief lieutenant in 1967 and was designated in the 1969 Communist Party constitution as “Comrade Mao Zedong’s close comrade-in-arms and successor.”

Even at the pinnacle of his power, Lin remained a small, unimpressive public figure, who transmitted neither energy nor vision. His sudden fall in late summer in 1971 is the most astounding political event in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Lin was accused of having led a scheme that was hatched by his son Lin Likuo and called Project 571. These numbers, read in standard Chinese, are homophonous with the term “armed uprising.” The plot also involved five top generals of the PLA and Lin’s second wife, Ye Zhun, in the attempt to assassinate Mao. When the attempt went awry, Lin and his family commandeered a British-made passenger aircraft of the Chinese Air Force and attempted to flee to the Soviet Union. The airplane lacked sufficient fuel and crashed in Mongolia. All the passengers, including Lin, were killed in the crash.

The full story of Lin’s death has never been told. Only months after the events occurred did the first public reports appear outside and inside China. The participating generals who survived the coup attempt were kept in jail for nine years before trial. By that time, several were too old to respond coherently to the charges. What happened to the thousands of minor figures implicated in the plot is unknown. Lin’s motivation remains cloudy, for he may have sought to kill Mao to speed up his own constitutionally mandated succession, or he may have reacted defensively to Mao’s displeasure at Lin’s own growing influence.

It is noteworthy that the failed coup and Lin’s death came within a few weeks of Henry Kissinger’s first visit to Beijing, in the summer of 1971. Following that visit, Zhou Enlai advocated, with Mao’s concurrence, abandoning China’s autarkic position in foreign policy to protect China better against the possibility of a Soviet attack. Anti-Americanism had been a hallmark of the People’s Republic of China’s policies since its establishment in 1949, but by 1960 China had fallen out with the Soviet Union also and had adopted a policy of independence from either of the superpowers. Instead, China would ally itself only with the interests of poorer, disadvantaged states. Lin was closely identified with this policy of nonalignment with either superpower.

The opening to the United States in the late summer of 1971 signaled Mao’s willingness to change China’s foreign policy radically. Lin probably did not approve, and it seems likely that differences over this new foreign policy helped precipitate the Lin Biao affair. There were other issues, however, involving domestic policy also in dispute in 1970 and 1971. Lin’s stress on keeping China poised on a wartime footing in fear of an attack from either superpower was no longer acceptable to Mao, in part because it required continuing commitment to military investment that weakened the growth of Chinese socialism. The official story of how Lin plotted to assassinate Mao is cast in terms of Lin’s own dreams of domination; any differences over the redirection of China’s foreign policy go unmentioned.

Significance

Throughout his life, Lin Biao was a disciplined, loyal military man, dedicated to Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. With other members of the small Chinese Communist leadership, he considered Mao not so much as an emperor who stood above them as a special comrade whose brilliance made him the core of their movement. They strengthened that core by rallying around him on all issues. Until 1960, Lin was only a third-level figure who contibuted through his competence in military affairs. Only by his elevation to minister of defense after Peng’s disgrace in 1959 did Lin enter into the second rank of Chinese Communist leaders.

Even in the 1960’s, though, Lin’s prominence appears to have been thrust on him. As minister of defense, he continued to follow Mao’s policy directions. He lacked independent vision of China’s socialist future and saw most questions in the limited terms of China’s strategic defense. As long as the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party remained united, Lin was no more than an influential minister of defense, but, in the Cultural Revolution, Mao accused other top leaders of undermining the revolution. Lin, as always loyal to Mao, followed Mao’s leadership into the maelstrom of the Cultural Revolution as the Chinese Communist Party split and turned on itself. When the tumult subsided, Lin was surprisingly left as Mao’s designated successor. After 1969, Lin was uneasy in his elevation, for he was better suited to serve than to lead. His status as the constitutionally designated heir to Mao required broad talents, which he lacked.

Ultimately, his role in history depends on the circumstances of his death, and that role is embedded in the full story of the so-called Lin Biao affair. Lin’s position changes with whatever version of his death one accepts. In the official version, Lin was an ungrateful traitor to Mao, who, impatient in waiting for Mao to die, plotted to destroy Mao. In a possible alternative, Lin could have reacted defensively against Mao’s displeasure and sought to save his own skin. In a third version, a sudden crisis could have boiled up over a foreign policy initiative toward the United States. Lin could have found himself on the losing side. In a final irony, this prosaic military man, by the circumstances of his death, became a figure of mystery whose full role in history remains unclear.

Bibliography

Ebon, Martin. Lin Piao: The Life and Writings of China’s New Ruler. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1970. The biographical section was written before Lin’s fall and is often wrong on facts, so this outdated source must be used sparingly.

Ginneken, Jaap van. The Rise and Fall of Lin Piao. Translated by Danielle Adkinson. New York: Avon Books, 1977. Emphasizes the last decade of Lin’s life including Lin’s activities during the Cultural Revolution. Argues that Mao’s retreat from Lin on domestic matters preceded their foreign policy differences. Best available general account.

A Great Trial in Chinese History: The Trial of Lin Biao and Jiang “Qing” Counter-Revolutionary Cliques. Beijing: New World Press, 1981. A semiofficial summary of the charges against Lin from the trial of his surviving coplotters held in 1980.

Jin Qui. The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Jin Qui, the daughter of a general who served under Lin Biao in the Chinese air force, examines the conflict between Lin and Mao Zedong and Lin’s mysterious death, which she views as a case study of the chaos that was commonplace during the Cultural Revolution.

Kau, Michael Y. M., ed. The Lin Piao Affair. White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1975. Translations from Chinese of public documents and some secret party materials concerning Lin and his failed coup attempt.

Lieberthal, Kenneth. Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform. 2d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. This history of Chinese government since the 1949 revolution includes information on Lin Biao.

Naughton, Barry. “The Third Front: Defence Industrialization in the Chinese Interior.” China Quarterly 115 (September, 1988): 351-386. Describes the economic and military strategy associated with the “Third Front” and Lin’s close association with that concept.

Yao, Ming-le. The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Piao. Translated by Stanley Karnow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. Published as an insider’s true account, the stories related in these pages make a riveting fictionalization but cannot be accepted as historically accurate.