35 THE MYSTERY OF PROJECT 571
On December 10, 1970, when Edgar Snow interviewed Mao Zedong for the fifth and final time, Mao was two weeks shy of his seventy-seventh birthday. Snow found him in reasonably good physical condition. Mao seemed to be suffering from a cold but otherwise looked quite well. He had even lost weight since their last meeting, in January 1965. Of course, his age was showing, but the Chairman's mind was still lively. The Great Helmsman observed to his guest that he would “soon be going to see God,” but he did not seem upset. It was inevitable, Mao said: everyone eventually had to see God. Snow knew that even earlier Mao had liked to speak about death. The Chairman had been talking about going to see Marx ever since 1961, when he spoke with Field Marshal Montgomery. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution in 1965, he had talked about the approach of death with Snow and first said that “very soon” he would meet with God. (No one knows why he no longer referred to Marx, but rather to the Almighty.)1 Old age and death had long since become favorite themes of his.
Of course, there was a significant element of intrigue in this. Mao loved to pretend that he was sick or unwell in order to gauge the impression this would produce upon his entourage.2 In February 1963, for example, he played the role of a seriously ill old man before Stepan Chervonenko, the Soviet ambassador. “He first rehearsed his act several times in front of me and other members of his staff, covering himself with a terry-cloth blanket, feigning lethargy and pain,” his physician recalled. “ ‘Do I look like I'm sick?' he wanted to know. Then he called the Soviet envoy to his bedside and staged an excellent dramatic performance.”3 The Soviet representatives were truly stunned:
We were struck by an unexpected contrast: in the middle of the poorly lighted room stood a tall bed on which Mao Zedong was half-lying. Around it sat Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and the interpreter in respectful poses…… The Chairman said that he could no longer decipher small characters and that large character texts were specially printed for him; he asserted that he no longer presided over sessions of the Politburo and did not read all the important papers. “Now they are the ones conducting the affairs of the party,” Mao Zedong said, pointing to the leaders of the CCP who were sitting in his bedroom.4
In December 1970, Mao really felt unwell. It took a considerable effort for him to appear healthy to Snow. On the eve of their meeting he had barely begun to recover from a serious bout of pneumonia that had confined him to bed for almost two months. That is why he looked thinner.
Eventually he regained his full strength. Parting with Snow, Mao left him with the words that he was “a monk holding an umbrella, without hair, without sky.”5 This meant that he was subject neither to the laws of man nor those of heaven. In other words, he lived as he liked, and he would live as long as he desired. (The words for “hair” and “law” are pronounced similarly in Chinese [fa], although the tones differ.)
Snow understood none of this, because the young interpreter, Nancy Tang (Tang Wensheng), born in America and unfamiliar with classical philosophy, translated the expression as if Mao were “only a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella.”6 No one knows how she came up with this phrase, but Snow trusted her implicitly and conveyed Mao's message to the whole world. People everywhere tried to guess just what he had in mind. Why was he so alone?
Mao boasted in vain about living as long as he liked. At his age pneumonia was very dangerous. Previously he had suffered only from bronchitis, which he could not fully overcome because he continued to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. His favorite brands were no longer Chesterfields or 555s, but domestic cigarettes like Zhonghua (China), Xiongmao (Panda), and Luojiashan (Mount Luojia). Possibly he chose these for patriotic reasons. Shortly before Snow's arrival, Mao switched to Northern Star, a higher-quality cigarette manufactured in Canton from foreign tobacco.7
Mao's health was also compromised by his abnormal habits. He went to bed well past midnight, often around 5 A.M., and slept only until 11 A.M. He ate just twice a day, around 2 or 3 P.M. and again between 8 and 9 P.M. His favorite dish was fatty roast pork cut into small pieces and prepared with hot Hunan pepper sauce. However, he drank in moderation, on rare occasions allowing himself some Chinese grape wine. Only on major holidays did he drink a little maotai, a pungent rice liquor.
The unrelenting political struggle also had a devastating impact on his health. After the Red Guards were crushed, political struggle shifted from the streets back to the party. The sharply increasing role of the leading generals in the army, who were directly responsible for restoring order, provoked dissatisfaction on the part of those in Jiang Qing's faction who were the main leaders of the Cultural Revolution. Relations among the various factions of the once-united left became increasingly strained. Jiang Qing and her associates began to express indignation at the actions of the PLA. Lin Biao and his generals, as well as his wife, Ye Qun, who had an enormous influence on her husband and his entourage, reacted irritably. They believed that the era of Sturm und Drang was over and that production and military modernization were the top priorities. Zhou Enlai supported them.
The first signs of conflict had already appeared in late 1967. This is how Soviet intelligence reported the situation to the Central Committee of the CPSU:
Information from Comrade TSVIGUNn84 Entry No. 4761 from December 7, 1967…… Inside the new ruling group [in the Chinese Communist Party our agents] have witnessed a growing strain in relations between ZHOU ENLAI and LIN BIAO on one hand, and the leaders of the CC Cultural Revolution Group, especially KANG SHENG and JIANG QING on the other. The criticism and sidelining of many figures who are representatives of the “new forces,” supported by KANG SHENG and JIANG QING, indicates that the position of these latter figures has become somewhat weakened at present. The termination of the purge in the army, the reining in of the Red Guards and the Rebels with respect to seizing power by force, the refusal to arm them, and the greater attention paid to economic questions, all these actions undoubtedly have increased the authority of ZHOU ENLAI and LIN BIAO.8
This information was accurate. Jiang Qing was encouraging anti–Lin Biao sentiment within the party leadership in an increasingly open manner. Initially she was unable to lure Mao into her intrigues. He continued to trust his close comrade in arms (such was Lin's official title). At the Ninth Party Congress a statement that Lin Biao was Mao Zedong's successor was even included in the party's statutes.9
Mao refused to hear anything bad about Lin, whom he had known since April 1928, when Zhu De's forces, in which Lin Biao served, joined with Mao's insurgents in the Jinggang Mountains. They had been introduced by Chen Yi, the chief political commissar in Zhu De's army who had described Lin as a brilliant officer that knew how to rout the enemy. Mao was ecstatic. “You're so young and you fight so boldly. That's great!” he exclaimed.10
Lin then was just going on twenty-one. He had been born on December 5, 1907, in Huanggang county, Hubei, into a family of weavers. He had a middle school education and in 1924, under the influence of two communist cousins joined the Socialist Youth League. In the winter of 1925 he was admitted to the Whampoa Academy in revolutionary Canton and found his career. He joined the Communist Party in late 1925 and was sent to the communist regiment of Ye Ting. Lin Biao participated in the Nanchang Uprising of August 1, 1927, along with Ye Ting and Zhu De. After its defeat he went to the Jinggang Mountains.11
He quickly fell under the influence of Mao, whom he began to treat with filial deference. The older man valued his junior acolyte. For Lin Biao, who was weak in Marxist theory, Mao was an encyclopedia of knowledge, a genius of science and politics as well as a military leader. Modest and shy, Lin was not a natural leader although he was a talented military commander. Among the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party he was called “the Maiden.”12 Thin and diminutive with thick, almost astonishingly raised eyebrows, he reminded one of a beauty from some Beijing opera in which men play the female roles. The name Lin Biao, which means “Forest Snow Leopard,” did not fit well with his looks and behavior.
His obedience, devotion, and lack of ambition, combined with his brilliant military abilities,n85 impressed Mao Zedong, who easily bent Lin to his own strong will. Mao began to nominate Lin to leading positions, because he did not discern a rival in this taciturn and unassertive military commander who was always ready to execute his orders. By 1949 Lin was already a member of the Central Committee and commander of the Fourth Field Army. That year he was chosen as a member of the Central People's Government Council as well as deputy chairman of the People's Revolutionary Military Council of the PRC. In 1954 he was made deputy premier of the State Council. A year later, Mao brought Lin into the Politburo and awarded him the rank of marshal. In May 1958, he became a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and one of Mao's deputy chairmen. Following the dismissal of Peng Dehuai in 1959, Mao quickly appointed Lin Biao as his new minister of defense.
The one thing that occasionally annoyed even Mao was the extraordinary adulation Lin accorded him. “I never believed that several of my little books could possess such great magical power,” Mao wrote to Jiang Qing in July 1966. “Now, after his [Lin Biao's] laudatory words, the entire country has begun to extol them; this is truly a case of ‘Old Woman Wang sells her pumpkins, and says how good they are.' …… He [Lin Biao] spoke even more forcefully in the press. He worshiped me as if I were like the holiest of the saints. So, I just have to play along. But …… the higher the praise, the more painful the fall.”13 Lin Biao's toadying, however, was not a significant transgression. Although Mao might grumble over this, it also pleased him. Moreover, there were any number of people prepared to idolize the Chairman, so many that by the late 1960s the aging Leader himself began to feel he was a god. The number of copies of the Quotations was exceeded only by the number of Bibles, and People's Daily and other newspapers were constantly writing about inconceivable miracles wrought by Mao Zedong Thought. Correspondents of the Xinhua News Agency reported the resurrection of the dead after physicians uttered quotations from the Great Helmsman over their bodies, the blind recovering their sight and the dumb their ability to speak as well as other absurdities.14 Lin Biao was not responsible for such nonsense. Jiang Qing and Chen Boda controlled the mass media.
Much more inconvenient for Mao was that his future successor was always ill. The nature of his illness remains a mystery. We know only that it was psychological rather than physical in nature. Possibly it was the consequence of the four wounds he had suffered during the civil war and the Sino-Japanese War. As early as his first trip to Moscow in 1939–41, Lin Biao complained about severe headaches, vomiting, heart palpitations, insomnia, and nervous disorders.15 He was treated at Monino and Kislovodsk, but to no avail. In his own words, every time he did a “little mental labor” he developed severe headaches and insomnia.16 From July to October 1951, he and his wife, Ye Qun, and their daughter Liheng—her pet name was Doudou, a diminutive from the word for “bean”n86 —sojourned in the Soviet Union, where he again underwent treatment that was ineffective. He stopped trusting in doctors and developed a serious persecution complex. He believed that his doctors were plotting to kill him by poisoning the baths they prescribed for him. He stopped seeing them and thereafter his wife became his physician.17 She was a woman of amazingly strong character, so it is not surprising that the weak-willed Lin was completely under her power. She did not love her husband, who was constantly languishing in depression, especially since Lin, who cycled through his illnesses, had lost any interest in sex. The marriage was her springboard to higher power, which is why she tried her utmost to indulge her sick spouse.
Meanwhile, Lin Biao's psychological attacks worsened with each passing year. Although he formally held various leading positions, for months at a time Lin was absent from work.18 Mao's personal physician, who was asked to visit Lin in his residence, described one of these attacks: “When we were escorted into his room, Lin Biao was in bed, curled in the arms of his wife, Ye Qun, his head nestled against her bosom. Lin Biao was crying, and Ye Qun was patting him and comforting him as though he were a baby.” Lin's wife told the doctor that in the 1940s her husband had become addicted to opium and had then switched to morphine. He had been cured of this habit in the Soviet Union, but
his behavior continued to be strange. Lin Biao was …… so afraid of wind and light that he rarely went outside, often missing meetings. His fear of water was so extreme that even the sound of it would give him instant diarrhea. He would not drink liquids at all. Ye Qun made sure he received liquid by dipping steamed buns in water and feeding them to her husband. That and the water in his food were the only liquids he got.
Lin Biao never used a toilet. When moving his bowels, he would use a quilt, as if it were a tent, to cover himself, and would squat over a bedpan that his wife would place on his bed.
I was astonished. Lin Biao was obviously mentally unsound.19
Another Chinese physician who examined the minister of defense gave a similar diagnosis. He “could find nothing functionally wrong” with him, but he recognized “a plenitude of symptoms of psychological disorientation and plain evidence of drug usage.”20
According to the reminiscences of Lin Biao's daughter Doudou and his son-in-law, Zhang Qinglin, the sick marshal invariably took some kind of “medicine” before he dared to venture out of his house, which was surrounded by a high stone wall, to attend public events during the Cultural Revolution. This “medicine,” which was kept in ampules labeled as vitamin C, could keep him going for several hours, but afterward the wretched man's illness would get worse for weeks at a time.21
This was precisely the kind of “close comrade in arms” that Mao, who feared strong individuals, needed. Or might the Chairman simply have pitied the unfortunate Lin, and cut him the slack to be sick? In any case, he did not wish to listen to Jiang Qing and her confederates slander the minister of defense.
But flowing water sculpts even the hardest rock. Ultimately the perfidious Jiang succeeded in toppling the sick marshal. In the deadly struggle for power between the two factions the aging Helmsman supported his wife. In early May 1970, while resting in Hangzhou, Mao thought of changing the constitution of the PRC by deleting the Second Article, which designated the chairman of the People's Republic of China as the formal head of state. Following the purge of Liu Shaoqi this post had remained vacant; now Mao decided it was superfluous. He informed the members of the Politburo, adding, however, that if they wanted to preserve this position they should know that he (Mao) did not wish to be the chairman of the PRC. “If [the Politburo] decides to maintain such a position, it is Lin Biao who should hold the position,” he summed up.22 Many years later this is how General Wu Faxian, commander of the PLA Air Force and a member of the Politburo, recalled Mao's instructions.23
After this communication, the members of the Politburo established a six-member commission that soon began drafting a new constitution. Meanwhile, Lin Biao, who had not attended the Politburo meeting, informed both Mao and the others that he did not wish to become the chairman of the PRC. However, he thought it “would be wrong for such a large country” like China “not to have a symbolic head to represent it.” Therefore, he insisted that Mao himself should accept this position. Possibly, Lin did not understand what the Great Helmsman actually wanted, and decided to flatter him just in case. Of course, according to the rules of proper Chinese behavior, he should decline even if he really wanted the position. But he actually was horrified at the thought of the numerous duties, of the need to attend diplomatic events and to travel abroad frequently. For someone in his condition this would be an inordinate burden.
Mao, it seems, understood Lin Biao's fears or toadying. At any rate, he informed Lin that the post of chairman of the PRC could be maintained in the constitution. But he added, “I will not hold the position, and neither will you. Let Old Dong [Biwu]n87 be the state chairman and, at the same time, put several younger people in the position of vice-chairmen.”24 There, it seems, the matter might have ended.
Just then, however, heated disputes flared up among the members of the commission preparing a draft constitution over how to fathom the intentions of the Great Helmsman. Kang Sheng and Zhang Chunqiao argued that Mao really did not want the post of chairman of the PRC, while Wu Faxian and another general from Lin Biao's faction thought the opposite. Moreover, there was disagreement over whether to include in the text of the constitution the sentence “Mao Zedong Thought is the guiding force of our country.” The generals favored this, but their opponents were against it. The latter were probably just egging on Lin Biao's supporters, trying to provoke a scandal. Zhang Chunqiao even said, “There are some people who are constantly mouthing off about Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought. But this doesn't mean that they are actually Marxists.” He was obviously hinting at Lin Biao and alluding to Mao's grumbling about flattery. Chen Boda, who was also participating in the work of the commission, defended the generals. The sixth member of the group kept mum.
The apostasy of Chen Boda, who had been one of the closest confederates of Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, was deeply rooted. Chen had long conceived a dislike for Mao's wife. He had even confided to several friends that he wanted to do away with himself because he could no longer tolerate this hysterical and power-hungry woman. By switching to the side of Lin Biao and Ye Qun he chose betrayal rather than suicide. In late 1968 he had begun to openly support Jiang Qing's rivals, which step, of course, she could not forgive.25
In these circumstances the Second Plenum of the Central Committee convened in Lushan in August–September 1970. The issue of a new constitution was on the agenda. Lin Biao took advantage of this to strike a blow against Zhang Chunqiao and the entire Jiang Qing faction. Zhou supported him, and then Mao, indicating his agreement, merely advised Lin not to criticize Zhang by name. “It must be Jiang Qing who backed Zhang Chunqiao,” he noted.26
Lin did everything that he had agreed to with Mao. He did not name Zhang but he asserted that the Great Helmsman was a genius, which justified inserting a passage about Mao's Thought in the constitution. Then the participants in the plenum divided into small groups to discuss Lin's speech. Then something happened that Lin would soon have occasion to regret. Many of those speaking, the generals in the first instance, enthusiastically supported their commander, especially when they grasped that his speech was aimed against Zhang, Jiang Qing, and their ilk. The Long March veterans also supported Lin.
Jiang Qing's tragedy was that few people in the party liked her. The enmity of many party leaders and their wives pursued Jiang throughout her marriage, which she repaid with malice, envy, and hatred. It was a vicious circle. The more they despised her, the more she hated them all; the more keenly she persecuted her enemies, the more fiercely they despised her. When she headed the Cultural Revolution Group she conceived a particular hatred for the party veterans. Now those who had managed to survive the Red Guard terror were savoring revenge. They willingly began singing the praises of Lin to spite Jiang. Chen Boda plunged into this effort.
The discussions continued for two days. Jiang, Zhang, and the other leftists were terribly frightened. So they did the only thing they could do: they turned to Mao for help. One can only imagine what dark hues they used to paint Lin Biao, Ye Qun, and the generals. Judging by what was to come, they must have presented their opponents as “plotters” seeking to undo the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, because Lin thought it necessary to preserve the post of chairman of the PRC, they accused him of an attempt to seize power in the state. They were not at all dissuaded by the fact that the naive marshal had suggested that Mao be given this position. They interpreted everything their enemy had said as a vile attempt of this “inveterate intriguer” to deceive the Leader. The Great Helmsman could not abide this.
He reacted instantaneously by convening a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, at which he firmly took Zhang's side. Then he aborted the plenum and prepared to deliver a counterblow against Jiang Qing's enemies. He followed through six days later, concentrating all his critical fire on Chen Boda, who had betrayed Jiang and, by association, the Cultural Revolution. Mao wanted to force Chen to make a self-criticism.
Lin had not expected such a gambit from the Great Helmsman. This was the first occasion during their “friendship” that Mao had so shamelessly betrayed him. Departing Lushan, Lin gloomily told his colleagues, “We are generals, and we only know how to fight wars,” meaning neither he nor his subordinates had ever learned how to engage in political intrigues.27
Lin, who had really been offended by Mao, ordered his generals not to engage in self-criticism. He realized he had lost a power struggle with Jiang and Zhang but he did not want to take part in this dirty brawl anymore. Mao, however, could not calm down. As had happened repeatedly before, he was gripped by the passion of the hunt. Sensing this, the bloodthirsty Jiang Qing fed Mao's rage by hammering home to him the idea of a military plot. Feeling the ground slipping from under his feet, Lin reluctantly gave permission to his generals to make self-criticisms in front of the Leader. He did not admit any fault of his own. He simply hid his head in the sand.
Ye Qun understood the urgency of finding a way out of this dangerous situation. The most active and strong-willed of those in Lin Biao's entourage, she was the first to contemplate countermeasures. The fate of Liu Shaoqi and his wife haunted her. Knowing what could happen to her, Lin, and their family if the Leader continued to listen to Jiang Qing, she could not sit idly by. Her son, Liguo, shared her anxiety. He was an air force officer, and although he was very young (in 1970 he was just twenty-four years old), he enjoyed great influence in the PLA Air Force. Since October 1969 Liguo had served as deputy director of the Operations Department of the air force and concurrently as a leading staff member in the office of the air force chief of staff Wu Faxian. Not surprisingly, he was extremely vain and cocky. From childhood he had been treated like a prince by his mother, who loved him so much that she had no love left for her firstborn child, Doudou. The daughter grew up a pariah, did the heavy housework, and endured constant humiliation from her mother. She accumulated these insults in her heart.
In October 1970, Lin Liguo and several of his closest comrades who revered him and addressed him as “commander” in English formed a secret group they called the Joint Fleet.28 This organization aimed to seize power in the country. Ye Qun became the éminence grise. (The members of the group called her the viscountess.)29
The plotters began to discuss several variants of a rescue plan. Lin Liguo, extremely decisive, was even more radical than his mother. With his approval, in March 1971, one of the air force officers drafted several versions of a plan to assassinate Mao Zedong. Liguo was ecstatic when he saw it. He promptly named the document “Theses of Project 571.” (In Chinese this number is pronounced wu qiyi. The words for “armed rebellion” are pronounced the same though with somewhat different tones.) Mao appeared in the draft plan under the code name B-52 after the famous American bomber. These were na ve children playing at war.
Of course, they were doomed. Not a single version of their plan was realistic. For example, one of the means for getting rid of Mao was to send aloft an entire air corps to bomb the Great Helmsman's special train. Another entailed blowing up an oil storage tank in Shanghai at the moment the Chairman's train approached. A third was to arrange an accident on a bridge between Shanghai and Nanjing.30 The conspirators were convinced a surprise attack was essential.31
The plotters were racing against time, lacking the leisure to work out a detailed plan for a putsch. They expected to be arrested at any moment. “[W]e must use a violent, revolutionary coup,” wrote the author of the plan. B-52 “is wary of us. It is better to burn our bridges behind us rather than to sit and wait to be captured…… This is a life-or-death struggle—either we devour them, or they devour us.”32
Meanwhile, Mao, who suspected nothing, increased the pressure on Lin Biao. In his own words, he used three methods: “throwing stones,” “mixing sand into soil,” and “undermining the wall.”33 In other words, he criticized, brought his own people into the Military Commission, and restructured organizations loyal to Lin. In late 1970 and early 1971 he reorganized the Northeast Bureau of the Central Committee and the command of the Beijing Military Region, purging from them well-known supporters of Lin and Chen Boda. At the same time a hysterical campaign spread across the country to criticize Chen, who was accused of “treason and espionage.” (No one in the country except for Mao and the members of the Cultural Revolution Group understood what these crimes were actually about.) Meanwhile, Mao let Lin know that he had better come crawling to him on his knees. But his mentally ill comrade in arms was depressed and aggrieved. He no longer had the strength to pull himself together. Even when, at Mao's request, Zhou Enlai visited him and informed him of the Leader's mood, Lin could only mutter through clenched teeth a single sentence: “One often harvests what he did not sow.”34 He did not move from his place.
Mao assumed that the marshal, who was avoiding him, would make a self-criticism at the forthcoming Central Committee Work Conference on education, scheduled for April–June. But Lin, pleading illness, ignored this event. By now the Chairman had run out of patience. In July 1971, barely containing his rage, he told Zhou Enlai, “Their mistakes are different from your past mistakes because they were conspirators.”35
Less than a month later, on August 14, Mao secretly departed the capital to feel out the mood in the provinces. From August 15 to September 11, he visited Wuhan, Changsha, Nanchang, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, meeting with regional party officials and military commanders. Prior to his departure he observed to his doctor, “I don't think the regional commanders will side with Lin Biao. The People's Liberation Army won't rebel against me, will it Anyway, if they don't want my leadership, I'll go to Jinggangshan and start another guerrilla war.”36
Now things began to take an abrupt turn. It is not entirely clear whether Mao by this time knew about the real plot by Lin Liguo and Ye Qun. Some eyewitnesses answer in the affirmative; others express doubt. Most likely he was unaware, and by “conspirators” he supposed that Lin Biao and his supporters were simply engaging in intraparty intrigues. Otherwise, it is unlikely he would have allowed the conspirators to remain at liberty while he left Beijing. Nevertheless, at every meeting with local cadres he openly attacked the “new Lushan conspirators,” even naming them. His words sounded like a death sentence.
At the 1970 Lushan Conference they [Lin Biao and the others] made a surprise attack and carried out underground activity. Why didn't they dare to act openly? Clearly they had something to hide. So they first dissembled and then made a surprise attack. They concealed things from three of the five members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. They also concealed things from the great majority of comrades on the Politburo…… They said not a word and then launched a surprise attack.
Mao was furious. Red-hot with rage, he continued: “A certain person was anxious to become state chairman, to split the Party and to seize power. The question of ‘genius' is a theoretical question. Their theory was idealist apriorism.” At this point, the majority of his auditors sighed deeply and no longer doubted the “counterrevolutionary” essence of the heretofore respected “close comrade-in-arms of the Great Leader.” One wonders if any of them understood the meaning of the awful-sounding word “apriorism.” Yet Mao was not done. “Comrade Lin Biao did not discuss that speech of his with me,” Mao shamelessly prevaricated. He also demonstrated his contempt for Lin as a worthless man and father. “I never approved of someone's wife [Mao used the colloquial expression lao po (old woman)] becoming the office manager in one's own work unit,” he flung at Lin. Regarding Lin Biao's son Liguo, Mao said: “It does a person under thirty no good at all if you call him a ‘super-genius.' ”
After such words, the only options remaining to Lin's family and his generals was to beg for forgiveness, shoot themselves, or rise in rebellion. Mao provided them an apparent opportunity to turn over a new leaf by repeating his familiar formula, “We should still operate a policy of educating them, that is, ‘learning from past mistakes to prevent future ones and curing the disease to save the patient.' We still want to protect Lin.” Yet he characterized his disagreements with his new “enemies” as a struggle between two lines and two headquarters, placing the “new Lushan conspirators” on the same footing not only with Peng Dehuai, but also with Liu Shaoqi.37
Ye Qun and Lin Liguo were promptly informed of Mao's speeches. They panicked and could not decide what to do. They did have sufficient wit to realize that launching Project 571 was impossible. The only thing left was to flee for their lives. Tension built as Mao traveled from one city to another. Finally, on September 12, when he returned to Beijing, they had arrived at the critical point. Ye and Lin Liguo suggested to Lin Biao that they flee. They did not want to take Doudou with them. Ye Qun's relations with her daughter remained venomous. Lin Liguo was also on very bad terms with his sister. She repaid him in kind, and was sometimes so deeply depressed that once, during her early adolescence, she had even attempted suicide. She persisted in thinking that Ye Qun was not her biological mother, a suspicion that grew into certainty when the poor girl began receiving anonymous letters confirming her fears.
In September 1971 the entire family was vacationing in the resort of Beidaihe. At the nearby airport of Shanhaiguan a Trident No. 256 was at the disposal of the minister of defense. It was on this plane that Lin Biao, Ye Qun, and Lin Liguo finally decided to flee the country. All their conversations were held behind closed doors, but on the evening of September 12, Liguo divulged their intentions to his sister. Doudou did not hesitate to denounce her parents and brother. At 10 P.M. she barged into the guardhouse to inform the deputy commander of the PLA unit 8341, which served the high-ranking party leaders, about everything she knew. She was absolutely convinced that her mother and brother had decided to “kidnap” her father.
The deputy commander quickly contacted his superior in Beijing, who informed Zhou Enlai. The premier rushed to Zhongnanhai to inform the Leader. Mao grimaced in fury. Zhou advised the Chairman to leave his residence at once and move to the Great Hall of the People, where he would be more secure.38
Meanwhile, Lin Biao and his wife and son grabbed their porcelain ware, place mats, cameras, and tape recorder and rushed to the airport in an armored car. Once on board, they ordered the pilot to take off, without checking on how much fuel was in the tank. There was barely a ton. In their haste, they did not take a copilot, navigator, or radio operator. On takeoff their plane grazed a fuel tanker, resulting in the undercarriage tearing away, an inauspicious beginning to a doomed flight.
An eyewitness informs us of what was going on at this time in Room No. 118 of the Great Hall of the People, where Mao, his mistress Zhang Yufeng, and others of his entourage were gathered:
Zhou Enlai suggested to Mao that they order a missile attack against the plane. Mao refused. “Rain will fall from the skies. Widows will remarry. What can we do? Lin Biao wants to flee. Let him. Don't shoot,” he said. We waited…… Chinese radar was tracking the plane's route…… It was heading northwest, in the direction of the Soviet Union…… At about 2:00 A.M. word came that Lin Biao's plane had left China and entered Outer Mongolian airspace. The plane had disappeared from Chinese radar. Zhou Enlai reported this to Mao. “So we've got one more traitor,” Mao said, “just like Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming.” The next big news came that afternoon, when Zhou Enlai received a message from Xu Wenyi, the Chinese ambassador to Outer Mongolia. A Chinese aircraft with nine persons on board—one woman and eight men—had crashed in the Undur Khan area of Outer Mongolia. Everyone on board had been killed…… “That's what you get for running away,” Mao said.39
The Mongolian and Soviet investigators working at the crash site concluded that the airplane had exploded while attempting a crash landing. On touching down it became unbalanced, dragged its right wing along the ground, and caught fire. Its remains were scattered across an area of four square miles. Ambassador to Mongolia Xu Wenyi, who arrived in Undur Khan on September 15, described the scene of the accident:
Most of the corpses were laid on their backs, their arms and legs apart, the heads were so burned that the corpses could not be identified. We laid out all nine corpses from north to south, numbered them, and photographed them from various positions in order to try and identify them later on. According to a subsequent inquest, Lin Biao was identified as corpse No. 5. A small bald patch was preserved, the skin on the head was abraded, the bones stuck out, the eyebrows were scorched, and the eyes transformed into dark orifices. Corpse No. 8 was Lin Biao's wife Ye Qun…… She had been burned relatively little, her hair was almost totally preserved, her left side was injured. Corpse Number 2 was Lin Biao's son, Lin Liguo: tall, the face was charred and had a look of excruciating torture as if it had gone through flames. Among the items belonging to the deceased was uncovered pass No. 002 for the Air Force Academy in the name of Lin Liguo.
Per agreement with the Mongolians, Soviet representatives severed the heads of Lin Biao and his wife and brought them to Moscow for forensic examination.40 The remains of the deceased were buried at the site of the accident.
On that same night of September 13, three of Lin Liguo's assistants tried to flee the PRC in a helicopter, but they were forced to land not far from Beijing. Two of them committed suicide after first shooting the pilot. The only surviving member of the plotters soon began to give evidence.41
The flight and death of Lin Biao shook the members of the Chinese leadership. No matter how hard Mao tried to stay calm, he also was deeply affected. His first reaction was to keep the betrayal of his “close comrade-in-arms” a secret. After instructing the faithful Zhou to investigate what had happened, he shut himself up in Zhongnanhai. He became apathetic. He stopped doing anything, lapsed into silence, and did not emerge from his bedroom for days on end. Two months later, when he finally reappeared in public, everyone noted how he had suddenly grown infirm. He shuffled around the house, constantly coughing and spitting on the floor. He complained about headaches and heaviness in his legs. His blood pressure was elevated—180 over 100—and he suffered from arrhythmia.
Meanwhile, Zhou's people uncovered details of the plot. During their search of the home of one of the conspirators they found a notebook outlining the “Theses of Project 571.” Not until twenty days after the accident were the top PLA commanders and high-ranking party officials informed of the betrayal by “the close comrade-in-arms of the Leader” at closed meetings.42 Afterward came the turn of ordinary party members and only then finally the broad masses. A new hysterical campaign to criticize Lin Biao unfolded throughout the country. The Chairman's former “close comrade-in-arms” now was criticized as an “ultra-leftist.”43
Mao continued to feel awful. He was often feverish, his pulse rate increased to 140 per minute. Unexpectedly he became sentimental. He was drawn to the friends of his youthful struggles, many of whom had been in disgrace during the Cultural Revolution because of his own will. He was extremely distressed when he learned of the death on January 6, 1972, of Marshal Chen Yi, his comrade from the Jinggang Mountains and his minister of foreign affairs. On January 10, the day of Chen Yi's funeral, despite his own poor health and the bad weather, Mao went to express his condolences to Chen Yi's widow. Afterward he ordered Zhou to rehabilitate those party veterans, victims of the Cultural Revolution, who could still be saved.
His condition deteriorated by the day. Mao's doctors diagnosed congestive heart failure. His brain was getting insufficient oxygen, he gasped for breath, periodically opening his mouth, greedily inhaling air, and then noisily exhaling. “The Chairman's life was in danger,” writes his former physician. “His arms and legs were sprawled motionless on the sofa, as though paralyzed.”
On the night of January 21, he felt worse than ever. In the presence of several persons from his entourage, he turned to Zhou Enlai. “ ‘No. Cannot make it. I cannot make it. You take care of everything after my death. Let's say this is my will.'?” Jiang Qing turned pale. “Her eyes opened wide, her hands curled into fists.” But Mao was adamant. “ ‘It's done now,' Mao finally said. ‘You can all go.' ”44 Although he did not die then, he was unable to make a full recovery from his illness. During his last five years his life gradually ebbed away.
The system of barracks communism was dying with him. Its collapse was still some time off, but the political crisis of the early 1970s demonstrated with exceptional clarity the bankruptcy of the Maoist system of power. An ever larger circle of people in China began to lose faith in its rationality. The era of Mao Zedong was drawing to a close.
1 See Snow, The Long Revolution, 4, 89, 168, 170, 194, 219, 220; “Statement of Edgar Snow,” RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 6, sheet 379; Mao, Mao Zedong wenji (Works of Mao Zedong), vol. 8, 400.
2 See Snow, The Long Revolution, 89.
3 Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 105.
4 Rakhmanin, Vzaimnootnosheniia mezhdu I. V. Stalinym i Mao Tszedunom glazami ochevidtsa (Relations between J. V. Stalin and Mao Zedong through the Eyes of an Eyewitness), 80, 81.
5 Quoted from Thomas, A Season of High Adventure, 326; Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 120.
6 Snow, The Long Revolution, 175.
7 Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 6, sheet 440.
8 Lichnoe delo Lin Biao (Personal File of Lin Biao), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 53, vol. 1, sheets 197–200, 204–6.
9 See IX Vsekitaiskii s”ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia (dokumenty) (Ninth Congress of the Communist Party of China [Documents]) (Beijing: Izdatel'sto literatury na inostrannykh iazykakh, 1969), 102–3.
10 Quoted from Wang, Linshi san xiongdi (The Three Lin Brothers), 314.
11 Lin Biao, “Avtobiografiia” (Autobiography), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 53, vol. 1, 197–200, sheets 204–6.
12 See Lichnoe delo Lin Biao (Personal File of Lin Biao), ibid., 201.
13 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 6, 212, 213.
14 See George Urban, ed., The Miracles of Chairman Mao: A Compendium of Devotional Literature 1966–1970 (Los Angeles: Nash, 1971); Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 5, sheets 267–77.
15 See Lichnoe delo Lin Biao (Personal File of Lin Biao), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 53, vol. 1, sheets 167, 177.
16 Ibid., sheet 178.
17 Alexander V. Pantsov's interview with Lin Liheng (Doudou) in Beijing, October 31, 2004.
18 Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 7, sheet 211.
19 Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 453, 454.
20 Quoted from Jin, The Culture of Power, 147.
21 Ibid., 129.
22 Quoted from ibid., 121.
23 The unpublished memoirs of Wu Faxian are widely cited in his daughter's book The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution, published by Stanford University Press in 1999.
24 Quoted from Jin, The Culture of Power, 122.
25 Ibid., 101, 117.
26 Ibid., 123.
27 Ibid., 131.
28 See Chao, “Wenhua da geming” cidian (Dictionary of the “Great Cultural Revolution”), 404; Yen and Kao, The Ten-Year History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 312–22.
29 See Michael Y. M. Kau, ed., The Lin Piao Affair: Power Politics and Military Coup (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1975), 81.
30 See A Great Trial in Chinese History: The Trial of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Cliques, Nov. 1980–January 1981 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981), 24–25; Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 540.
31 See “Outline of ‘Project 571,' ” in Kau, The Lin Piao Affair, 88.
32 Ibid., 83, 85.
33 Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, 295.
34 Quoted from Jin, The Culture of Power, 134.
35 Ibid., 135.
36 Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 533.
37 Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, 290–99. See also Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 7, sheet 286–94.
38 Jin, The Culture of Power, 173–80, 186; Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 534–37.
39 Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 537, 538.
40 See V. Skosyrev, “Golovu Lin Biao general KGB privez v Moskvu” (A KGB General Brought Lin Biao's Head to Moscow), Izvestiia (News), February 17, 1994.
41 See A Great Trial in Chinese History, 89–100, 216; Chao, “Wenhua da geming” cidian (Dictionary of the “Great Cultural Revolution”), 405; Jin, The Culture of Power, 237; Yen and Kao, The Ten-Year History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 343–45.
42 Alexander V. Pantsov's interview with a Beijing resident, October 31, 2004. According to another source, it took five to ten days to inform the top party officials about the incident. See Deng, Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution, 182.
43 See Barnouin and Yu, Ten Years of Turbulence, 252–53.
44 Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 552.
n84 Semyon Kuz’mich Tsvigun (1917–1982) was first deputy chairman of the KGB from November 1967.
n85 Even Otto Braun, who despised Lin Biao, was compelled to point out in one of his reports to the ECCI that “I personally consider him [Lin Biao] to be the best field commander in the Eighth Route Army.”
n86 Lin Biao was married twice. His first wife, Liu Xingmin (she was also known both as Liu Xinmin and as Zhang Mei), was twelve years younger than he. She was a simple, unlettered girl from northern Shaanxi. In 1939 she went with her husband to the Soviet Union. But after two years, Lin broke with her. He returned to China in August 1941, leaving her pregnant in Moscow. Liu gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Xiaolin. Until September 1948 Liu worked in the International Orphanage in Ivanovo, where, it will be recalled, Mao’s former wife Zizhen was for a time. Then she returned to China. Xiaolin was able to leave for China only in 1950 after Lin Biao himself interceded on her behalf. However, he saw this daughter only rarely. He now had a different family. During the anti-Japanese war he married a native of Fujian named Ye Qun, who was also twelve years his junior. He had two children from this marriage: Lin Liheng (Doudou), the daughter born in 1944, and a son, Lin Liguo, born in 1946.
n87 It will be recalled that in the early 1930s Dong Biwu (1886–1975) was the secretary of the Party Control Commission. From 1959 on he and Song Qingling were vice chairmen of the PRC.