The Rise and Fall of Lin Biao

Podcast Transcript

From the outside, the Chinese Communist Party appears to be a unified entity, devoid of internal dissent.

However, history suggests that the machinations of power at the top of the communist party can often take on Shakespearean turns.

Few figures illuminate the shadows and secrets of the party’s organization as completely as Lin Biao, who had experienced one of the greatest rises and falls in Chinese history.

Learn more about the legacy of Lin Biao and his fall from grace on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Lin Biao was born in 1907 in Hubei province, into a lower-middle-class family at a time when China was wracked by warlords and social upheaval. As a teenager, he was drawn to radical politics and revolutionary nationalism, eventually enrolling in the Whampoa Military Academy in the mid-1920s.

Whampoa was a vital training ground for both Nationalist and Communist officers, and Lin quickly distinguished himself for his tactical brilliance, intelligence, and discipline.

Like many of his generation, the young Lin was influenced by the passionate student protest of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Lin’s enthusiasm encouraged him to register for military training at the Huangpo National Military Academy.

He graduated as a distinguished student, and the academy taught him military strategy and tactics.

His academic brilliance prompted a quick rise through the ranks of the military and a position in the First United Front.

The First United Front was an alliance between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, and the Chinese Communist Party. The United Front was an amorphous movement that emerged to combat crises in China, such as the expanding influence of warlords.

Choosing between the communists and the nationalists was challenging for military academy graduates. Lin’s allegiance was clarified in 1927 after the Nationalists and Chiang Kai-shek opened up a civil war with the communists after the Shanghai Massacre.

The massacre was a joint effort between the Kuomintang and Shanghai’s infamous criminal organization, the Green Gang. They jointly attacked communists, resulting in an astonishingly high death toll, with some estimates reaching as high as 10,000.

As bad as the massacre was, the long-term costs were even higher as the event began a civil war that devastated China until 1949.

Following the massacre, Lin Biao became a member of the communist party. His subsequent friendship with Mao Zedong was a critical factor in establishing the Chinese Red Army and influencing the political direction of the Chinese Communist Party.

Afterward, Mao concentrated on combating the Nationalists in Hunan province, where he was eventually defeated forced him to withdraw.

At the same time, Lin’s own engagements with the Nationalists resulted in a retreat after the communists were defeated in the Nanchang uprising. Both retreating communist forces eventually converged in the remote Jinggang Mountains in 1928.

This is known as the Jinggangshan Convergence. The moment is a celebrated part of communist history and was memorialized in the propaganda art of early communist China.

This led to the foundation of the Jiangxi Soviet. The Jiangxi Soviet was the largest and most important Chinese Communist revolutionary base in the early 1930s, where the CCP under Mao Zedong established a de facto state in rural Jiangxi Province.

The Jiangxi Soviet became a prime target for Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists. They surrounded the region with nearly 700,000 troops with the goal of destroying the communist base and its infrastructure.

In 1934, the fourth year of the siege, 86,000 communists broke through the Nationalist lines. They fled west in what became one of the most important events in Chinese history, the Long March.

Mao was sharing power with Zhou Enlai and Zhu De in Jiangxi. The events of the Long March left no doubt who would lead the movement forward. Mao led the march of an astonishing 6,000 miles to the Northern city of Yan’an.

The marchers had to endure constant air bombardment by the Nationalist Chinese air force and persistent ground offensives, while crossing 18 mountain ranges. Estimates indicate that of the 86,000 who began the march, only 8,000 completed the trek.

Lin built his reputation on the Long March. He commanded the 1st Army Corps that led the march. He displayed valor and courage, qualities that captivated Mao Zedong, and by the end of the march, Mao had Lin’s unquestioned loyalty and confidence.

Their friendship shaped the ensuing revolution.

By 1937, China faced a new problem. The Japanese had invaded China, and fighting the Japanese was now a much larger problem for both the Nationalists and the Communists.

The two forces set aside their differences, forged an uneasy truce, and united to combat the Japanese threat.

During the Second United Front, Lin Biao’s stature grew considerably. Commanding communist forces, Lin led direct confrontations with the Japanese and secured several seminal victories, significantly enhancing his fame and importance within the communist movement.

Lin and the army’s leadership were forced to recognize that the Second United Front lacked the resources to launch full-scale operations against the Japanese; he organized the highly effective guerrilla operations against Japanese forces in Northern China.

The defeat of the Japanese saw the resumption of the Civil War, which ultimately ended in a Communist victory, a subject I’ve discussed in an earlier episode. Lin was crucial to this outcome.

His leadership in Northeast China, particularly his decisive victories there, was instrumental in securing the final Communist victory and further solidified his standing among the party elite.

Lin maintained a low profile following the communist victory. Due to health issues and a reluctance to engage in political life, he was initially assigned only minor roles. His decision to remain inconspicuous during the Great Leap Forward later proved to be a brilliant strategy.

His role in the early governmental structure, as Vice Chairman of the Military and later Vice Premier, kept him out of the spotlight and out of the way of the disastrous consequences of the Great Leap Forward.

His quiet advocacy of Mao’s initiatives brought him closer to Mao, and he was rewarded with rapid promotions.

When Mao’s minister of National Defense, Peng Dehuai, was purged for contradictory opinions on the effects of the Great Leap Forward, Mao turned to Lin and appointed him the Minister of National Defense in 1959.

Mao had ambitious plans to foster greater unity between his government and the military. Mao had always harbored concerns about the relationship between political and military power structures.

Lin could help him create a closer relationship between the two.

Lin’s role grew in importance during the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, Lin’s star never shone as brightly, nor would his status ever be as dark.

The Cultural Revolution held that, to preserve the original ideas of the communist revolution, any perceived dissent had to be purged from the system. Mao also felt he was losing power and influence after the discord caused by the Great Leap Forward.

Creating a unified conscience was essential to the success of the Cultural Revolution, so Mao turned to one of his closest allies, Lin Biao.

During the early Cultural Revolution, Lin was the architect of the propaganda responsible for the widespread dissemination of the cult of personality surrounding Mao, which defined the movement.

A review of the propaganda paintings of the time often showed Mao flanked by a smiling Lin Biao

In an effort to elevate Mao, Lin oversaw the publication and distribution of a collection of his sayings, which resulted in the creation of the Little Red Book.

The goal, as summarized in Lin’s foreword to the first edition of the books, is to provide Maoist writings and messages that reinforce the values of communism. He wrote, “Study Chairman Mao’s writings, follow his teachings, act according to his instructions, and be his good soldiers.”

Lin’s efforts were rewarded with shocking clarity in Mao’s 1969 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, which said, “Comrade Lin Biao has consistently held high the great red banner of Mao Zedong thought and has most loyally and resolutely carried out and defended Comrade Mao Zedong’s proletarian revolutionary line. Comrade Lin Biao is Comrade Mao Zedong’s close comrade-in-arms and successor.”

Outlining succession in a constitutional document in this manner is incredibly rare. Lin had gone as far as was possible so long as Mao Zedong was alive.

It turns out that being the heir apparent to a megalomaniac dictator was not the best position to be in. His story was about to take a tragic turn.

In 1971, with order restored following the twin calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s confidence in his own rule and his paranoia of the military led him to reduce the influence and power of the People’s Liberation Army.

Military leaders around Lin began to fall victim to Mao’s purges.

Since granting Lin the title of leader-in-waiting, Mao had become very suspicious of Lin’s every move. Mao feared that Lin was maneuvering to oust him.

By the summer of 1971, Mao began publicly calling Lin out for errors in judgment, which was the Chinese Communist equivalent of a death sentence.

The details of what happened next are obscured by the secrecy surrounding high-level leadership in China. What is known is that Lin’s son, Lin Liguou, a senior officer in the Chinese air force, created a plan called Project 571.

In Chinese, the number 5-7-1 sounds similar to the phrase for ‘armed uprising.’

The project was an outline for the assassination of Mao Zedong.

The plan was likely enacted in an effort by Lin’s son to save his father’s life. History suggests that, based on earlier Maoist purges, Lin was in grave danger.

The plan had created several scenarios based on Mao’s travel plans. Mao was known to be incredibly paranoid and often changed his travel plans in an effort to throw off any attempted assassination.

The details are unclear, but we do know that the assassination attempt was unsuccessful.

After the failed assassination, Lin Biao acted quickly to save his family. The family boarded a plane and planned to fly to the Soviet Union.

The hope was that the Soviet Union would grant him protection for his years of loyal service to global communism.

On the night of September 12, 1971, Lin, his wife, his son, and several associates boarded a Hawker Siddeley Trident aircraft in the city of Shanhaiguan, east of Beijing, near the coast. The plane departed hastily, without sufficient fuel or a clear flight plan, and headed north, apparently toward Soviet airspace

In the early hours of September 13, the plane crashed near Öndörkhaan in Mongolia, killing everyone on board. Pilot error coupled with fuel exhaustion is the most common explanation for the crash; however, sabotage and mechanical failure have also been proposed as possibilities.

The political fallout was enormous. Mao ordered an immediate cover-up while the leadership assessed the implications of losing the country’s designated successor under such circumstances.

Once the story was made public, Lin was denounced as a traitor and counterrevolutionary, his name erased from official history, and his former praise of Mao retroactively recast as cynical manipulation.

The incident deeply shocked the Chinese political elite, undermined the moral authority of the Cultural Revolution, and reinforced Mao’s distrust of concentrated military power.

Lin Biao rose from a gifted battlefield commander to Mao Zedong’s chosen successor by showing absolute loyalty and political discipline. He helped create a system that rewarded devotion to a single leader and punished doubt as to Mao’s authority.

When Mao grew suspicious and turned on Lin, Lin had no independent base to protect himself. He fled in panic and died in a failed escape attempt, not in battle. Like a tragic Shakespearean figure, Lin was undone by loyalty mistaken for security and by living too close to supreme power.