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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 21. 5th September 1973

[Introduction]

This week we are continuing our series of reports on life in the People's Republic of China with a report sent from Peking by Wilfred Burchett about the downfall of Lin Piao, a key figure during the Cultural Revolution and once the number two man in the Chinese leadership.

For the past two years the fate of Lin Piao has been the subject of much speculation in the western press. While it has been generally known that Lin died in September 1971 while trying to flee by plane to the Soviet Union after failing in a plot against Chairman Mao, the background to Lin's plot and the details of it were unclear.

Last week the 10th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party expelled Lin and another former member of the five-man Secretariat of the CCP, Chen Po-ta, who also disappeared in September 1971.

In his report to the Congress on behalf of the party's Central Committee Chou Enlai said the "Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique" had attempted to restore capitalism domestically, and to align with the Soviet Union internationally.

Referring to the clique's practice of pretending to be Mao's most loyal supporters while secretly plotting against him Chou En-lai said: "They never appeared without a copy of Mao's Quotations in their hands. They never spoke without shouting 'Long Live!' They smiled to your face, but stabbed you in the back."

Chou En-lai's report substantially confirms Burchett's story written before the Congress, although Chou mentioned that Lin launched his plot against Mao on September 8, 1971. This fact suggests that there was probably an atmosphere of suspicion surrounding Lin by September 12 when, as Burchett relates, several minor functionaries involved in the plot backed out and others tried to prevent Lin's escape.

Photo of Lin Piao, Chairman Mao and Chou Enlai

Lin Piao, with his perpetually wagging little red book, at the height of his power. But even then Chairman Mao and Chou Enlai (rear) were becoming suspicious of China's "evil genius".

A massive dossier on Lin Piao's waverings ambitions, and feudal type plotting, has been under discussion all over China in the past weeks. Some lurid details on the private life of Lin Piao, his wife Yeh Chun and his son Lin Li-kue, proclaimed a "genius" by his father, are included. But the essence of the charges against Lin Piao, the former Minister of Defense, are similar to those against Liu Shao-Chi. Lin is described as a political swindler, "a capitalist-roader" and of "having illicit relations with foreign powers."

The report shatters the image of Lin Paio, created by himself and his closest followers. The image of Lin as the "closest companion in arms" and "unwavering supporter" of Mao is repudiated. One of Mao's most famous articles, "A Single Spark can Start a Prairie Fire", the report recalls was in fact a letter of criticism addressed to Lin Piao in 1930 because of his vacillating and pessimistic attitudes at moments of crisis.

The portrait presented in the report is of someone continually wandering from the "straight and narrow" and being pulled back into line by Mao Tsetung: a Lin Piao repeatedly promising to correct his errors but in fact never really changing his basic ideas. That Lin Piao had his merits as a field commander is not denied. "Although he turned out to be a traitor, he also did many good things," a high government official told me.

Examples of the lengths to which Lin Piao's closest supporters would go to fabricate the "closest disciple" image include, the report notes, two recent paintings which falsify history. One was of the famous episode of the meeting up of the Red Army forces headed by Mao Tsetung with those headed by Gen. Chu Teh in Kiangsi Province at the beginning of the Long March in 1935. In the painting it is Lin Piao who leads the second column. Chu Teh is nowhere to be seen! The report points out that Lin Piao followed Chu Teh, when he mistakenly decided to return to Hunan instead of joining Mao in the Long March. (Mao went after Chu Teh and persuaded him to join him in the Long March.)