The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution
300
The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution
300Hardcover(1)
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Overview
The author brings unique credentials to her reexamination of the incident. She is the daughter of the former commander-in-chief of the Chinese air force, who served under Lin and, along with thousands of others, was imprisoned as a result of the purges that followed Lin’s death. For this book, she has drawn upon her father’s unpublished memoirs, interviews with former high government officials and their families, and her own experience and acquaintances among the government’s elite families, as well as an abundance of newly available documents. The book reexplores three key questions surrounding the Lin Biao incident: Why would Lin, the brilliant architect of pivotal victories in the Civil War who had been doggedly loyal to Mao for decades, suddenly attempt an ill-conceived coup? Why, when the alleged coup failed, would he defect to the Soviet Union? And why and how did Lin’s plane crash?
Challenging the official account, this book puts forth a radically different interpretation of the incident, arguing that in a narrow sense it was a consequence of the poisonous interplay of governmental politics and family politics during the Cultural Revolution. The roles of Lin’s wife, Ye Qun, and son, Lin Liguo, in the events leading up to the fateful flight are fully discussed for the first time in any language. This view is vividly set forth against a moving portrayal of Chinese society in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and the increasingly desperate efforts of an aging Mao to assure his own immortality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804735292 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/1999 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 6.00(h) x (d) |
| Lexile: | 1410L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Culture of Power
The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural RevolutionBy JIN QIU
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1999 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3529-2
Chapter One
Introduction
In the months before his death in 1976, the longtime leader of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, was prone to look back over his life sorting out his accomplishments and failures. "I did two things in my life," he told his designated successor, Hua Guofeng, on one nostalgic occasion. "The first was to fight against Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek] for several decades and drive him to a few islands and send the Japanese back home after the eight-year war against Japan." The second accomplishment Mao pointed to was the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. Not surprisingly, Mao was confident of the success as well as the significance of the first of his accomplishments, but he seemed uncertain how history would judge the second. "Only a few people agree with me [and] quite a few people oppose me," he told Hua in an uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt. "Neither of these [two accomplishments] was finally [i.e., fully] accomplished and [the resulting problems] will be passed to the next generation." Mao was thus evidently concerned about his legacy, even in areas that he considered his most important accomplishments. Would his be a legacy of peace, he wondered, or of "a foul wind and a rain of blood." "Only heaven knows what you are going to do," Mao said with a sigh to Hua.
The sigh seemed to confess Mao's disappointment with the outcome of the Cultural Revolution, a dramatic social upheaval to which he devoted all of his thought and energy during the last ten years of his life. When he started the Cultural Revolution, he had wanted to ensure a path of continuous revolution for at least the next several generations. He never expected the revolution to be the crowning disgrace of his life. Ten years later, at the end of his life, he regretfully admitted that time was running out on his effort to bequeath to his successor a China that was everything he intended it to be. He was not even sure whether China could maintain peace and integration after he was gone. It was finally clear even to Mao that the Cultural Revolution had failed to achieve what he had intended.
Mao's concern over the Cultural Revolution has been verified by events since his death. In 1981, five years after Mao died, the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) acknowledged that the Cultural Revolution was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic." Thereafter, neither the government nor the people who lived through the Cultural Revolution had anything positive to say about it. Mao's adventurous pursuit of a Utopian dream became one of the Chinese people's worst nightmares. The governments of Mao's successors have shown understandable caution in criticizing the Cultural Revolution, but they have reversed nearly everything it stood for. I wish to emphasize that this is not a study of the Cultural Revolution as such. Indeed, the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, was a multidimensional phenomenon that no single volume can cover comprehensively. From a macrohistorical viewpoint, the Cultural Revolution was in fact many revolutions related in form but with considerable diversity in content and process. The Cultural Revolution intended by party leaders, particularly Mao, was quite different from the cultural revolutions that actually occurred. Moreover, the Cultural Revolution in Guangdong differed from that in Sichuan, which in turn differed from those in Yunnan, Xinjiang, and elsewhere. Each province and even each city had its own revolution. Obtaining archival materials from across China and conveying the complexity of the Cultural Revolution itself are daunting challenges to any researcher seeking to write its comprehensive history. Nevertheless, the Cultural Revolution does provide organizing themes for scholars looking into individual facets of Chinese politics and society in the last decade of the Mao era.
In a broad sense, the Cultural Revolution exemplifies the series of public and political crises China endured in the twentieth century. Politically, the Cultural Revolution was the result of conflict between a charismatic leader and a bureaucratic government in the process of institutionalizing itself. It was a systematic effort to rejuvenate a rigid administrative system that provided civil servants with no career alternatives and no means of exiting with dignity. Socially, it was an expression of accumulated frustrations with bureaucracy itself, as Mao himself understood. Culturally, it was a clash between traditional Confucian values and the Communist revolutionary spirit. And economically, it was an experiment aimed at creating a "socialist economy" based on egalitarian peasant principles, and as such was a rejection of capitalist, market-oriented economies.
This study examines certain extra-institutional factors that fueled Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution. By extra-institutional factors I mean such elusive details as personality, individual experience, and social relationships, including family ties, personal connections (guanxi), and individual loyalties as these function in the political sphere. I use the term "extra-institutional" in particular to emphasize a distinction between two political phenomena—those that characterize or constitute political systems, and those that inform or pervade the context in which those systems function and generate meaning.
Western studies of recent Chinese politics have always focused on institutional factors, including organizations, ideology, and formal policymaking apparatuses. Studies of the political elite have addressed less formal group processes, including the functioning of sociopolitical factions, opinion and interest groups, informal groups, and situational groups. Such studies contribute notably to our understanding of the nature of the Chinese Communist system, especially those that grasp the dynamics of Chinese politics. The best of them provide good accounts of the interaction between collective behavior and group decision-making. They also put Chinese politics in the broad framework of international politics and thereby provide bases for informed comparative study.
As more information became available after the Cultural Revolution, it became apparent that the gap between theory and reality in Communist politics in China was always quite large. Scholars now find themselves overwhelmed by newly available details in primary sources, including information about the private lives of political leaders. They have access to oral accounts by leading participants in important political events. The resulting wealth of new information has made it necessary to modify previous interpretations. It has also made it easier to research specific topics and to add contextual factors to studies of recent political institutions and elites. The latest studies published in China are thus rich in detail but often lack perspectives informed by Western social science.
This book extends the study of recent Chinese politics to familial and personal levels of inquiry. I believe that new microinformation at these levels can shed light on the macroperspectives already well established in Western works on recent Chinese politics. As a historian, I am interested in whether events can be interpreted differently through an examination of personal and even seemingly tangential data. More particularly, I hope to establish a persuasive framework with which to credibly reconstruct the series of events that led to the Lin Biao incident. I may not be able to prove my case definitively and I will undoubtedly bring a share of my own biases to the topic, but complex historical events always admit of a variety of interpretations among well-meaning and open-minded historians. I hope to illustrate that Lin Biao's death is understandable only if one takes into consideration extra-institutional factors that explain not just the incident but also a good deal else in modern Chinese politics. Moreover, I intend to illustrate how extra-institutional factors interact with institutional factors in the political life of the People's Republic. Such a study should help explain to what extent traditional Chinese culture and values influence individual and group behavior in the political arena.
Of all the major events in the Cultural Revolution, the Lin Biao incident remains the most mysterious. Many scholars suggest that the day of the incident, September 13, 1971, was also the day of the greatest crisis in Mao's China. On that day, Lin Biao, then sole vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, officially designated as the closest comrade-in-arms of and heir apparent to Mao Zedong, was supposedly defecting to the Soviet Union when the aircraft in which he was fleeing crashed in the People's Republic of Mongolia. Everyone on the plane was killed, including Lin and his wife and son.
More than a quarter-century later, the incident remains an unsolved mystery. At the time, Chinese officials issued strongly worded accusations of an aborted coup d'état and a plot to assassinate Mao, both allegedly masterminded by Lin Biao. These accusations framed the official verdict on the event, which was "confirmed" a decade later at a show trial in 1980&ndash81. Nonetheless, the accusers never established a convincing link between Lin and the crimes attributed to him. Three key questions concerning the incident remain unanswered: Why would Lin, the brilliant architect of major victories in the Chinese civil war and a man who had always been doggedly loyal to Mao, suddenly attempt an ill-conceived coup? Why, when the alleged coup effort failed, would he have attempted to escape the country by fleeing to the Soviet Union? Finally, why—and most important, how—did his plane crash?
The Lin Biao incident shocked everyone in China, and then in the rest of the world. As every Chinese knew, Lin had come to the forefront of national politics five years earlier, when he was elevated from minister of defense to sole vice-chairman of the Communist Party. Lin's position as Mao's heir apparent was reconfirmed in the party constitution of 1969, when the party honored Lin as Mao's "closest comrade-in-arms" and "successor." Thereafter Lin accompanied Mao on every public occasion, always clutching a copy of the "little red book" of Mao's quotations. What is even more incongruous is that only two days before Lin's plane crashed the Xinhua News Agency reported that a book of photographs that included several of Mao and Lin together would be published shortly as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the CCR "This will make people feel encouraged," stated the Xinhua report, "that Comrade Lin Biao is a bright example for the whole party, the whole army, and the whole country to learn from." In addition, the cover of the September issues of Hongqi (Red Flag) carried for the third time in 1971 a color photograph of Mao and Lin together. Even after the Lin Biao incident but before it was made public, Lin's name continued to appear in newspapers in Beijing and other cities, though less frequently than it had before. In remote areas, Lin's name still appeared in local media until the end of 1971.
Lin's sudden death triggered the biggest political crisis in Mao's party since 1949. How could Mao make his people believe that their "beloved vice-chairman," who had helped whip the country into the frenzied cult of Mao's personality, had turned overnight into a would-be assassin of Mao himself and a traitor to the country? Mao needed time to determine how best to cushion the shock to his people and to the world and had to act with caution. Instead of releasing an announcement of Lin's death, the Party Central Committee issued, between late September 1971 and March 1972, a set of documents exposing Lin's "crimes" and disseminated the documents incrementally to officials and other Chinese according to their rank and position in the political hierarchy. During the Cultural Revolution, the party grouped the Chinese into different social categories according to their political backgrounds and attitudes. While rank and position within the party separated party officials, party members in general had more political privilege than nonparty members. Certain Chinese were specified as politically unreliable because of their "class origins" and their political attitudes. Even the overseas Chinese and foreigners were identified as either "friends" or "enemies" of China. This politicization of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution still exerts a strong influence over Chinese society today.
For more than a week, Mao restricted the news of the incident to Politburo members, and it was two additional weeks before he circulated the first document on the incident among high-ranking party officials in the provinces. According to a circular of September 28, only members of local Party Standing Committees, military officers ranking above division commander, and provincial officials could have access to CCP documents concerning the incident. The circular also made it mandatory that no one should take notes or make copies or even talk about these documents. Finally, two months after the incident, the government made its first announcement to ordinary Chinese that Lin had died.
When the party finally decided to circulate documents at the grassroots level, it stamped all of them "strictly confidential" and allowed only the party organizations at the county or equivalent level to have custody of them. The party instructed leaders to "borrow" the documents from party organizations and read them aloud to everyone authorized to hear them. A circular from the Party Central Committee instructed, "Landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, and capitalists, as well as those who have serious historical problems and who are under investigation, cannot listen to the readings of the documents. Nor are any foreigners to hear them." The circular also directed that party members be the first to hear the documents, followed by workers, peasants, and soldiers, and only then other Chinese. The circular ended by announcing that the party would issue a supplementary directive describing how the documents should later be read to "patriotic overseas Chinese, foreign experts, and foreigners with Chinese citizenship."
The following is one man's recollection of how he learned about the Lin Biao incident:
Marshal Lin Biao died in September 1971, but we ordinary Chinese first heard about the incident in July 1972, ten months later. I was then a high school student in a country town in Hunan province. At first, we knew only that something frightening and immensely important had happened. The Communist Party members among the students and teachers were called away from classes and shut up for a week of meetings in the County Revolutionary Committee compound. Armed guards stood before the meeting hall, and, despite the summer heat, the windows were heavily curtained, muffling the megaphone inside. Then a Party member was permitted to visit his sick wife and the incredible news leaked: our revered First Vice-Chairman Lin Biao had conspired to kill our beloved Chairman Mao and had died in a plane crash in Mongolia while he, his wife, his son, and a handful of coconspirators were trying to escape to the Soviet Union in a Trident jet. This we could hardly accept, but there must have been some truth in it since our informant immediately lost his Party membership and was thrown into jail for a year and a half for breach of discipline. We got more information soon enough. After the Party members had been briefed, it was our turn for a week of meetings. We listened to readings from official documents in the mornings, were made to discuss and criticize Lin and his policies in the afternoons. What we heard confused us more than any of the shifts in the political wind that had us spinning about dizzily since the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Culture of Power by JIN QIU Copyright © 1999 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword, by Elizabeth J. Perry....................ixPreface....................xi
1. Introduction....................1
2. Mao Zedong and Theories of the Cultural Revolution....................15
3. Chinese Gerontocracy and the Cultural Revolution....................42
4. Lin Biao and the Cultural Revolution....................62
5. The Conflict Between Power Groups....................107
6. Families in Chinese Politics....................137
7. The Lin Biao Incident....................163
8. Conclusion: The Tragedy of Lin Biao....................200
Notes....................211
Bibliography....................245
Index of Persons....................267
Index of Topics....................275