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246 pp. May 1996
cloth, ISBN 978-0-8248-1811-1, $26.00
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Keywords: |
Asia
China
history
biography |
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The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1971
by Frederick C. Teiwes; Warren Sun
"A much-needed revisionist view of Lin Biao, one of the most important figures in Mao Zedong's regime, who died in a mysterious plane crash in Mongolia in 1971." --China Review International, Fall 1998
The Lin Biao affair, which saw the Minister of Defence dramatically rise to become Mao Zedong's designated successor at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and, even more dramatically, die in a plane crash while fleeing his country in September 1971, remains the least understood of all Chinese Community Party elite conflicts of the Maoist era. Despite the pivotal importance of Lin's rise and fall in the history of contemporary China, his career has received little scholarly attention. Those studies which have appeared, mostly in the years soon after his death, have been seriously flawed by their reliance on official sources which painted a false picture of Lin as an unprincipled 'careerist'; by unusually large gaps in critical information from Chinese sources; and by a propensity of their authors to fill the gaps by relying on Western assumptions about the nature of politics which are inappropriate to Chinese elite political culture.
In this pathbreaking study Frederich Teiwes and Warren Sun offer an interpretation which radically undermines the standard view of Lin Biao as an ambitious politician who manoeuvred his way to the top, adopted a radical position during the Cultural Revolution to promote his own interests, and eventually came undone by seeking to consolidate his own power and military dominance over the polity, thus leading to a vicious power struggle with Mao. Drawing on extensive new Chinese sources which have become available since the late 1980s - including memoirs, detailed Party history studies and investigative journalism, as well as interviews with both Chinese scholars and individuals involved in the events surrounding Lin Biao - Teiwes and Sun provide a very different picture of Lin with far-reaching implications for an understanding of the Cultural Revolution period. They reveal Lin as someone basically uninterested in power or even politics, who was thrust into leading positions and the successor role by Mao against his wishes; who never opposed Mao politically but instead attempted to follow his wishes in every way to the extent that they could be determined; who had no policy programme, whose rare initiatives were on the side of moderation; and whose political decline was due to Mao's reaction to complex factors unconnected with either a bid by Lin for personal aggrandizement or an effort to entrench army power. In this Teiwes and Sun refute both the official Chinese verdict on Lin Biao and the prevailing Western interpretation.
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