The ghost of Lin Biao marches back

Press, 14 May 1985, Page 21

The ghost of Lin Biao marches back

From

JONATHAN MIRSKY

in London

It is no longer taboo in China to tell the whole truth about the mar who once tried to assassinate Mac Tse Tung. Until recently, the attempted murder was the single greatest scandal of the Cultural Revolution decade of 1966 to 1976. In 1971, Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s chosen successor, and his “closest comrade in arms,” a towering military leader whose reputation reached back beyond the 1934 Long March, died in a plane crash fleeing the scene of his thwarted conspiracy to kill the chairman. Lin’s accomplices in the plot among them some of China’s supreme military ■ commanders were immediately arrested. They languished behind bars until they appeared grovelling in the dock at

the great trial of the Gang of Four in November, 1980.

It is a mark of the sensitivity ol this issue, involving the now largely discredited Mao and a cabal from the once-sacred People’s Liberation Army, that the first public sign of the reassessment of Lin Biao’s career should appear in the “Ningxia Daily,” in the remote north-west, quoting an abridged report from the Party history newsletter. It is a distortion of reality, the newsletter says (following the cur-

rent line which disparages lying), to neglect Lin Biao’s “positive points,” even if, it adds discreetly, the Marshal “opposed Chairman Mao on certain questions.” His contributions as a commander during the civil war against Chiang Kai Shek must be remembered. This revised view has doubtless been circulated among Party officials. They will be impressed by the names of its sponsors: Yang Shangkun, the Army’s top propagandist, and Chen Yung, one of the six men who run China from the

standing committee of the Politburo. Lin Biao made mistakes in the civil war, Chen Yun notes, “but we should not neglect the correct points of view in his capacity as commander.” Such balanced observations are a new phenomenon in China where, until very recently, once an official was “smashed” his entire career, no matter how illustrious, was repainted in the darkest colours. Since Premier Chou En Lai’s disclosures in 1972 of Lin’s conspiracy and violent death, no detail of his life has escaped blackening: his conduct on the Long March, his supreme commands in the civil war and in Korea, his entry into the standing committee of the

Politburo in 1958 and subsequent elevation to Defence Minister in 1959.

During the 1980-81 trial of his accomplices, the bizarre tale of Project 571 emerged. Under the direct orders of Lin’s son, operating from within the Air Force high command, a plot was confected which would result in Lin’s seizure of national power.

Mao’s special train was to be attacked by air strikes, tanks, flame-throwers, and bazookas. The Chairman would be polished off by a commando team.

Lurid sexual allegations, an inevitable aspect of Chinese disclosures of high-level wrong-doing, followed the abject confessions of the conspirators, who included the

chief of the Army general staff and deputy chiefs of the Navy and Air Force.

Finally, it is still maintained in China, on September 13, 1971, when the game was up, Lin Biao, his wife, and son, commandeered a plane in which everyone was lost when it crashed in Mongolia. So poisonous was the late Marshal’s reputation, according to the Army’s Yang Shangkun, that “not long ago when comrades in the north-east were shooting a film, they didn’t dare depict Lin Biao.” Now, notes the Party history newsletter, it is time "to start telling the truth about Party history.”

Copyright—London Observer Service.