The Role of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army

Mao Tse-Tung’s famous aphorism, quoted ad nauseam in the last quarter of a century, that power flows from the barrel of a gun but that the party must control the gun, seemed more or less reversed in the last part of Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Even today, after the Tenth Party Congress in August 1973, the extent of the political power still in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which holds the gun, is one of the more intriguing mysteries beguiling China watchers. This article is an attempt to provide a background for the present drama being played out in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

By the autumn of 1965, Mao began to lay the groundwork for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was to push China to the brink of chaos. In August 1966, using the PLA to provide the training and logistics, Mao assembled the first contingents of the Red Guards in Peking, gave them his benediction, and dispatched them throughout China to attack the entrenched bureaucracies in the educational, economic, and party sectors. By January 1967, it was apparent to Mao that his “little generals” were not capable of carrying out their task without help, so he called on Lin Piao and the PLA to lend them assistance. The bewildered soldiers, neither by training nor by disposition inclined to aid and abet anarchy, tended either to stand aside or to favor the so-called “entrenched” bureaucrats. Ergo, the confusion grew apace. By 1968 the PLA was given the job of bringing the Cultural Revolution to an end and of restoring order, a task more to its liking.

By the time of the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969, the PLA commanders of the military regions and districts had supplanted the party bureaucracy and were apparently enjoying their new powers. The next five years witnessed Mao’s efforts to bring the military back under civilian control, a task that is still under way and still not fully accomplished. The politicization of the PLA during the Cultural Revolution and the attempts to de-politicize it since the Ninth Party Congress are of continuing interest to the United States and to many another nation of the Western world.

origins of the Cultural Revolution
and the events of 1965 and 1966

The reasons given for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution are about as numerous as the China watchers writing on the subject. They range from those who see it as caused by a semideified Mao, striving to eradicate greedy bureaucrats, to those who see the whole thing as a power struggle among the power-hungry autocrats both in Peking and in the semiautonomous hinterlands. Others see the root cause in Mao’s attempt to transform China into a modern industrial nation, on the one hand, and on the other his almost fanatical determination to prevent the consolidation of a bureaucratic-managerial class à la Russe.

There seems to be some agreement, however, that the seeds of the Cultural Revolution were planted by Minister of Defense P’eng Teh-huai’s attack on Mao’s policies at the Lushan Plenum of the Central Committee in August 1959 and the Central Committee’s demonstration of a lack of confidence in Mao’s leadership when it replaced him as head of state, the job going to Liu Shao-ch’i. For the next few years Mao’s authority, except in the PLA, was in semieclipse. The “moderates,” using such un-Maoist mechanisms as material incentives, brought production back to the levels prevailing before Great Leap and even allowed the communes to decentralize to a considerable degree.

Mao fought back. At the Tenth Plenum of the Central Committee in September 1962 he launched a “socialist education movement” to counteract what he regarded as a newly fledged “bourgeois elite,” made up of bureaucrats who put their professional interests above revolutionary goals. Their new god was “expertise,” and Mao saw this as a move away from contact with the masses. The “socialist education movement,” however, was far less than an outstanding success, thus further embittering Mao. He was convinced—and he was probably right—that it had been sabotaged by the party and government bureaucracies.

Furthermore, as early as 1964, Mao became alarmed at the trends in the cultural field. Not only were the artists and writers aping Western forms but some were even aiming their barbs at Mao himself. For example, Wu Han, a deputy and close associate of P’eng Chen, the first secretary of the party committee in Peking, had published a play entitled “The Dismissal of Hai Jui,” in which he described how a Ming emperor fired an honest and courageous official at the urging of some sycophants in the royal court. The analogy was obvious—Mao’s cashiering of the honest and courageous P’eng Teh-huai. Teng T’o, another of P’ eng Chen’s deputies in the Peking party machine, wrote a series of essays under the general title of “Evening Chats at Yenshan,” and in one of them he satirized Mao’s “the East Wind prevails over the West Wind” as “Great Empty Talk.”¹ Mao called upon the Central Committee in September 1965 to condemn the intellectuals who were going astray so outrageously, but his appeal fell on deaf ears.

In October 1965, claiming that the party apparatus in Peking was controlled by his enemies, Mao left the capital and went to Shanghai, where the political climate was more congenial. In November a member of the Shanghai Party Committee, one Yao Wen-yuan, apparently under the guidance of Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing, wrote an article criticizing Wu Han’s play. The article got national circulation when published by the PLA’S Liberation Army Daily and is usually regarded as the opening shot in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

P’eng Chen, realizing that the attack on his deputy, Wu Han, was really aimed at himself, tried to see Mao to mend his fences. In late December 1965, he was summoned to Shanghai for a three-day conference with Mao; Ch’en Po-ta, Mao’s ex-secretary and then editor of Red Flag; K’ang Sheng, a security type sometimes called China’s Beria; and Yang Ch’eng-wu, deputy chief of the PLA General Staff. This pro-Maoist group instructed P’ eng to demand “self-criticisms” from Wu Han and other offending intellectuals.

Mao then began the undoing of the chief of the PLA General Staff, Lo Jui-ch’ing, who had been in eclipse since November 1965. In early 1966 the accusations against Lo Jui-ch’ing became more and more severe. His main heresy, it seems, was his advocacy of a modernized PLA and the industrial buildup needed to supply the wherewithal to accomplish that. Both would require the patching of relations with the Soviet Union. Mao, however, saw China as strong in manpower, thus having to fight any invader in a “people’s war”—a sea of people engulfing the invader as he advanced. You do not attempt to fight a technologically superior enemy with his own weapons and strategy, maintained Mao; you pit your strengths against his weaknesses. The outcome was the fall of Lo Jui-ch’ing—literally the “fall,” since he attempted unsuccessfully to commit suicide by jumping out of a window in March 1966.

This Mao versus Lo Jui-ch’ing clash in the winter of 1965-66 was more than theoretical to Mao, since at that time he was convinced that China was about to be invaded. He told a delegation of Japanese Communists, visiting China in February 1966, that a war between China and America was inevitable in the next year or two and that Russia, using the Sino-Soviet defense pact as a pretext, would also invade China. Thus China would be invaded from the south and the coast by Americans and from the north by Russians. The Japanese returned home convinced that Mao was a bit neurotic on the subject of invasions.²

In the meanwhile the Maoist group was intensifying the attack on P’eng Chen and, by implication, on his superiors, Teng Hsiao-p’ing, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and Liu Shao-ch’i, the head of state. Why Liu Shao-ch’i picked April 1966 to go on a state tour of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Burma is hard to fathom, but when he got back, he found himself outgunned in the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Furthermore, in mid-April an editorial in the Liberation Army Daily stated that the armed forces were the chief instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that Mao was the creator of the PLA, and that the PLA should be obedient to his instructions. As one author puts it: “The barrel of the gun, from which political power grows, had been openly invoked in support of Mao Tse-Tung.”³ By June, P’eng Chen had been replaced, as had Wu Han and Teng T’o, in the Peking Party Committee. Lu Ting-yi, the Director of Propaganda, was out, and Lo Jui-ch’ing had been officially dumped. Since Lo, P’ eng, and Lu were all full members of the Secretariat, the Maoists were seizing effective levers of power in the CCP’s central apparatus.

At this point Mao, on 16 May, established a Cultural Revolution group with Liu Shao-ch’i in charge. Liu created “work teams” to go to government offices, schools, and communes to carry out a rectification campaign. But Mao simultaneously set out to make Liu’s “work teams” ineffective and use that ineffectiveness as a club with which to beat Liu. A woman on the staff of Peking University, Nieh Yuan-tsu, put up a large-character poster bearing the injunction: “Bombard the Headquarters!!” She called for support for Mao and the Cultural Revolution and stated that there was hanky-panky going on in Peking University. Since it was just before exams, the students were in a mood to let off steam. Mao had found his “little generals.”

By July 1966 Mao, having the PLA firmly on his side, having destroyed the opposition in the Peking Party Committee, and being in control of the Secretariat, decided it was time to return to Peking. To offset rumors that he was in bad health, he made his famous swim, on 16 July, in the Yangtze near Hankow—some 15 kilometers in 65 minutes! On returning to Peking on 18 July, he found the students at the various schools in a proper ferment and many of them already on the rampage. Many were the recruits for the first covert Red Guards, organized in May and June. Liu Shao-ch’i, immediately recognizing the Red Guards as aimed at him and his colleagues, declared them illegal. But it was too late, since his power at the center had already been too badly eroded.

Mao then set about the convening of a plenum of the Central Committee, the first since 1962. It met on the first of August, and it was no coincidence that the date was also Army Day, the celebration of the founding of the Red Army in 1927. By 8 August, with the help of PLA officers and radical students, Mao was able to intimidate the Central Committee into approving his 16-point program, the guidelines for the Cultural Revolution. On 18 August, Mao presided over a gigantic rally of tens of thousands of Red Guards attired in uniforms provided by the PLA. The rally was run along the lines of the Nuremberg Nazi get-togethers—cheer leaders leading the youthful Red Guards in rhythmic paeans of praise for Chairman Mao. The rally unleashed a two-month-long reign of terror, during which the young fanatics destroyed cultural treasures, raided educational institutions, and beat up thousands of suspected “capitalist roaders,” the term given to anyone not acceptable to the Maoist zealots. Soon millions of Red Guards were pouring into Peking to be indoctrinated. By the end of November, Mao had blessed over eleven million of his young “warriors” at eight rallies. They were instructed to attack and destroy “those within the party who are power-holders taking the capitalist road.”⁴

In October 1966 a new Cultural Revolutionary group was created to push the movement forward. The director of the new group was Ch’en Po-ta, Chiang Ch’ing was the deputy director, and K’ang Sheng an adviser; it also included two members of the Shanghai Party Committee: Chang Ch’un-ch’iao and Yao Wen-yuan. This group, especially Chiang Ch’ing, was to dominate events and determine the tone of the Cultural Revolution over the next two years. Its main task was to bring down Liu Shao-ch’i and Teng Hsiao-p’ing, the top party leaders in Peking, and to destroy the party apparatus in the provinces. The first task was easily accomplished; but the second, the extension of the revolution to the provinces, was to be the reef upon which the movement ultimately foundered.

During November and December, Chiang Ch’ing and her colleagues on the Cultural Revolutionary group went ape. P’ eng Chen, Lu Ting-yi, Lo Jui-ch’ing, and P’eng Teh-huai were “arrested” by Chiang Ch’ing’s favorite Red Guard contingent and publicly abused. They even lured Wang Kuang-mei, Liu Shao-ch’i’s wife, out of the safety of the official compound by phoning her that her daughter was in the hospital. The group was riding high at the end of 1966.

But it was becoming obvious to Mao that the Red Guards in the provinces were not doing as well. The local party leaders were creating their own Red Guard contingents to protect them from the invaders from Peking, and in some cases they were backed by the local military units. Many of the natural leaders of the Red Guards, those from the families of the party bureaucrats, began to lose their enthusiasm for the movement when it was focused on their own families, and some shifted sides. The last of the Red Guard rallies in Peking was held on 25 November, and the word went out shortly afterwards that the wandering Red Guards were all to return home by 20 December and that there would be no more free train rides or free food after 21 December. It was high time the “little generals” stopped clogging the rail lines. One estimate is that 50 million Red Guards had been shuttled by rail around China between August and December 1966.⁵

the intervention of the PLA in 1967-1968

On 21 January 1967 a central directive ordered the PLA to support the revolutionary left in its efforts to smash the party committees in the provinces and cities of China. This job of supporting the Red Guards was probably given to the regional forces, one of the two broad divisions into which the PLA was divided. The regional forces were made up of the border troop, the independent divisions and regiments, and the garrisons in the cities, under the command of the 13 region and 23 military district commanders. The main forces, under the direct command of the headquarters in Peking, were composed of some 36 corps (sometimes called “armies”), each made up of three divisions and some support units, about 45,000 men in all. Furthermore, the Air Force and the Navy were under the direct command of PLA headquarters in Peking. The region and district commanders had no control over the 36 corps of the main forces or over the Air Force and Navy units in their areas. But they did have a good deal of autonomy in the handling of the regional forces.⁶

The provincial military district headquarters were the key organizational link between the party and military bureaucracies, and many of the first secretaries of the provincial party committees were also the first political commissars of their respective military districts. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, 18 of the 23 military districts had party secretaries concurrently serving as first political commissars, as did 11 of the 13 military regions.⁷ The ties between the regional military district forces and the party apparatus in the military district were very close, even interlocking. Thus when the word came down that the military commanders were to assist the radicals in the destruction of the local party apparatuses, the military commanders were bewildered. As Nelson comments: “The regional forces were as distant from the revolutionary rebels as they were close to the local Party apparatus. . . . No wonder so few military districts and garrisons supported the left wholeheartedly.”⁸ To make matters worse, how was the military commander to determine which of the contending groups was the truly revolutionary one? If he made the wrong decision, he had Peking down on him, and he might also be attacked by the group against which he had decided—a potent factor in angering many a military commander. Peking, aware of the tendency of the district commander either to drag his feet or even to side with the party apparatchiki being attacked, began to use the main forces to take over in trouble spots. Over 20 of the 36 corps were involved at one time or another during the Cultural Revolution in support of the revolutionary rebels.⁹

In June 1967 an organization of industrial workers, known as the “Million Heroes,” had been formed in Wuhan to oppose the Red Guards, and the Wuhan Military Region command was involved on the side of new organization. On 14 July Hsieh Fu-shih, Minister of Public Security, and Wang Li, a fellow-member of the Cultural Revolution Group, arrived in Wuhan at the head of a delegation to survey the situation. The region commander, Ch’en Tsai-tao, tried to get the delegation to look at both sides of the imbroglio, but Wang Li, acting as spokesman for the delegation, came out solidly on the side of the Red Guards. Early in the morning of 20 July, Ch’en Tsai-tao’s troops began to occupy key points in the city, and a mob of “Million Heroes” grabbed Hsieh Fu-shih and Wang Li, roughing them up in the process. Ch’en Tsai-tao rescued them and carted them off to military headquarters. Peking was outraged—the Minister of Public Security beat up and then arrested!

Lin Piao during the last ten days of July moved naval units up the Yangtze to Wuhan and dispatched airborne units to the city. Tseng Ssu-yu replaced Ch’ en Tsai-tao as commander of the Wuhan Military Region, and the two abused emissaries were returned to Peking. But the whole affair had jolted the military command in Peking and what was left of the government, since neither relished the idea of conflict between the regional and main forces of the PLA. Furthermore, although centrally controlled corps units had been put in charge of some military districts and even smaller administrative areas, it was a dangerous gambit. This tended to politicize main force commanders and weaken their ties with headquarters in Peking.¹⁰ The use of centrally controlled forces of the PLA was Mao’s final trump card in carrying out the Cultural Revolution. As flare-ups between the regional and main forces in the ensuing months persisted, there was the danger that the main forces, the ultimate base of national political power and national defense, would be severely weakened.

In the meanwhile, it was necessary to create something in the provinces to replace the wrecked party apparatuses and government bureaucracies. As early as January 1967 a Revolutionary Committee was established in the Heilungkiang Military District. The ideal arrangement aspired to in the creation of the Revolutionary Committees was the bringing together of the military command, the “pro-Maoist” party cadres, and the representatives of the revolutionary masses (i.e., the revolutionary rebels) into three-headed committees, or, as the blueprint of the Maoist group in Peking read, the forming of a “Revolutionary Triple-Alliance” consisting of “revolutionary mass organizations,” the local PLA forces, and the “revolutionary cadres” (i.e., pro-Maoist party officials who had seen the light).¹¹ Early in the game, however, the military leaders and party cadres dominated the committees, with the military on top. For example, the four-man Standing Committee of the Heilungkiang Revolutionary Committee was composed of two military men, an old party cadre, and a representative of the revolutionary masses.¹² The leading role of the military in the Revolutionary Committees, as they were created in one province after another, was almost inevitable. Once the PLA had been instructed to intervene in the Cultural Revolution in January 1967, military units moved in to run industrial plants in the cities, began to administer civil aviation, and took over the police and security organs. The responsibility for maintaining a minimum of public order and some production tended to push the local military leaders to the fore in the new administrative organs in the provinces, the Revolutionary Committees.

During the period from 31 January 1967, when the first Revolutionary Committee was created in Heilungkiang, to 5 September 1968, when the last of the 29 Revolutionary Committees was established—a long and arduous process characterized by much factional in-fighting—the military came to dominate the committees. Of the 476 Standing Committee members in the 29 Revolutionary Committees, 235, or 49 percent, were military men, 109 were veteran party cadres, and only 132 represented the revolutionary mass organizations. Of the 29 chairmen, 22 were military men (13 commanders and 9 commissars).¹³ It was altogether obvious by mid-1968 that the PLA had become the dominant administrative authority in the provinces.

In Peking by June 1968, both Lin Piao and Chou En-lai realized that, if the PLA were to survive as a unified force, various military units would have to cease backing opposing armed factions at the local level, for otherwise the PLA would disintegrate as a viable military organization. In July representatives of contending factions from many of the provinces were called to Peking to work out agreements, but little agreement seemed to come out of the meetings. Finally, on 28 July, at 0300, Mao called in a number of Red Guard leaders and scolded them vehemently. This was the death knell of the Red Guards. They were rapidly cleared out of the various institutions they had taken over during the Cultural Revolution. For example, by the end of 1968, two-thirds of the 15,000 students in Peking’s Tsingua University had been sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants, a trip that was scarcely voluntary on their part.¹⁴

In a review of the role of the PLA during the Cultural Revolution, two dates stand out: 23 January and 5 September 1967. On the first of those dates, the PLA was instructed to intervene in the Cultural Revolution and thereby involve itself in the political maelstrom then raging throughout China. On the second date, the army was ordered to restore order and use force if needed. As one authority points out, “ . . . this was the beginning of the end of the Cultural Revolution.”¹⁵ The PLA was more than willing to use force, lots of force, by September, since in the aftermath of the Wuhan Incident in July the radicals in Peking had been urging the Red Guards “to drag out the handful of power-holders in the army,” i.e., to attack the district and regional PLA headquarters. Apparently the army’s reaction to this line led to the 5 September order authorizing force. Although the Cultural Revolution sputtered along until early 1969, with first the radicals and then the moderates on top in Peking, the ultimate power belonged to the PLA after September 1967.

In retrospect, the PLA became the dominant force in the Cultural Revolution malgré lui. It was initially brought in, reluctantly, by the civilian leadership to aid the Maoist group in an intraparty conflict. Contrary to the expectations of the Cultural Revolution Group, however, the army tended to favor the moderate elements, both in the provinces and at the center; it tended to act as a moderating force, especially in the conflicts raging between contending elements at the local level. The military commanders were given the impossible task of simultaneously restoring order and aiding the Red Guards, an unsolvable paradox. They had to opt for one or the other of these contradictory alternatives, and by natural bent and long training they preferred order to the Red Guard anarchy. Forced to enter the political arena, the PLA in spite of itself was the dominant political and administrative force in the provinces by the end of the Cultural Revolution.¹⁶

the role of the PLA in the immediate
aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, 1969-1971

On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, China’s foreign relations were deteriorating badly. The Chinese had worked assiduously in the first half of the 1960s to build a strong position in Asia and Africa, had quarreled bitterly with the Soviets at a succession of Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) conferences, and in Indonesia had won over both the Communist Party (PKI) and President Sukarno to their side. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, however, the whole elaborate policy had disintegrated: relations with AAPSO got so bad that the Chinese quit the organization, and the disastrous attempted coup in Indonesia in September-October 1965 led to the destruction of the PKI and the political castration of Sukarno.

During the Cultural Revolution, Peking’s relations with the outside world fell into even more disarray. For example, for most of the period there was only one ambassador still at his post, Huang Hua in Cairo; the rest had been recalled for reindoctrination in the “Thoughts of Mao,” a process that lasted out the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards at one point took over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, scattered secret documents about, and carted off the Minister, Ch’en Yi, to subject him to long and arduous public “struggle” sessions. They periodically harassed the Soviet and British embassies, and the latter was even burned down. In Hong Kong, the local Red Guards rampaged, killing constables and fostering a bus strike, and Peking for a while cut off food and water to the city. Even Ne Win of Burma, who had tried so hard to get along with his big neighbor, had to break off relations when the Red Guards in Rangoon carried on so outrageously that a Burmese mob burned out the Chinese diplomatic compound and raided the Chinese section of the city.

All these events, however, paled into insignificance when compared to the rise in tensions between Moscow and Peking. A succession of events in the early 1960s, such as the Soviet ambivalence in the Sino-Indian quarrels, the complete cutoff of Soviet technical and economic assistance to China, the Soviet stance on the Indian-Pakistani War in 1965 and the subsequent Soviet mediation of the war at Tashkent in January 1966—all served to irritate the Chinese more and more. The insults exchanged between Moscow and Peking grew ever more vehement and also more frequent. Finally, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the subsequent enunciation of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine caused extreme alarm in Peking. If, as the new Soviet doctrine asserted, socialist states have the right, or even the duty, to intervene in other socialist states where there is either a domestic or foreign-inspired threat to socialism (a rationalization for the intervention in Czechoslovakia), who would be more vulnerable to the use of such a doctrine than China? Surely, if Moscow is to define “socialism,” then Mao’s China is the acme of heresy in Russian eyes.

In the spring of 1969, tensions along the Sino-Soviet border had built up to the danger point. Border incidents had been occurring with great frequency after 1960, and a rather severe flare-up took place in January 1967 along the Ussuri River. According to the Chinese, the Soviets had provoked a total of 4189 border incidents between October 1964 and March 1969.¹⁷ Mao, in his July 1964 conversation with some Japanese socialists, had poured oil on an already raging fire when he pointed out that tsarist Russia had obtained vast tracts of Chinese territory east of the Ussuri, north of the Amur, and in what is now Soviet Central Asia, by pressuring a beleaguered Ch’ing dynasty in “unequal treaties.” He added that Chi had not yet presented her account.

The Soviets, alarmed by the rising crescendo of border incidents, seriously began to augment their forces along the Sino-Soviet border in 1967 and simultaneously signed a 20-year defense pact with the People’s Republic of Mongolia. The Chinese, with 14 divisions in the Shenyang Military Region, five in Inner Mongolia, and five in Sinkiang had about half a million soldiers in the border areas. This was the setting when on 2 March 1969 open warfare began on Damansky (or Chen Pao) Island in the Ussuri River.

Damansky is one of the many disputed islands in the Amur and Ussuri rivers, is uninhabited, and would seem to be a most unlikely spot to begin a major international incident. Just how the fire fight began, who to blame, and how much the event was being manipulated in either Peking or Moscow are still puzzles. Most accounts have the Chinese bushwhacking a Soviet patrol and shooting it up rather badly, the Soviets claiming 31 casualties. Two weeks later, on 16 March, following a buildup on both sides, the battle was resumed, and this time the Soviets let it be known that it could escalate into a really serious conflict if the Chinese persisted in their belligerent activities. Peking got the message, and the hostilities ceased—at least in that area.¹⁸

The March incidents along the Ussuri signaled an accelerated Soviet military buildup along the entire Sino-Soviet border, and this in turn triggered a Chinese counter buildup. Both countries used the clash over the island to inflame national hatreds, and Western observers began to talk and write about the imminence of a major Sino-Soviet conflict. Imminent or not, the danger of such a war could not be ignored by Peking, and there was general agreement that it was high time to put a stop to the domestic shenanigans that had characterized the Cultural Revolution.

The gunsmoke along the Ussuri had hardly cleared when the Ninth Party Congress was convened in Peking on 1 April. It was at this congress that the PLA consolidated its position at the center in addition to its power in the provinces. In the new Politburo, with its 21 full and 4 alternate members, the military got about half the slots: Lin Piao; Yeh Chun, his wife, in charge of the administration of the Military Affairs Committee (MAC); Ch’ en Hsi-lien, commander of the Shenyang Military Region; Ch’iu Hui-tso, head of PLA Rear Services; Hsu Shih-yu, commander of the Nanking Military Region; Huang Yung-sheng, chief of the general staff; Li Tso-p’ing, political commissar of the Navy; Wu Fa-hsien, head of the Air Force; Yeh Chien-ying, to become acting chief of staff in late 1971; and Li Teh-sheng, commander of the Anhwei Military District—all were actively engaged in military work. In addition, two of the Old Guard, Chu Teh and Liu Po-ch’eng, were soldiers and on the Politburo. Of the 170 full members of the Central Committee elected at the Ninth Party Congress, slightly more than half were military men (68 commanders and 19 commissars).¹⁹ Furthermore, the, Minister of Defense and “Chief” of MAC, Lin Piao, was officially named Mao’s successor and his deputy in just about everything. It looked as though Lin and the PLA were in an impregnable political position. With military men sitting in the top slot in 22 of the 29 Revolutionary Committees and holding half the positions in the Politburo and the Central Committee, it would seem that Lin would be able to make his succession stick.

But the Great Helmsman was about to make another of his notorious 180-degree ideological shifts. He had used Lin Piao to back his leftist policy that unhinged Liu Shao-ch’i and company, and he was now about to go into an alliance with Chou En-lai in a rightist swing to unseat Lin Piao. As Lin was reputed to have said in 1971, when Mao’s intrigues became obvious to him: “Once he [Mao] thinks someone is his enemy, he won’t stop until the victim is put to death; once you offend him, he’ll persist to the end—passing all blame on to the victim, held responsible for crimes committed by himself.”²⁰ Actually the Cultural Revolution ended in a three-way conflict: Lin and the PLA, Chou En-lai and the remnants of the government, and the survivors in the Cultural Revolution Group. Chou and the remnants of the Cultural Revolution Group had no other option than to unite with Mao in an effort to undercut Lin Piao. For the next 28 months (April 1969 to September 1971) this group of strange bedfellows worked at the ruination of Lin Piao, and it was eventually successful. How this was done can be seen in broad outline although the dirty details are still murky.

At the outset it looked as though Lin and the military were steadily gaining in political strength. The attempt to shift political power back to civilians in the party by reconstructing the Provincial Party Committees boomeranged. The first reconstructed Provincial Party Committee came into being in December 1970, and the process was not completed until August 1971. But of the 29 First Secretaries, 22 were military men; and of the 158 Committee secretaries, 62 percent were military. “Only Shanghai, the cradle of the Cultural Revolution and the citadel of radicalism throughout its development, retained a predominantly nonmilitary leadership.”²¹ Apparently, judging from subsequent events, the unity of the PLA in its new power position was more façade than reality.

It would seem in retrospect that Lin Piao and his staunch supporters on the General Staff were in conflict with many of the military leaders in the military regions and districts. Some of these could not forgive or forget the indignities they had suffered during the Cultural Revolution when Lin and his pals at the center were pushing them to aid and abet the Red Guards and the revolutionary left. It was during that period of the Cultural Revolution that some of the regional commanders came to look upon Chou En-lai as the voice of moderation, the man striving to keep the ship of state afloat in a sea of anarchy. The cracks in the army’s unity that had appeared during the Cultural Revolution tended to widen as the army became even more deeply involved in politics in the aftermath of the revolution. The main split appears to have been between Lin and some of the most powerful of the military region commanders.

Mao, seemingly somewhat amazed that his Cultural Revolution had brought forth not a victory for the radicals but a militarization of the party, began to call for a return to civilian control even before the end of the Cultural Revolution. The military went right ahead, though, in their seizure of the top slots in the reconstructed Provincial Party Committees and a goodly share of power in the central organs such as the Politburo and the Central Committee. Mao, backed by Chou En-lai and his moderates as well as by the remnants of the greatly weakened Cultural Revolution Group, then began undermining Lin Piao in earnest. The struggle came out in the open at the Lushan Plenum of the Central Committee in August 1970 when Lin, supported by Ch’en Po-ta, criticized those who had drafted a projected state constitution (Chou En-lai had been the chief architect), which deleted the position of State Chairman of the PRC (Liu Shao-ch’i’s old job). It is somewhat uncertain who Lin and Ch’ en had in mind for State Chairman: some writers think it was Mao, to keep the chair warm for his heir apparent; others think Ch’en Po-ta was the claimant; and some think Lin wanted to step into the job immediately. The main objective, however, of the gambit was to retain the position so that it would mean someone was immediately over Chou En-lai, either Lin or Ch’en preferably. ²² Mao was adamantly opposed to the retention of the position and reminded Lin that he had told him on six previous occasions that there was no need for a State Chairman.

With the battle lines more or less openly drawn, Mao then proceeded with his campaign to get rid of his appointed successor. In January 1971 the commander and the second political commissar of the Peking Military Region, both Lin supporters, were relieved of their duties; and the 38th Army, also pro- Lin, was transferred to another area. Mao also succeeded in inserting some of his adherents into the MAC, thus diluting the authority of Lin and his wife, Yeh Chun, head of the administrative office. At the Central Committee Work Conference in April 1971, it was disclosed that several Politburo members who had supported Lin at the Lushan Plenum had subsequently come forth with “self-criticisms.” By the early spring of 1971, it was evident to Lin Piao that his position was being seriously undermined.

the fall of Lin Piao, 1971

In August and early September 1971, Mao went on an inspection trip through the Canton and Nanking Military Regions, where he talked with regional and district commanders about the necessity of the PLA’S giving up control of the party machinery. He, apparently, also asked for their support in the coming showdown with Lin Piao. He seems to have gained that support, and the day after his return to Peking, on 12 September, an aircraft belonging to the Chinese Air Force, a British-built Trident, crashed in Outer Mongolia and Lin Piao was heard from no more. Just what happened is still a mystery. Although there were rumors that Lin had died in that air crash, there was no word from Peking authenticating the rumors. It was not until 28 July 1972 that Wang Hai-jung, a young lady close to Mao and an Assistant Foreign Minister, confirmed a Chinese Embassy statement issued in Algiers as true: Lin Piao, according to that statement, had died, in the plane crash in Mongolia while attempting to escape after failure of a plot to oust Chairman Mao.²³ Mao, it seems, had revealed the same information earlier to Mrs. Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), and to Maurice Schumann, Foreign Minister of France. Since then there have been several documents emanating from China, not to speak of the plethora of rumors and weird tales. In 1973 and 1974 the Chinese have gone after Lin Piao and his colleagues with a vengeance, and his crimes are multiplying by the day, including purported plans to assassinate Mao.

The main outline of the story being fed to the party faithful in China is as follows: Lin Piao and a number of high-ranking officers plotted a coup d’état; the plot entailed the assassination of Mao; when the plot was discovered, Lin panicked and tried to escape to the Soviet Union in a Trident but left in such a hurry that it was insufficiently fueled and without a navigator, ergo the crash. The Lin Piao plot, or at least an outline of it, has been circulated in China under the title “Outline of the ‘571 Project.’”²⁴ Garbled and weird though it is, it attempts to show Lin, on the outs with Mao in late 1970, plotting with some fellow officers on the General Staff, especially Air Force leaders, to take over from old “B-52,” the code name for Mao. Lin Piao’s son, Lin Li-kuo, is portrayed as running about in Hangchow, Shanghai, and Peking trying to coordinate the plot.

In another account, “Document No. 24 of the CCP Central Committee,” issued in June 1972, a much more detailed account of the Lin Piao plot is given. According to this version Lin and his colleagues attempted in September 1971 to assassinate Mao when he was touring the south on his inspection trip. They were unsuccessful, and the death of Lin is described as follows:

Those who went down with Lin Piao comprised a relatively high percentage of the top command of the PLA in Peking. The officers accused of being in on the Lin Piao plot mostly chiefs and deputy chiefs of various segments of the General Staff, a number of top Air Force officers, and quite a few from the Navy and General Logistics Department. The most highly placed of those purged were Yeh Chun, Lin’s wife and director of administration in MAC; Huang Yung-sheng, chief of the General Staff; Wu Fa-hsien, head of Air Force; Li Tso-p’eng, 1st political commissar of the Navy; Ch’iu Hui-tso, head of the General Logistics Department; Yen Chung-ch’uan, deputy chief of the General Staff; and Liang Hsing-ch’u, commander of the Chengtu Military Region. More than thirty other high-ranking officers were involved in the purge. Five of the victims were on the Politburo, ten were members of the Central Committee, and others were secretaries or deputy secretaries in provincial party organizations in addition to their military positions. In the military structure per se, five were from the General Staff, five from Logistics, four from the Navy, and ten from the Air Force. The strong representation from the Air Force may account for the fact that all aircraft were grounded from 13 to 16 September 1971. The anti-Lin Piao group must have feared that the Air Force might attempt to help the plotters escape. The usual celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October was called off, probably because of the confused state of affairs in Peking following the ouster of Lin and his colleagues.

The Lin Piao affair, with heads rolling thick and fast at the top levels, left the PLA as a whole decapitated. Apparently there was no agreement as to which of the survivors should get which job. Top slots such as the chief of the General Staff, head of the Air Force, and other heads of departments were left in the hands of temporary appointees whose titles carried the adjective “acting” to designate the transitory nature of their assignments. The Lin Piao affair, with its wholesale purge of top military personnel, is reminiscent of the wholesale slaughter of top Soviet officers during the Stalinist Great Purge of 1936-39.

the military in the current phase
of Chinese politics, 1971-1974

Although those close to Lin Piao at the General Staff and Department levels were purged immediately, Mao was much more careful in his handling of the Military Region and Military District commanders and their political commissars. After all, those people controlled the provincial party machinery by virtue of their positions as chairmen of the Revolutionary Committees and secretaries of the provincial party committees. The purge of suspected pro-Lin people in the provinces would have to be carried out with patience and a good deal of finesse.

One of the tactics used by Mao and his entourage was to so blacken Lin Piao’s name that anyone with former connections could be regarded as “guilty by association”—hardly a cornerstone of English common law but a rather widely used technique in Communist-ruled countries. Lin was accused of plotting to assassinate the Great Helmsman, of seeking the return of capitalism in the People’s Republic, of trying to sabotage the détente with the United States, and of dealing with the Russians for assistance in dumping Mao. Just as Stalin was never satisfied with merely eliminating an opponent, or even potential opponent, but sought also to destroy his reputation utterly, so Mao has dealt with his enemies. Liu Shao-ch’i was not simply a political rival who lost; he had to become a black villain, a “capitalist roader,” “China’s Khrushchev,” etc. Now it was Lin Piao’s turn to get the treatment. His military exploits, dating back to the late 1920s, were now downgraded and ridiculed. He was now a man who had long aspired to bring back capitalism and imperialistic exploitation to China, and he had even conspired with the Russians to return China to the subservient position it had held in the early 1950s. With the pushing of Lin’s criminal activities back into the past, his earlier military associates became vulnerable.

The only difficulty with the whole stratagem was how to keep Mao himself from looking like a damn fool. After all, he had made Lin Piao his closest comrade-in-arms, his heir apparent, and had picked him to succeed P’eng Teh-huai as Minister of Defense in 1959. If the Great Helmsman himself had been fooled by Lin all those years, why blame lesser folk for failing to realize what a scoundrel he was? One attempt to offset this potential criticism of Mao was the circulation of a letter from Mao to his wife, Chiang Ch’ing, supposedly written on 8 July 1968. In this letter Mao comments ruefully on his elevation to the rank of “genius” by Lin Piao and on the latter’s characterization of Mao’s booklets as having “so much supernatural power.” He was tempted to speak out against such adulation but feared that his words would help the “rightists” and hurt the “leftists” in the Cultural Revolution. He consoled himself, however, with the thought that: “We shall launch another movement for sweeping up the ghosts and monsters after seven or eight years, and will launch more of the movement later.”²⁶ Although there is general agreement that the letter was written by Mao, it is also generally agreed that it was written subsequent to Lin’s downfall or that it was revised to include the anti-Lin comments.

By the summer of 1973 the Mao-Chou-Chiang Ch’ing alliance had gained enough control over the party apparatus to convene another Party Congress, and the 10th Party Congress met between 24 and 28 August 1973. It was notable for the shortness of the meeting and the secrecy in which it was held. There were 1249 delegates, 263 fewer than those in attendance at the 9th Party Congress in April 1969. The Congress elected 195 full and 124 alternate members to the new Central Committee, or 319 in all, some 40 more than the membership of the preceding Central Committee. Of the 319 Central Committee members, 100, or 31 percent, were military; 91, or 29 percent, were veteran party cadres; and 104, or 32 percent, represented the Cultural Revolution faction. The allegiance of 24 members cannot be ascertained. The military, therefore, lost ground, since there had been about 50 percent military men in the 9th Central Committee. The Central Committee during its first plenary session at the end of the Congress approved a new Politburo of 21 full and 4 candidate members. Of the 25 members of the Politburo, only seven were military men; and two of those, Chu Teh and Liu Po-ch’eng, were Old Guard decorative members. As Rice points out, the 10th Party Congress reflected the “civilianization” of the CCP.²⁷

On New Year’s Day 1974, Peking, revealed that nine of the eleven commanders of military regions had been reshuffled, thereby removing them from their mountaintops,” i.e., from the regions in which they had built up intimate and long-standing political, economic, and governmental ties. Ch’en Hsi-lien, who had been in command of the Shenyang Military Region (three provinces of Manchuria) since 1959, was transferred to command the Peking Military Region. Hsu Shih-yu, in command of the Nanking Military Region since 1954, a region controlling about 40 percent of China’s industrial output, was sent to head the Canton Military Region. Seven other military regions got new commanders. The light touch was again revealed, however, since the commanders merely swapped assignments and thus found it difficult to plead demotion.

Military Region	Commander in 1973	Commander in 1974
Shenyang	Ch’en Hsi’lien	Li Teh-Sheng
Peking		Ch’en Hsi’lien
Canton	T’ing Sheng	Hsu Shih-yu
Nanking	Hsu Shih-yu	T’ing Sheng
Chengtu	Ch’iu Chi-wei	Ch’iu Chi-wei^o
Lanchow	Pi Tung-chun	Han Hsien-chu
Foochow	Han Hsien-chu	Pi Tung-chun
Tsinan	Yang Teh-chih	Tseng Ssu-yu
Wuhan	Tseng Ssu-yu	Tang Teh-chih
Kunming	Wang Pi-cheng	Wang Pi-cheng^o
Sinkiang		Yang Yung

By the late spring of 1974 it looked as though Mao and the party were again in command of the gun. But it may be too early to make such a judgment, since the local military commanders are still powerful in the hinterlands while the regime in Peking seems rent with dissensions. Madame Chiang Ch’ing and her radical friends, Chou En-lai and his government colleagues, and the half-dozen military chiefs make a rather uneasy alliance in the Politburo. Each faction has to keep itself in the good graces of the Great Helmsman, and he—unless the law of mortality has been revoked for him—is tottering on the brink of the grave. His passing will probably bring on a resounding power struggle, and the military may again have to keep the ship of state afloat.

1. Excerpts from Wu Han’s play and Teng T’o’s essays can be found in Jack Gray and Patrick Cavendish, Chinese Communism in Crisis: Maoism and the Cultural Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1968), pp. 153-58 and 166-71.

2. Kikuzo Ita and Minoru Shibata, “The Dilemma of Mao Tse-tung,” in China Quarterly, No. 35 (July-September 1968), p. 67.

3 Edward E. Rice, Mao’s Way (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 240.

6. For details, see Harvey Nelson, “Military Forces in the Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly, No. 51 (July-September 1972), pp. 444-47.

11. Jürgen Domes, “The Role of the Military in the Formation of Revolutionary Committees, 1967-68,” China Quarterly, No. 44 (October-December 1970), p. 113.

13. Jürgen Domes, “Party Politics and the Cultural Revolution,” in Frank N. Traeger and William Henderson, editors, Communist China, 1949-1969: A Twenty-Year Appraisal (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 90.

15. Ellis Joffe, “The Chinese Army after the Cultural Revolution: The Effects of Intervention,” China Quarterly, No. 55 (July-September 1973), p. 455.

16. For an excellent discussion of the role of the PLA in Cultural Revolution, see Joffe, pp. 450-56.

17. Colonel D. M. Marks, “The Ussuri River Incident as a Factor in Chinese Foreign Policy,” Air University Review, XXII, 5 (July-August 1971), p. 54.

18. Harrison Salisbury, War between Russia and China (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 180-82; Marks, p. 58. For the Chinese view or case, see Neville Maxwell, “The Chinese Account of the 1969 Fighting at Chenpao,” China Quarterly, No. 56 (October-December 1973), pp. 730-39.

20. “Outline of the ‘571 Project,’” Issues and Studies, May 1972, p. 81, quoted in Philip Bridgham, “The Fall of Lin Piao,” China Quarterly, No. 55 (July-September 1973), p. 439.

22. Details are in Bridgham, pp. 434 ff., and in E. E. Rice, “Leadership, Party, and Army in Future China,” Pacific Community, V, 2 (January 1974), pp. 176-77; Mao’s side of the story in “Mao Tse-tung’s Talks to Responsible Comrades in Nanking and Shanghai Areas during His Inspection of the Troops,” Issues and Studies, VIII, 10 (June 1972), pp. 95-97.

24. A translation of the text is available in Issues and Studies (Taipei), VIII, 8 (May 1972), pp. 78-83, under the title “The Struggle of Smashing the Counter-revolutionary Coup of the Lin-Ch’en Anti-Party Clique.”

26. A translation of this letter is in Issues and Studies, IX, 4 (January 1974), pp. 94-96.

27. E. E. Rice, “Leadership, Party, and Army in Future China,” Pacific Community, V, 2 (January 1974), p. 182.