- After Mao, What Now?
When he heard the news of Mao’s death, Lin Biao was not in Beijing. Sensing that his standing with the Great Helmsman was diminishing and wishing to get out of town, Lin had gone to review troops in Heilongjiang (黑龙江) Province to inspect military readiness in the wake of serious border clashes with the USSR the previous year (1). Contacts in the Defence Ministry conveyed the news of Mao’s death to Lin quickly, and he resolved to return to Beijing and make his case to be the next Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic. Lin immediately boarded his personal aircraft and flew to Beijing; upon his landing he was greeted by a crowd of citizens cheering 林彪同志万岁! (Lin Biao tongzhi wansui, or “Ten thousand years to Comrade Lin Biao!”) (2). Though Lin was bolstered by this display - which was in fact the work of a junior officer, who rounded up all the civilian workers at Beijing’s Nanyuan Airport and ordered them to surround Lin’s plane and cheer him on - other members of the government were less sanguine about the possibility of Lin gaining power. Chief among these anti-Lin elements were Mao’s closest confidants, who had come to believe that Lin would betray Mao Zedong Thought (毛泽东思想) and govern the People’s Republic as a Rightist. Although the 文革小组(Wenge xiaozu, or Cultural Revolution Small Group) had officially been disbanded in 1970, many of the members of the group still possessed enormous amounts of power and influence. On the night after Mao’s death, several former members of this group met in secret in the kitchen of Mao’s residence in Zhongnanhai. Though no records or eyewitness accounts of the meeting survive, the cabal has gone down in history as the 七人帮 (qi ren bang, or Gang of Seven), a reference to the most important conspirators at the meeting - Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Kang Sheng, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen, Xie Fuzhi, and Wang Li.
Lin Biao knew that Mao’s confidants were wary at the thought of him as Paramount Leader, but he would have been shocked at the lengths to which the Gang of Seven would go. Lin’s indecisiveness also hurt his candidacy; many counterfactual historians have speculated that had he moved quickly upon his return to Beijing and pressed for a full meeting of the Politburo - backed up by the army if necessary - he could have won the position of Paramount Leader with a minimum of dramatics. In any event, this was not the course that Lin pursued. Instead, he sealed himself up in the Defence Ministry building and plotted his next move with trusted subordinates, who found him surprisingly conflicted and dilatory to a man (3). Meanwhile, the Gang of Seven sprang into action. Another consideration that Lin had failed to take into account was that while he did indeed control the army, the Gang of Seven controlled a facet of society that was almost equally as important - the vast propaganda apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. Thus it was that the entire nation - still in mourning for Chairman Mao, whose official funeral had not even been scheduled due to the uncertainty as to who was in control - was shocked further by the release on April 9th of the document 毛主席的最后遗书 (Mao zhuxi de zuihou yishu, or “The Final Testament of Chairman Mao”). The testament attacked Lin Biao in the strongest possible terms, calling the Defence Minister a “black hand,” a “counterrevolutionary Rightist,” and alleging that he was “a running dog of the petty-bourgeois capitalist roaders.” Subsequent interviews with nurses and others who were present during Mao’s final days have established that the Great Helmsman himself played no part in the drafting of his final testament; although we cannot state definitively who the author was, it is likely that most of the work was done by the skilled propagandist Yao Wenyuan at the behest of Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, among others. As the nation reeled and as Lin Biao struggled to come up with a response, it was clear that the Maoists were not going gently into the good night.
In the early days of the post-Mao period, it seemed as though the power struggle was binary in nature: Lin Biao wanted to become the next Paramount Leader, and the Gang of Seven - or as they were popularly known at that time, the 厨房革命委员会(chufang geming weiyuanhui, or the “Kitchen Revolutionary Committee,” a reference to the place of their initial meeting after Mao’s death) were determined to prevent Lin from assuming the reins of power. Indeed, initially almost everyone forgot about Prime Minister and Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Zhou Enlai. This was a mistake. Not only was Zhou a canny political infighter with a preternatural ability to tell which way the wind was blowing, but he was also perhaps the most beloved by the common people of all the senior Communist Party cadres (4). Zhou had little love for either Lin Biao or the Gang of Seven. On the one hand, Zhou deplored the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the Gang’s policies; he had spent the last several years attempting to mitigate them without getting purged himself. On the other hand, Zhou disliked Lin Biao as well; not only had Lin been almost as implicated in the Cultural Revolution as the members of the Gang of Seven, but he was also an ardent supporter of the USSR. For his part, Zhou had painstakingly endeavored to lay the diplomatic groundwork for a rapprochement between the People’s Republic of China and the United States over the past year and a half. Typically risk-averse and extraordinarily cautious, Zhou threw caution to the winds after Mao’s death, contriving to have his friend Deng Xiaoping brought back from the countryside to which he had been purged and attempting to position himself as the 第三选择 (di san xuanze, or Third Option) between what he portrayed as the opposing extremes of Lin Biao and the Gang of Seven. Indeed, the Zhou-Deng alliance was perhaps the axis on which the future of China turned . . .
The nation essentially came to a halt for almost two weeks as the backroom infighting as to who would succeed Mao reached a fever pitch. As the Chairman’s body mouldered - a date for the funeral had still not been set - Lin Biao finally decided to make his move, setting the stage for what has come to be known as the 三讲日 (san jiang ri, or “Day of Three Speeches”). On April 20th, Lin addressed the people of China from the Defence Ministry, where he stated that, in his role as the Vice Chairman of the Communist Party and as Mao’s designated successor, he would henceforth be temporarily taking power until such time as a full meeting of the National People’s Congress could be convened. Lin further announced that the Gang of Seven had been detained as counterrevolutionaries, and that units of the People’s Liberation Army would move into major cities to “maintain the public order and ensure the continued progress of the revolution.” Unfortunately, Lin’s speech - crafted by Chen Boda - erred in one crucial point. The Gang of Seven had in fact fled Beijing the night before, having received word that Lin Biao was preparing to move against them the next day. Although the exact means by which they received the information are unknown to us, we should not be unduly surprised. After all, the master spy Kang Sheng counted himself among the Gang’s members, and the People’s Liberation Army was not nearly as united behind the Defence Minister as Lin Biao would have hoped. The Gang had fled to Shanghai, a hotbed of radicalism, and it was from that city that Jiang Qing made her speech to the nation later in the afternoon (5). Jiang played the role of grieving widow to perfection; as she choked back sobs, she called on the Chinese people to “fight and uphold Chairman Mao Zedong Thought! Fight against the usurper Lin Biao! Fight so that New China will not be lost! Fight for Marxism-Leninism and the revolution!” As unrest began to break out across the nation, Zhou Enlai seized his opportunity. Elements of the People’s Liberation Army loyal to Zhou attacked the elements that had sworn their allegiance to Lin Biao, driving Lin’s forces from Zhongnanhai (6) and buying time for Zhou to make his address to the Chinese people in the early evening. Zhou’s speech began by condemning Lin Biao and taking the “Last Testament of Chairman Mao” at face value. Clearly, Zhou said, Lin was a counter-revolutionary whose malign influence Mao had been unable to excise before his untimely death; he was manifestly unsuited to be Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic. Zhou then neatly pivoted into a criticism of the “Kitchen Revolutionary Committee,” excoriating them for “inexcusable and serious Leftist deviations from the Party line” (7). Zhou finished by parroting Lin’s words from earlier in the day, declaring that as he was the most senior member of the Party due to the “exposure of Lin Biao as a counterrevolutionary,” Zhou himself would be “temporarily assuming the office of Chairman of the Communist Party until such time as the National People’s Congress can be convened.” As Zhou spoke, Lin’s troops rallied and counterattacked; a tank battle broke out blocks from Tiananmen Square. Beijing was burning, and the chaos had only just begun.
NOTES
(1) I refer to the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, which occurred in the spring of that year along the Ussuri River. A bunch of people died, the USSR kept the disputed territory, and Mao decided that the Americans weren’t so bad after all.
(2) 万岁 (wansui) literally means “ten thousand years,” but is perhaps better translated as “long live.” Basically, when Chinese people start wansui-ing something or someone, it means that they really like it. BONUS: in Japanese, the same two characters 万歳 are read as banzai, which many of you will recognize from every terrible World War II movie ever made.
(3) Lin was famously introverted and monosyllabic OTL. He was not exactly the decisive type, which kind of hurts him in this sort of situation. The early bird catches the Paramount Leadership, and all that.
(4) Zhou managed to make it his entire life without once being purged, which was no mean feat in the Maoist CCP. He accomplished this by shutting his mouth and doing what Mao told him, even when it was really stupid. Well, that might be a little harsh.
(5) Keep in mind that almost no one in China owns a TV at this point, so these “addresses to the nation” are a bit ad hoc. They’re broadcast on state radio, and each faction plants the text of their speech in friendly newspapers across the country to be disseminated. Even without the TV, news got around pretty quickly in China.
(6) Zhongnanhai (中南海, literally “South Central Sea”) is the district in Beijing where the Chinese Communist Party headquarters are located. The name is somewhat misleading: while it is near a lake, it is not near an ocean of any sort.
(7) Being accused of “Leftist deviationism” from the Party line was also a bad thing, although it wasn’t as bad as being a rightist. In fact, the official line even today is that the Cultural Revolution was a “Leftist deviation” for which Mao and others are to blame. But the official line is also that Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong (not, say, sixty-nine percent right. Seventy percent exactly. Whose job was it to run the numbers?).
[FONT="]*The fun has begun in the race to succeed Mao and become the next Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China! It will be . . . messy. In the next installment, those pesky foreigners will start nosing around. Hilarity will ensue. As always, thanks for reading.[/FONT]
