A
few weeks ago, a person by the name of Tanmoy Ibrahim wrote an article on the
occasion of the 50th anniversary of Lin Biao’s death. The article
was titled “Why after 50 years of his death Lin Biao terrorizes the Chinese
rulers?” (See: Why
after 50 years of his death Lin Biao terrorises the Chinese rulers? – People's
Review (peoplesreview.in) )
The article purports to eulogise Lin Biao and to damn Zhou Enlai. This is embedded in the graphic that accompanies his article (above). It shows Mao and Lin smiling at each other with a sullen-looking Zhou imposed between them.
The first point I want to deal with is the death of Lin Biao. Ibrahim says that Lin’s death was necessary for Zhou to restore capitalism. He questions why Lin would flee to the Soviet Union given the strain in relations between it and China and why he “who never lost a battle in his lifetime” would be so stupid as to board a jet with “no fuel”.
The assassination theory was originally proposed by a Chinese author who had a study of Lin Biao (The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Biao) published in an English translation by Collins in 1983. He (she or even they?) hid his real name behind the pseudonym Yao Mingle. His evidence of an assassination came from pages of a diary allegedly written by a member of Unit 8341, the PLA unit guarding Zhongnanhai, and passed on by a person whose pseudonym was Zhao Yanji. His memoirs and secret documents allegedly obtained by him from the special investigators into the death of Lin Biao, together with the diary of the soldier, Tan Shu, formed the basis for a rather fanciful account of Lin’s assassination. Neither Zhao Yanji (said to have died before the publication of the book), nor Tan Shu have ever been identified or traced.
Tan Shu claims he was part of an operations group of 60 charged with ambushing Lin Biao’s car after he left a banquet with Mao and Zhou. This was all planned by Wang Dongxing. They lay in wait for the car, with four 40mm rockets and three 60mm anti-tank rockets. Others were armed with light machine guns and submachine guns. Two rockets were enough to take out the car and its occupants. Wang Dongxing reported the success of the assassination to Zhou, who in turn reported it to Mao who shrugged it off, allegedly saying “As to who in this is guilty, it doesn’t matter what anyone says. I don’t give a damn.”
I can understand why Yao Mingle doesn’t directly quote this assassination story. Firstly, it would undermine his efforts to portray Mao and Lin as a united team opposed to Zhou; secondly, the idea of rockets being launched (from a distance of 15.7 metres!) and the associated noise and confusion not being a sensation in the heart of Beijing, is just unbelievable.
The official version is that Lin Liguo (Lin’s son) was in charge of an operation to blow up Mao’s train as he was returning to Beijing from the south. (I’ll deal later with why Lin may have wanted Mao dead.) The plan was aborted by those tasked with carrying it out, and Mao arrived in Beijing. Lin had a Trident jet on standby at a military airport at Shanhaiguan near Beidaihe. Lin’s daughter mentioned some apparently unusual behaviour of her parents to an officer of Unit 8341 who contacted Zhou who immediately ordered Wu Faxian, the air force commander and a Lin loyalist, to ground all planes. He immediately alerted Lin, who panicked and quickly drove with his wife and son to Shanhaiguan and demanded that the plane take off. The pilot had had no time to fully refuel the aircraft, and it departed for the Soviet Union. Short of fuel, the pilot tried to land the plane on a pebbly field in Manchuria, but it crashed killing all on board.
If this version is true, why would Lin choose the Soviet Union to flee to given the stridency of his condemnation of social-imperialism?
Who knows what, indeed whether, Soviet diplomats had any foreknowledge of Lin’s plans to assassinate Mao. They would certainly have known many of the details of the conflicts between Mao and Lin. The latter was well-known to the Soviets, having convalesced there for five years, from 1937 to 1942, when he was the link between the Comintern and the CCP. And they had form: Peng Dehuai had been approached by the Soviet Ambassador in the mid-50s to stage a coup against Mao – one reason why he was later accused of having illicit relations with a foreign country.
In any case, where else would he flee? How would he have been received in Taiwan, in Japan or either of the Koreas? The Soviet Union was as close, or closer, as any of the others, and would have had more political capital to be made out of his defection.
I doubt whether China will ever open its archives, and the Russian release of Soviet archives has seen evidence of tampering to suit anti-Communist and anti-Stalin agendas. Would the same not happen in China?
So, for the moment we are left with a choice between two stories, and my money, until anything else crops up, is on the official version.
Why would Lin Biao have wanted to assassinate Mao?
This all
revolves around Lin’s ambition to become head of state. Mao had been Chairman
of the Party and President of the PRC until he announced in 1959 that he wanted
to step down from the Presidency. Both Lin Biao and Liu Shaoqi wanted the
position, but Liu had the numbers, including backing from Mao, and was
appointed in April 1959. He and Deng had been strong proponents of the Great
Leap Forward although they did so from an “ultra-left” position of promoting
exaggerated production figures and pushing for an early transition to
Communism. At the same time, both supported abandoning rural collectivisation
and pushed for the “household contract responsibility system”, so no sooner had
Liu won the Presidency than contradictions between he and Mao began to emerge.
The
Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966.
Mao initially praised the student Red Guards for creating havoc, and was
happy to have classes suspended for six months so that they could travel the
country promoting anti-revisionism. But the schools were to remain closed for
over a year, and Red Guards amongst the workers and the students forgot that
the aim of struggle was a higher level of unity. The country was in chaos and
the only means of restoring order was through the intervention of the PLA.
Mao relied
on Lin Biao to over see the revolutionary three-in-one committee structure that
was designed to squash the violence of factional struggle. From 1959 onwards he
held the three responsibilities of Vice Premier of the State Council, Vice
Chairman of the CPC, and Minister of National Defense.
Lao Tian,
the comrade some of whose works I have translated, argues that Lin went through
three stages of involvement with the Cultural Revolution. At first, he
supported Mao’s line that the PLA had to support the Left, but his own
followers among the generals were themselves the target of rebel PLA groups, so
he had to suppress that group. An armed conflict between PLA factions in
Beijing on May 13, 1967 cemented his ties to his generals and their demand for
protection from the masses. This was extended to “dismantling of the local
revolutionary committees (which) began with the composition of the committees,
which gradually moved towards a single military administration and military
Bonapartism, and then led to a nationwide campaign of "two purges in one
batch” - a purge of May 16 counter-revolutionaries and criticism of
factionalism, creating tens of millions of unjust, false and wrong cases. This
led to a complete reorganisation of the composition of the Revolutionary
Committee - from a triple combination of military and cadres to a single
combination of almost pure military control” (Lao Tian). (See: servethepeople:
Lao Tian: Lin Biao and the Left (mike-servethepeople.blogspot.com) )
Lin placed
his loyal generals in charge of the Army, Navy, Air Force and the General
Logistics Department of the PLA. In May 1966, Lin Biao made a speech in which
he had referred to coups. Mao was concerned enough by the context of this
referral that he discussed it in a letter he wrote to Jiang Qing on July 8,
1966: “Our friend's [Lin Biao’s] speech—the center is urging to publish it. And
I plan to agree to publish it. He speaks specifically on the subject of coups.
On this question, there has been no such talk in the past. The way he brings
certain things up makes me feel unsettled overall”.
Mao’s
dependency on the PLA through Lin was followed by the amendment of the Party
Constitution at the 9th Congress in 1969 so that Lin could be named
as First Vice-Chairman and Mao’s successor.
But Lin was not satisfied. No-one knew how long Mao would live, and
alongside that uncertainty, the position of the Presidency was vacant and had
been since October 1968 when Liu had bee stripped of his Party positions.
Throughout
1969 and 1970, Lin let it be known that he proposed that Mao should become
State President, with himself as his deputy. Mao was adamantly opposed to
filling the position himself, so if the Party could be persuaded that the
nation needed such a position, Lin was the obvious nominee.
During preparations
for the Second Plenary Session of the 9th Central Committee, held in Lushan
from August–September 1970, Mao became uncomfortable with Lin's growing power,
and began to maneuver against Lin by undermining his supporters within the
military. He accepted a proposal by Zhou
Enlai that the positions of the commanders should be rotated.
At the
Second Plenum, Lin advocated that Chairman Mao take the position of President,
which had not been filled in since the removal of Liu Shaoqi, but Mao dismissed
this appeal, suspecting Lin of using it to increase his own power. Mao did not
attack Lin directly, but showed his displeasure by attacking Lin's ally, Chen
Boda, who was quickly disgraced. Lin kept his position, but the events of the
Lushan Conference revealed a growing distrust between Lin and Mao.
At
subsequent talks with provincial leaders during a tour of regions after the Second
Plenum, Mao specifically warned against plots and conspiracies, saying: “I hope
that you will practice Marxism and not revisionism; that you will unite and not
split; that you will be sincere and open and not resort to plotting and
conspiracy.”
There can
be no doubt at whom these words were directed. Here is an excerpt from these
talks:
At the 1970 Lushan Conference they made a surprise attack and carried
out underground activity. Why did they not dare to act openly? Clearly they had
something to hide. So they first dissembled and then made a surprise attack.
They concealed things from three of the five members of the Standing Committee
of the Politburo. They also concealed things from the great majority of
comrades on the Politburo apart from their own few big generals. These big
generals included Huang Yung-sheng, Wu Fa-hsien, Yeh Ch’ün, Li Tso-p’eng, and
Ch’iu Hui-tso, as well as Li Hsüeh-feng and Cheng Wei-shan.[4] Before they
launched their surprise attack they did not let out a whisper. They caused trouble
not merely for a day and a half, but from 23 August right through the 24th and
up to midday on the 25th, altogether two days and a half. This kind of
behaviour shows that they had some aim in mind! P’eng Te-huai formed a military
club and issued a declaration of war. They were not even up to P’eng Te-huai’s
level. This only shows how low their style of work was.
In my view, behind their surprise attack and their underground activity
lay purpose, organization and a programme. Their programme was to appoint a
state chairman, and to extol ‘genius’: in other words, to oppose the line of
the Ninth Congress and to defeat the three-point agenda of the Second Plenum of
the Ninth Central Committee. A certain person was anxious to become state
chairman, to split the Party and to seize power. The question of genius is a
theoretical question. Their theory was idealist apriorism. Someone has said
that to oppose genius is to oppose me. But I am no genius. I read Confucian
books for six years and capitalist books for seven. I did not read
Marxist-Leninist books until 1918, so how can I be a genius? Didn’t I put
circles round those adverbs several times over?[5] The Party Constitution was
settled at the Ninth Congress. Why not take a look at it? I wrote ‘Some Opinions’,[6]
which specially criticizes the genius theory, only after looking up some people
to talk with them, and after some investigations and research. It is not that I
do not want to talk about genius. To be a genius is to be a bit more
intelligent. But genius does not depend on one person or a few people. It
depends on a party, the party which is the vanguard of the proletariat. Genius
is dependent on the mass line, on collective wisdom.
Comrade Lin Piao did not discuss that speech of his[7] with me, nor did
he show it to me. When they had something to say they did not disclose it in
advance. Probably this is because they thought they had a grip on things and
were likely to succeed. But as soon as they were told that their ideas were not
acceptable, they became jittery. At first they were as bold as brass, giving
the impression they could raze Lushan to the ground or stop the earth
revolving. But after a few days they hurriedly withdrew the draft.[8] If it was
right, why withdraw it? This shows that they were devoid of ideas and in a
panic.
The struggle with P’eng Te-huai at the 1959 Lushan Conference was a
struggle between two headquarters. The struggle with Liu Shao-ch’i was also a
struggle between two headquarters. The struggle at this Lushan Conference is yet
another struggle between two headquarters.
The struggle at Lushan this time was different from the nine previous
struggles. On the previous nine occasions we drew some conclusions, while this
time we have shielded Vice-Chairman Lin and have not drawn conclusions
concerning an individual. He must, of course, assume some responsibility. What
are we to do about these people? We should still operate a policy of educating
them, that is, ‘learning from past mistakes to prevent future ones and curing
the disease to save the patient’. We still want to protect Lin. No matter who
it is who has made mistakes, it is not a good thing to forget unity and the
line. After I return to Peking I must seek them out again to have a talk. If
they do not come to see me I will go to see them. Some of them may be saved,
others it may not be possible to save. This depends on their actions. They have
two possible futures: they may reform or they may not. It is difficult for
someone who has taken the lead in committing major errors of principle, errors
of line or direction, to reform. Looking back, did Ch’en Tu-hsiu reform? Did
Ch’u Ch’iu-pai, Li Li-san, Lo Chang-lung, Wang Ming, Chang Kuo-t’ao, Kao Kang,
Jao Shu-shih, P’eng Te-huai or Liu Shao-ch’i reform? They did not reform.
I spoke to Comrade Lin Piao and some of the things he said were not very
accurate. For example he said that a genius only appears in the world once in a
few centuries and in China once in a few millennia. This just doesn’t fit the
facts. Marx and Engels were contemporaries, and not one century had elapsed
before we had Lenin and Stalin, so how could you say that a genius only appears
once in a few centuries? In China there were Ch’en Sheng and Wu Kuang, Hung
Hsiu-ch’üan and Sun Yat-sen,[9] so how could you say that a genius only appears
once in a few millennia? And then there is all this business about pinnacles
and ‘one sentence being worth ten thousand’.[10] Don’t you think this is going
too far? One sentence is, after all, just one sentence, how can it be worth ten
thousand sentences? We should not appoint a state chairman. I don’t want to be
state chairman. I have said this six times already. If each time I said it I
used one sentence, that is now the equivalent of sixty thousand sentences.
But they never listen, so each of my sentences is not even worth half a
sentence. In fact its value is nil. It’s only Ch’en Po-ta’s sentences that are
worth ten thousand apiece to them. He talked about ‘establishing in a big way’,
by which he gave the appearance of meaning to establish my prestige.[11] But
when you get to the bottom of it, he really meant himself. They also said that
the People’s Liberation Army was built and led by me, and commanded personally
by Lin.[12] It seems that the person who founded it cannot command it! And I
did not build it all by myself either.
When it comes to questions of line, questions of principle, I take a
firm hold and do not relax my grip. On major questions of principle I do not
make concessions. After the Lushan Conference I employed three methods: the
first was throwing stones, the second was mixing sand into soil and the third
was undermining the wall. I criticized the material produced by Ch’en Po-ta
which fooled a great many people. I approved the report of the Thirty-eighth
Army and the report of the Tsinan Military Region which opposed arrogance and
complacency.[13] Then there was the Military Affairs Committee which held such
a long discussion meeting without a word of criticism of Ch’en. I inserted a
few critical notes about that in a certain document.[14] My method was to pick
up these stones, write a few remarks on them, and let everyone discuss them.
This is what I call throwing stones. When soil is too compressed it cannot
breathe. If you mix in a little sand, then it can breathe. The staff of the
Military Affairs Committee was too uniform in its composition, and needed to
have some new names added. This is mixing sand in the soil. The reorganization
of the Peking Military Region was undermining the wall.[15]
What is your opinion of the Lushan Conference? For instance, is the
Sixth Brief Report of the North China Group really revolutionary,
semi-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary? I myself regard it as a
counter-revolutionary report. You were all present at the meeting of the
ninety-nine, when the Premier made the summing-up speech and the
self-examinations of the five big generals were issued, as well as those of big
generals Li Hsüeh-feng and Cheng Wei-shan, so that everyone thought that the
problem had been solved.[16] But in fact the Lushan affair had not finished,
the problem had not been solved. They wanted to suppress it. They did not even
let cadres of the rank of head of the General Command and the General Staff
departments know about it. This would not do!
What I have been saying are my own personal opinions, which I am giving
you informally. I shall not draw formal conclusions now, this must be done by
the Central Committee.
I’ll refer
to the argument over “genius” later with some other aspects of Lin Biao’s
ambitions.
Based on Mao’s
remarks above, Lin would have known that his days as Mao’s heir apparent were
over. However, he had complete control over the commanding heights of all
branches of the PLA, and his son Lin Liguo has his own group of conspirators in
Shanghai. They called themselves Project
571, because the Chinese words for these numbers are also homophones for
“military uprising”.
Having
convinced himself of the need for Mao’s assassination and a coup, Lin had to
convince his wife and his senior generals to support him. Mao had been critical
of Ye Qun, Lin’s wife, in the same talks he held with provincial leaders after
the Second Plenum at Lushan. He told
them:
I never approved of one’s wife
becoming the office manager in one’s own work unit. Over at Lin Piao’s, it is
Yeh Ch’ün who manages his office. When the four of them want to ask Lin Piao
about anything they have to go through her. In doing any work one should do it
oneself and read and endorse papers oneself. One should not rely on one’s
secretary. One shouldn’t let one’s secretary wield so much power. My secretary
is only responsible for receiving and dispatching papers. I select the
documents myself, read them myself, and when something has to be done I do my own
writing so that no mistakes are made.
Along with Ye Qun, the four generals were Huang Yongsheng,
Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo. Convincing them to join the plot, and
then finding the opportunity to put their plans into action, explains the
12-month delay between the plans and the performance.
Our friend Tanmoy Ibrahim puts forward another explanation.
Mao and Lin were peas in a pod, so much so that Lin was “more Maoist than Mao
himself” (attributed to the CIA!). As an inseparable partnership, their
revisionist opponent Zhou Enlai could “only curb Mao’s influence by doing away
with Lin”. Well, it has always suited
some people to call Zhou a revisionist and a Dengist, but I don’t buy it. Nor
do I buy Ibrahim’s denial of Lin’s ambitions and the serious blow dealt by Mao
to those ambitions following the Second Plenary at Lushan.
Mao’s judgement of Lin and what he was up to was spot on,
and Lin’s subsequent attempt to have Mao assassinated only confirms that.
Lin Biao
conspired to have Mao assassinated in his haste to assume the Presidency of the
country and the Chairmanship of the Party.
He tried to flee to the USSR when his conspiracy was revealed and died
when his plane crash-landed in Mongolia.
But was it
simply a matter of ambition, or were there differences with Mao that added to
his sense of insecurity and hence to his need to bring on the assassination
attempt?
Lin Biao
was one of China’s ten Marshalls, but he was not the foremost among them. Zhu
De, He Long and Peng Dehuai had higher public profiles during the first decade
of the PRC. What enabled Lin Biao to
come to the fore was his championing of Mao’s leadership and his promotion of a
loyalist personality cult around Mao.
He oversaw
the publication in 1961, for military distribution only at that stage, of
quotations culled from Mao’s works. Five
years later, with a foreword in which he assumed responsibility for the
publication, the Quotations became a visible sign of loyalty to Mao, and Lin
rode on its coattails.
That is not
to say that the promotion of Mao’s works was in any way wrong. It made the
military one of the most politically conscious institutions in China. In 1964, Mao wrote that “What the PLA excels
in is the field of political ideology”. Just prior to the launch of the
Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao invited Jiang Qing to hold a forum for
participants from the PLA on the question of work in literature and art in the
armed forces. The forum was held in Shanghai from February 2 – 20, 1966. To those of us in capitalist countries, it
may perhaps seem incongruous to place the words “culture” and “military” in the
same sentence, but here was Jiang Qing hosting thirteen film shows and three
theatrical performances – the latter being revolutionary operas she had been
working on for the previous three years and attending private and group
discussions about cultural work with military leaders. It was made quite clear
in a 1968 publication on the forum that it had been “entrusted” to Comrade
Jiang Qing by Comrade Lin Biao. A letter
from Lin Biao to members of the Standing Committee of the Military Commission
served as an introduction to the publication.
The letter was printed in boldface – a typographical privilege reserved
for the words of Mao Zedong.
By the time
of the 9th Congress of the CPC, as noted previously, the PLA under
Lin had stabilized the factional ranks of the rebellious students and with
Lin’s star in the ascendancy, he was named in the Party Constitution as Mao’s
heir. Mao had already expressed concerns about Lin, though, in his letter to
Jiang Qing of July 8, 1966 – a letter which was burnt by Qi Benyu, on the
orders of Mao following a request for its destruction from Lin – but which
survived thanks to a hand-written copy made and kept by Zhou Enlai. Perhaps
this can be cited by Ibrahim as an example of Zhou’s “cunning”! Personally, I
say “Thanks Comrade Zhou!”
I’ve
referred previously to the debate around the theory of “genius” and I won’t go
into that in much more detail. Suffice
it to say that Lin was doing exactly what Khrushchev had done before him –
using the most lavish and obsequious praise of the current Party leader behind
which to conceal his plans to depose and destroy him. None-one shouted “Long live Stalin!” louder
than Krushchev, and no-one praised Mao more than Lin Biao.
This is
where his “A genius like Chairman Mao emerges only once in several
hundred years in the world and in several thousand years in China”, and his “one sentence being worth ten
thousand” all fit in. But they don’t
exhaust the shallowness of his praise.
He said “I have always said that Mao Zedong Thought must be
implemented both when we understand it and when we may temporarily not
understand it.” Nothing can be properly implemented when it is not understood,
and it is wrong to suggest that it can be, or should be.
Not only were people encouraged to blindly implement Mao
Zedong Thought, but they were also discouraged from reading other Marxist
theoreticians.
On September 18, 1966, he wrote “The writings of Marx and
Lenin are too numerous; they cannot be finished. Moreover, they are too far
removed from us. In the classical works of Marxism-Leninism, we must devote
ninety-nine percent of our efforts to the study of Chairman Mao's worlds; they are
our revolutionary textbooks.”
In the same piece, he wrote “Chairman Mao stands much higher
than Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin. There is no one in the world today who has
reached the level of Chairman Mao. Some people say that Capital is the basis of
all theories. In fact, it only sets forth the laws and problems of capitalist
societies. In our country we have already overthrown capitalism; we are now
setting forth the laws and problems of a socialist society. To oppose
imperialism, modern revisionism, and the reactionaries in various countries and
to build socialism, we must rely upon the thought of Mao Zedong. The thought of
Mao Zedong is Marxism-Leninism at its highest level.”
He also pushed the idea that Mao Zedong Thought was not just
a higher stage of Marxism-Leninism, but Marxism-Leninism of a new era, an era
that had gone beyond the era of imperialism. After Lin’s death, Mao referred to
this, saying that it was still the era of imperialism and that his Thought was
not something that was “absolute” or “perfect” and could not be further
developed. Ibrahim still adheres to Lin’s absurdity, and even out-Maos what he
calls the “so-called ‘Maoist’ movement…started by ‘Gonzalo’”. He says “the
movement continues to work as per Lenin’s era and refuse to accept Lin’s
assertion that the present era is not Lenin’s but Mao’s”.
Lin Biao did some very useful work in popularising Mao
Zedong Thought and in supporting the earliest stages of the Cultural
Revolution, but he turned out to be a charlatan whose own understanding of
Marxism-Leninism was shallow and deficient.
Now, a few other matters arising from Tanmoy Ibrahim’s
article.
In addition to slandering a “cunning” Zhou as someone who
was advocating “prostrating before the West to gain access to technology and
capital investment”, he refers to Dong Biwu as “their man” (ie the US’s “man),
and a “right-winger…saved by Zhou during the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution’ using his clout.” Dong Biwu was an old and very close associate of
Mao, who always referred to him by the honorific “Dong Lao”. They were the only
two of the founding members of the CCP to survive and to share the Tiananmen
rostrum on October 1, 1949. He was one of two vice-Presidents of China (with
Song Qingling) and after Lin Biao’s death he became Acting President of China,
serving in that capacity from February 1972 to January 1975. Like nearly ever
other leader, he was criticised early in the Cultural Revolution, but was never
overthrown. He didn’t need Zhou’s protection, his own status ensured that he
was never struggled against.
Several communications between Zhou and Kissinger are cited
as evidence that Zhou did not want ideology to stand in the way of an
unprincipled rapprochement with US imperialism. What might shock Ibrahim would
be the transcripts of Mao’s discussions with Kissinger on February 17-18, 1973,
October 15, 1975, October 21, 1975, his talk with Nixon on February 21, 1972, and
with Gerard Ford on December 2, 1975. If you want to see some right-wing
opinions laid before these US imperialist leaders, you need go no further than
Mao. These transcripts are all available
on the web. Unlike Ibrahim, who believes that you can only say “Down with the
US imperialists and their running dogs!” to the imperialists’ faces, Mao
certainly made them feel at home with an apparent sharing of views on a range
of topics.
Ibrahim is certainly a student of Chinese politics. Note the certainty of his claim that “Zhou
also brought the term ‘Third World’ in the CPC’s lexicon” and his “this later translated
into the Theory of Three Worlds”. I
think the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) has dealt with Mao’s
(not Zhou’s) development of the Theory of Three Worlds, in the Spring 2020 AC
so I won’t labour the point. (See AC+2020+Spring.pdf
(cpaml.org) )
In his hatred of Comrade Zhou Enlai, Ibrahim, the master of
China’s politics, says “Mao didn’t allow any state mourning of Zhou, who was
trying to reverse the gains of the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’”.
So, there was no state mourning, and it was because Zhou had angered Mao by
going in for capitalist restoration. But
there was a state funeral, presided over by Deng Xiaoping and many mourners
attended. Foreigners reported that Beijing was like a ghost town. There was no
burial ceremony at Babaoshan, because Zhou had asked to be cremated with his
ashes to be scattered across the hills and rivers of his hometown, rather than
stored in a ceremonial mausoleum.
There were restrictions on further public mourning: these
were the "five nos": no wearing black armbands, no mourning wreaths,
no mourning halls, no memorial activities, and no handing out photos of Zhou.
These cannot be attributed to Mao – there is no documentation carrying his name
to that effect. But Zhou had been the
subject of a campaign by the Gang of Four and the bans are in line with the
struggle against Zhou promoted by the Gang. In any case, it backfired – when
the Qingming Festival occurred three months later, the masses spontaneously
gathered in Tiananmen Square, throwing those who had attacked Zhou into a
frenzy. There is no documentation to indicate that this included Mao. I
personally saw evidence of this at Tiananmen Square where poems and pledges and
large amounts of cash (large denomination notes) covered the Monument to the
Heroes.
Zhou Enlai was Mao’s most loyal and reliable colleague. He was open and above-board and did not
intrigue or conspire. He was a Marxist-Leninist and not a revisionist.
