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Part 1 of historian Xiao Gongqin’s take on the Lin Biao incident. Scared by Mao’s manoeuvring against his dad, and aiming to ensure the family’s eminence post Mao’s death, son Lin Liguo incompetently tries to organise Mao’s assassination and coup. https://www.chinese-future.org/articles/-1
Ye Qun, Lin Biao’s wife is in on it, too. She wants the power too - and, given her husband’s illnesses/weirdness she spends a lot of time managing him. Lin Biao, though, completely in the dark.
When Lin Liguo tells his sister about the plan, and asks her to tell dad, she knows the coup plan is ridiculous, tries to dissuade him, but stays quiet. And so the fateful day rolls round... and that’s in Part 2 which I’ve not read yet!
OK Part 2: https://www.chinese-future.org/articles/-2 . Lin Liguo, the son, is now holed up in a PLA airforce base in BJG with his coup chums, hears Mao is only going to spend one day in Shanghai so any assassination attempt is mute. Decides to move to “Plan B”, to flee to Guangzhou,
...and set up a second government (wait, it gets crazier), and send a subordinate to Moscow to ask them to launch a missile strike against Beijing from a submarine... Lin then flies back to Shanhaiguan to join his dad in Beidaihe. This is sept 12th evening.
At this point, some claim Liguo & Ye Qun finally tell Lin Biao the plan - to fly to Guangzhou on the next day & oppose Mao from there. We don’t know Lin’s reaction; “You’re even nuttier than me!” is highly possible. Others claim Lin is still in the dark as the 13th dawns...
But! On the evening of the 12th, knowing the craziness of the plot, its inevitable failure, Lin Biao’s daughter, Lin Liheng (aka Doudou), makes a phone call to the leadership guard unit, 8341, to report the plan to take (maybe kidnap) Lin Biao to Guangzhou the next day.
The 8341 soldiers are a bit surprised; has Lin Doudou gone completely mad? But 8341 Beidaihe reports to senior in Beijing, who reports to Wang Dongxing, Mao’s head bodyguard and political player, who tells Premier Zhou Enlai. Who can’t quite believe what he’s hearing either.
Ok, so we’re still late night on the 12th, Premier Zhou orders the No 256 airplane in Shanhaiguan airport to return to Beijing; the pilot, Pan Jingyin (Liguo’s guy), says plane needs repairs. So Zhou orders the airport closed, nothing allowed to take off w/o his & 3 other’s OK.
Zhou then calls through to Ye Qun to say hi and ask what their plans are for tomorrow. Oh we might go fly around if the weather is nice, she replies. Zhou: I suggest you don’t fly as the weather looks bad. Maybe I should come down there. Ye knows he knows...
Ye Qun panics. Our historian Xiao argues at this point, Zhou doesn’t actually know very much, only has Lin Doudou’s one report about a flight to Guangzhou. But Ye Qun panics, thinks the plan is known, calls Lin Liguo and they wake up Lin Biao, who’s just taken sleeping pills...
They decide to fly to Guangzhou that night at around 11.30. Liguo calls through to Pilot Pan to tell him to get ready. daughter Lin Doudou at this point reports again to 8341/Zhou - they’re planning to fly tonight and Lin Biao is going voluntarily.
Zhou still thinks Lin might be going to get away from Mao, that he can still be reasoned with and that as the No 2 in the Party, he has no right or power to detain him. So doesn’t do anything else, just tell the 8341 guards to watch, follow and report Lin Biao’s movements.
The family jumps in the car just before midnight. It’s unclear even at this point how much Lin Biao knows, & if he does finally know of his wife & son’s plotting then maybe he realises running is their only option. But maybe still thinks they’re flying south, not to the USSR...
OK, we’re back...Lin Liguo, Ye Qun & Lin Biao are driving fast to Shanhaiguan airport. Lin Jnr called ahead to tell the pilot, Pan Jingyin, to get the plane (a medium-sized transport plane, Trident 1E 256) ready & to minimise the crew. Pan doesn’t wake co-pilot, navigator etc.
Lin Jnr is planning to commandeer the plane, redirect it to the USSR so doesn’t want a dissenting crew. At 12.22am on the 13th the Lin’s Hongqi car arrives at the airfield, drives up to the aircraft & they board with 5 others. Pan runs over, boards & starts the engines.
Other crew members and airport staff run to the plane but its already moving. The 8341 guard car(s) which had followed from the Beidaihe leadership compound arrives too - Premier Zhou had told them to monitor & report - but they don’t have ability/authority to try stop the plane.
A call comes in from 8341 Beidaihe to the airport to tell them to stop the plane - but different xitong (departments)! So airport staff (airforce, i think) don’t know what to do. Some are shouting to block the runway...chaos...
... and the plane is already taxi-ing, with no runway lights, so its bumpy on/off the runway. Pan’s an experienced pilot so they’re airborne at 12.32am on the morning of Sept 13. And from then on, we’re kind of guessing - none of those on the plane will survive....
Xiao, our historian, reckons that Lin Liguo prob used his gun to force Pan to redirect the plan from south to Guangzhou to northwest, towards Irkutsk, in the USSR. By 1.55am, after 83mins of flying, they’re over the border into Mongolia...but they only have 40mins of fuel left.
What Xiao thinks happens is they decide to land the plane on flatland - there’s no airport nearby. But this kind of plane is bulky, and challenging to land at the best of times. Add no lights, no co-pilot, no navigator...
They crash land at 2.27am in the Gobi desert, eastern Mongolia, and the plane rolls, breaks up at impact and bursts into flames. Xiao dismisses rumours of a missile strike on the plane; Beijing didn’t really know what was going on, and if they did why not stop the plane earlier?
And given the chaos at the airport, no time to plant a bomb on the plane, another rumour. There have been rumours of a black box being recovered - but according to other pilots, and this is the early 1970s, they didn’t have them. Another rumour - Pan crashed on purpose.
But why then? And why kill yourself? And there’s alot of talk, promoted after the event, that Lin Biao was in on the assassination “plot” (it hardly passes for a plot so lacking in any kind of organisation) and was long-planning on defecting.
But Xiao thinks that’s extremely unlikely. Rather, Ye Qun and an ambitious, but young and stupid, Lin Liguo, fearing that their Commander Lin was going to end up like Liu Shaoqi, dying in a jail cell, acted. And that’s the 913 (September 13 1971) Incident. Here’s the crash site
Here’s Lin Biao, Mao’s second, and a key proponent of the Cultural Revolution.
And with his son, Liguo.
And just realised 萧功秦老师 seems to be@on twitter!! @xiao9981 您好! 刚阅读您写的林彪913事件的文章。真的很棒，精彩，收获很大。在这平台我用英文介绍这个故事，但遗漏了很多您写的具体细节，引语等，请原谅，纠正！
