The Lin Biao System

In November 1974, three students in the city of Guangzhou, under the collective penname "Li Yizhe," wrote a long, polemical big-character poster, the target of which they called the Lin Biao "system" (xitong ). They explained:

What is a "system"? It is the total entity of related things—thus a complete system. The Lin Biao system is the whole lot of Lin Biao's theories, programs, roads, lines, policies, measures, style of Party [building], style of study and style of work which has, in various spheres of politics, jurisprudence, military affairs, economy and culture, opposed the Party center and Chairman Mao and thus brought great disasters upon the whole people and spread poison over the whole country.^[1]

The poster extended for a hundred yards in length, and attracted crowds of attentive readers. Local cadres were reportedly taken aback by the scope of the critique and by the sophistication of the argument, and somewhat at a loss about how to handle the incident. When the contents of the poster were referred to the CC for their instruction, Li Xiannian pronounced it "reactionary through and through, vicious and malicious to the extreme," and the three perpetrators were placed under arrest.^[2]

The probable reason for Li Xiannian's indignation and for the harsh reaction of the authorities is that the focus of the attack by "Li" was so broad, conflating features peculiar to Lin's period with others characteristic of the pre- and post-Lin regimes. (Li's conception of Lin's regime as a seamless web is also obviously overstated, in view of the drastic shrinkage of his base in the final showdown.) Yet Lin Biao did leave his inprint upon the country. Within a very brief time span he constructed a structure of radical praetorianism or barracks communism that comprised one of the politically feasible futures that lay open to Maoism upon the termination of spontaneous mobilization.

Lin Biao's intervention into politics did not follow the typical pattern of the "man on horseback" in a less developed country, for it took place at

[1] Li Yizhe, "Concerning Socialist Democracy and Law," pp. 11–20. Also translated in IS , vol. 12, no. 1 (January 1976): 110–49.

[2] "Editor's Note," IS , vol. 12, no. 1:111.

the invitation of the civilian political leadership. The PLA intervened massively at every level during the Cultural Revolution in order to fill the vacuum left by the destruction of the Party-state bureaucracies. The army expanded its power along two main organizational axes:

1. Military dominance was asserted following demobilization of the Red Guard and Revolutionary Rebel bands by dispatching "support-the-left" troops—or, to be more precise, troops implementing the "three-support" and "two-military" campaign.^[3] Zhou Enlai told Edgar Snow that no less than 2 million soldiers were engaged in this campaign, including virtually the entire strength of the Regional Force troops, consisting of more than a million men. These troops were not normally sent as intact units, but were parceled out to form political work teams, or "soldiers' Mao Zedong Thought propaganda teams." Such teams were sent into all communes, enterprises, schools, offices, and state and Party organizations (including most State Council ministries) in which factional strife had disrupted normal administrative capacity, in order to supervise operations. As they began moving into troubled areas, the teams placed local police and public security personnel under their jurisdiction in the form of a so-called Military Control Commission (MCC), which exercised practically total control over the local civilian population. These temporary administrative organs were to prepare for the formation of RCs to succeed them, though in many cases the Mao Thought teams or MCCs declined to "fade away" following establishment of RCs. By the end of 1969, all organs, units, enterprises, and rural areas were thus governed by at least one (and perhaps all) of the following: a workers' unit, a PLA unit, a Mao Thought propaganda team, an RC preparatory group, and a Communist Party branch preparatory group—all of which were coordinated by the military and, in most cases, headed by an officer.^[4] The various military work teams saw to it that the schools or factories to which they were assigned were organized in the same way that the army itself was organized, forming regiments, companies, platoons, and so forth, and teaching the "three-eight style of work" taught in the PLA.

2. As the civilian governmental (i.e., RC) and Party structures were reconstructed, the numerous leadership and staff vacancies were filled by professional soldiers. The same situation prevailed during the immediate post-Liberation period, but, unlike their predecessors, these soldiers did not demobilize. Local military leaders dominated the local and provincial RCs that were established between the summer of 1968 and the spring of 1969, and, because most delegates to the Ninth Congress were produced

[3] The "three supports" were support for the broad masses of the left, industry, and agriculture; the "two militaries," military control and military training.

[4] Ilsa Sharp, "The Saplings," FEER 69, no. 28 (July 2, 1970): 17.

by the RCs at various levels, the military also gained control of the Central Party apparatus. Only slightly more than 28 percent of the incumbents of the Eighth Congress (32 full members, 14 alternates) retained their positions in the Ninth. Of the 279 members elected, 132 (about 46 percent) were military commanders or political commissars (compared with 30.9 percent in the Eighth CC), 77 (27 percent) were cadres, and 56 (90 percent) mass representatives.^[5] The CC also included 34 members of the central government (28 full members, 6 alternates, 18 percent of the total), thus serving as a major catchment basin for revisionist bureaucrats who had been washed out of the Politburo; among the Eighth CC incumbents who retained their positions were 15 full and 2 alternate members of the old Politburo, including Chen Yun, Nie Rongzhen, Chen Yi, and Xu Xiangqian. Of mass representatives elected, most were anonymous newcomers (only 2 were former Red Guards); if they received permanent functional positions outside the CC, these were usually subordinate positions in provincial RCs.

The Politburo was even more heavily weighted with military cadres than the CC (13 of the 25 total were military officers, only 3 of whom were members of the previous Politburo); 6 of these were Lin's personal protégés (Lin Biao himself, his wife Ye Qun, Li Zuopeng, Wu Faxian, Qiu Huizuo, and Huang Yongsheng), and the remainder were former marshals or provincial and regional military officials whose loyalties were not yet apparent. Five civilian radicals became Politburo members, 2 of whom (Kang Sheng and Chen Boda) sat on the Standing Committee. Only 2 State Council representatives survived (Zhou Enlai, Li Xiannian), leaving such veterans as Zhu De, Liu Bocheng, Ye Jianying, and Dong Biwu as a "swing" bloc.

The military's dominance was evident not only in its authoritative coordination of other units through PLA-dominated work teams and appointment of military officers into most commanding civilian political positions, but in the leverage the military continued to exercise over the two conceivable sources of opposition: rebel "mass organizations" and demoted civilian Party-state cadres. We have already noted the importance of the 1967 clash between Red Guards and PLA regional forces in splitting cultural and military radicalism and establishing the domin-

[5] All eleven known MR commanders were elected, as well as all known MR chief commissars except for those from Tibet; all told, some 26 percent of the CC were drawn from the regional commands, including at least fifty-three general officers and some twenty-seven Military District (MD) or garrison officers. The chairmen of all twenty-nine provincial RCs (the majority of whom were military officers) were elected to full CC membership. The headquarters and staff departments were also quite well represented (12 percent) in comparison with the Eighth CC, though the real strength of this group was to be found in its domination of the CC's Military Affairs Commission (MAC). Ralph L. Powell, "The Party, the Government and the Gun," AS 10, no. 6 (June 1970): 441–72.

ance of the latter: whereas only two of the RCs set up before the Wuhan Incident were led by soldiers, nineteen of the twenty-three RCs established thereafter were. In addition to the prominent military role in the rustication of Red Guards that terminated spontaneous mobilization, there was an inherent class-based antipathy between soldiers (usually of "poor peasant" background) and young rebels (of urban middle-class background). This hatred was exacerbated when the PLA reverted to the "blood-line" theory of class origins in their implementation of such campaigns as the "great criticism," "cleansing of class ranks" or the "one-hit, three-anti" (yi da san fan —hit counterrevolutionaries; anti corruption/theft, extravagance, and waste) in the 1968–70 period.^[6] The radicals mobilized to protest their suppression in the wake of the Ninth Congress, becoming so troublesome that on August 28, 1969, the CC issued an eight-point Central Document banning struggle by force, dissolving all armed factions and mass organizations, and remanding all workers and peasants to their units of production.^[7] Even when representatives of the "revolutionary masses" attained positions on RCs, these were usually not members of the disbanded rebel organizations but model workers or peasants receiving sinecures; being of inferior status and lacking political experience, they looked for guidance to the leadership, who encouraged them to remain at their units and "not divorce themselves from production."^[8]

Purged cadres were disposed of in one of three ways: they were sent to May 7 cadre schools, sent to settle down on the farm as members of production teams, or sent to take part in manual labor for a specified period. As of January 10, 1969, nearly three hundred May 7 cadre schools had been set up in Guangdong alone, and more than a hundred thousand cadres had been sent for retraining. There they attended Mao Thought study classes, practiced criticism and self-criticism, and engaged in manual labor. Some groups of cadres were sent to the countryside to settle down indefinitely and receive reeducation from the masses. Shorter labor stints were more common: some units implemented the "three-thirds" system (one-third of the time doing manual work, one-third going down for investigation and study, and one-third engaged in routine office work), whereas some units spent half their time each day doing

[6] Small meetings were held before and after work. Large meetings were usually held in the evenings, at which short articles of criticism written by the masses would be publicly discussed and linked to concrete problems. Dai Dan, "'Da pipan' he 'yi da san fan'" [Great criticism and "one hit, three anti"] ZW , no. 209 (October 16, 1970):8.

[7] URS , vol. 56, no. 5 (July 15, 1959): 59; editorial, "Cadres Should Persist in Taking Part in Collective Productive Labor," RR , November 20, 1969, p. 1.

[8] Nanfang Ribao , January 10, 1969, p. 1; RR , August 22, 1969, p. 2; RR , October 17, 1969, p. 2; RR , August 18, 1969, p. 2; HQ , no. 9, 1969.

manual labor, the other half doing their regular work. In each of these resocialization arrangements the military was in command and retained discretion to block the rehabilitation of cadres.

Lin was also energetic in organizing the masses into politically utilizable organizations, often introducing new organizational vehicles—partly because of ideological antipathy to the old ones, no doubt, but also because restoring the original organizations would necessitate rehabilitating their civilian leadership.^[9] The masses were initially (mid-1968) organized along functional lines into various "congresses" (daibiao dahui ): the Workers' Congress (gong dai hui ), the Poor-and-Lower-Middle Peasants' Congress (pin xiazhong nong daibiao huiyi ), and the Red Guards' (or University and Middle-School Students') Congress.^[10] Article Fifteen of the Party Constitution adopted at the Ninth Congress alluded to the "Three Congresses" (san dai hui ), and in fact some provinces held three-congress provincial meetings.

After the Ninth Congress such relatively unstructured assemblies fell into desuetude, to be replaced by a more militaristic pattern of organization. In schools, students were organized into battalions, companies, platoons and squads; in the factories, workshops, sections and work shifts were rechristened battalions, companies, platoons, and squads, each with its own "commander."^[11] "Provincial activists' meetings" were introduced, under the direct jurisdiction of the PLA. Every functional group was to have its own catechism: there were the "four firsts," the "four-good company" movement, the "three-eight work style," and the directive to be "soldiers with five good qualities."^[12] For the youth, there were

[9] The Red Guards were no longer autonomous, of course, but placed under the supervision of the military. Functioning as a junior branch of the Red Guards were the "Red Little Soldiers" (hong xiao bing ), including children between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen, which replaced the pre-Cultural Revolution Young Pioneers. Its activities included learning revolutionary songs and basic military drill or attending Mao's Thought study sessions. CN (Hong Kong), no. 370 (July 23, 1970); "Commentary," HQ , no. 7, 1970; China Topics , YB524 (May 6, 1969).

[10] RR , May 31, 1969, p. 2; July 9, 1969, p. 2; August 22, 1969, p. 4.

[11] CNA , no. 795 (March 20, 1970).

[12] The "four firsts" (sige di yi ) were: first priority for the human factor, for political work, for ideological work, and for living ideas. A "four-good company" was good in political-ideological work, in following the "three-eight" movement, in improving the organization, and in relation to the masses. (The four firsts and four-good company were Lin's summation of Mao's discussion of the priority of politics in his 1929 speech in Gutian.) The "three-eight work style" (sanba zuofeng ) referred to one of Mao's directives consisting of three phrases and eight characters: The three phrases called for firm political attitudes, a simple and diligent work style, and flexible strategy and tactics. The eight characters constituted four words: unity (tuanjie ), concentration (xinchang ), seriousness (yansu ), and liveliness (huopo ). The "five goods" include the first three points of the four goods, plus two additions: good in production techniques, grasping scientific experiments and technical innovation, and good in patriotic sanitation. JFJB , January 22, 1964, as cited in TilmanSpengler, Der Sturz von Lin Piao: Paradigm für militärisch-zivile Konflikte in der Volksrepublik China ? (Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde, Mitteilung no. 76, 1976), p. 245.

the five requirements for worthy revolutionary successors.^[13] For cadres aspiring to rehabilitation, there were the "three criteria."^[14] The meeting repertoire also reflected military influence. For example, on the basis of provincial "four-good" and "five-good" movements, exemplary individuals or units would be selected to attend provincial meetings, sometimes in conjunction with such meetings as the "congress of activists in the study of Mao Zedong Thought" (huoxue huoyong Mao Zedong sixiang jiji fenzi daibiao hui ), or "meetings for the exchange of experience in the study of Mao Zedong Thought." Such meetings were held only after months of preparation and careful selection of participants at county-level activists' meetings. There was even some speculation that such meetings (which by early 1970 had been held in twelve of twenty-six provinces) might climax in a national congress, which might then replace the NPC (whose functions it in fact duplicated). But there were also reports of local and provincial resistance to the four/five goods campaign.^[15]

Just as his economic initiatives jeopardized his relations with Zhou Enlai, Lin's organizational arrangements tended to alienate the radicals, isolating him in his showdown with Mao. His militaristic organizational preferences emphasized the reconstruction of tight organizational frames to which the radicals were opposed, due to their rebel constituency as much as to their abstract ideological commitments. The emphasis of Lin and the military politicians popularly associated with his rule on the restoration of discipline snuffed out the phase of radical organizational experimentation that flickered briefly in 1967–68. This emphasis precluded the possibility of an alliance with his most logical civilian collaborators, and possibly disquieted Mao as well. It seems to have also alienated any potential civilian mass constituency, for interview informants in Hong Kong were unanimous in their rejection of Lin's organizational arrangements.

Lin's demise allowed his contributions to radical reorganization to fall into swift and apparently unsung oblivion. Beginning in 1970 at Lushan,

[13] Viz., (1) living study and (2) living application of Mao Zedong Thought; (3) act as a shock brigade in the Three Great Revolutionary Movements (class struggle, the struggle for production, and scientific experiment) in the countryside; (4) thoroughly implement mass criticism; and (5) take heroes as examples, conscientiously fighting self, criticizing revisionism, and remolding world outlook. HQ , no. 9, 1970.

[14] Viz., (1) "Do they hold high the red banner of Mao Zedong's Thought? . . . (2) Do they engage in political and ideological work? . . . (3) Are they enthusiastic about revolution?" Spengler, Sturz . Lin considered the first criterion decisive whereas Mao deemed it less important, though he did not make his attitude clear until later.

[15] CNA , no. 795 (March 20, 1970).

a national campaign was launched to "criticize revisionism and rectify work style" (pixiu zhengfeng ). Its thrust was antiradical, enabling the moderates to criticize Cultural Revolution innovations without openly repudiating the Cultural Revolution itself. "Revisionism" was redefined in terms of the belief in "innate genius" (tiancailun ) or the "hero in history" (yingxiong shiguan ; i.e., Mao's personality cult), as counterposed to "materialism" and "the people make history."^[16] The purpose of the campaign was to provide an appropriate public atmosphere for the introduction of more moderate policies; as Zhou explained to the national media in September 1972, "Without thoroughly discrediting the ultraleftist trend, you will not have the courage to implement Chairman Mao's revolutionary line."^[17] Between late 1971 and the fall of 1972 a series of national planning conferences was convened on such topics as public security, economic planning, and science, taking as their framework for debate criticisms of previous "ultra-left" agricultural, industrial, and educational policies.