Lin Biao was a major Chinese Communist military leader who was pivotal in the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, especially in Northeastern China. Lin was the general who commanded the decisive Liaoshen Campaign and Pingjin Campaign, co-led the Manchurian Field Army of the People's Liberation Army into Beijing, and crossed the Yangtze River in 1949. He ranked third among the Ten Marshals.
Background
Lin Biao was the son of a prosperous merchant family in Huanggang, Hubei.His name at birth was "Lin Yurong".Lin's father opened a small handicrafts factory in the mid-late 1910s, but was forced to close the factory due to "heavy taxes imposed by local militarists". After closing the factory, Lin's father worked as a purser aboard a river steamship. Lin entered primary school in 1917,but moved to Shanghai in 1919 to continue his education.
Education
As a child, Lin was much more interested in participating in student movements than in pursuing his formal education. Lin joined a satellite organization of the Communist Youth League before he graduated high school in 1925. Later in 1925 he participated in the May Thirtieth Movement and enrolled in the newly established Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou.
As a young cadet, Lin admired the personality of Chiang Kai-shek, who was then the Principal of the Academy.At Whampoa, Lin also studied under Zhou Enlai, who was eight years older than Lin. Lin had no contact with Zhou after their time in Whampoa, until they met again in Yan'an in the late 1930s. Lin's relationship with Zhou was never especially close, but they rarely opposed each other directly.
After graduating from Whampoa in 1926, Lin was assigned to a regiment commanded by Ye Ting. Less than a year after graduating from Whampoa, Lin was ordered to participate in the Northern Expedition, rising from deputy platoon leader to battalion commander in the National Revolutionary Army within a few months. It was during the Northern Expedition that Lin joined the Communist Party By 1927 Lin was a colonel.
Career
Lin, like most of the Politburo, initially held serious reservations about China's entry into the Korean War, citing the devastation that would result if the "imperialists" detonated an atomic bomb in Korea or China. Lin later declined to lead forces in Korea, citing his ill health. In early October 1950, Peng Dehuai was named commander of the Chinese forces bound for Korea, and Lin went to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. Lin flew to the Soviet Union with Zhou Enlai and participated in negotiations with Joseph Stalin concerning Soviet support for China's intervention, indicating that Mao retained his trust in Lin.
Due partially to his periods of ill health and physical rehabilitation in the Soviet Union, Lin was slow to rise to power. In the early 1950s Lin was one of five major leaders given responsibility for civil and military affairs, controlling a jurisdiction in central China. In 1953 he was visited by Gao Gang, and was later suspected of supporting him.In 1955 Lin was named to the Politburo. In February 1958 Peng Dehuai, then China's Defense Minister, gave a speech for the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet Red Army in which he suggested increasing the military cooperation between China and the Soviet Union. Mao wanted to distance China from the Soviet Union, and began grooming Lin Biao as a viable successor to Peng.In 1958 Lin joined the Politburo Standing Committee and became one of China's Vice-Chairmen. In 1959, after the Lushan Conference, the relationship between Mao and Peng led to Peng's arrest and removal from all government positions.Privately, Lin agreed with Peng's perspective on, and opposition to, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and he was strongly opposed to Peng being purged, but Lin's fear of being purged himself kept Lin from publicly opposing Mao's efforts to purge Peng,and Lin publicly condemned Peng as a "careerist, a conspiricist, and a hypocrite".Under Mao's direction, Peng was disgraced and put under indefinite house arrest.Lin became the senior leader most publicly supportive of Mao following the Great Leap Forward, during which Mao's economic policies caused an artificial famine in which tens of millions of people starved to death.
Lin initially refused to replace Peng, but finally accepted the position at the insistence of Mao Zedong. As Defense Minister, Lin's command of the PLA was second only to Mao, but he deferred many of his responsibilities to subordinates. The most important figures who Lin deferred the day-to-day operations of China's armed forces to were Chief of Staff Luo Ruiqing and the Central Military Vice-Chairman, He Long.
On October 1, 1959, Lin Biao, as defense minister, surveyed the honor guards at the military parade celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
As Defense Minister, Lin's policies differed from that of his predecessor. Lin attempted to reform China's armed forces based on political criteria: he abolished all signs and privileges of rank, purged members considered sympathetic to the USSR, directed soldiers to work part-time as industrial and agricultural workers, and indoctrinated the armed forces in Mao Zedong Thought.Lin's system of indoctrination made it clear the Party was clearly in command of China's armed forces, and Lin ensured that the army's political commissars enjoyed great power and status in order to see that his directives were followed. Lin implemented these reforms in order to please Mao, but privately was concerned that they would weaken the PLA (which they did).Mao strongly approved of these reforms, and conscientiously promoted Lin to a series of high positions.
Lin used his position as Minister of Defense to flatter Mao by promoting Mao's cult of personality.Lin devised and ran a number of national Maoist propaganda campaigns based on the PLA, the most successful of which was the "learn from Lei Feng" campaign, which Lin began in 1963.Because he was the person most responsible for directing the "learn from Lei Feng" campaign, Lin may have directed the forging of Lei Feng's Diary, upon which the propaganda campaign was based.
Because of Lin's fragile health, Ye Qun controlled many aspects of Lin's public life during the 1960s, including who would see Lin and what others would know about him. Mao encouraged Ye to act on Lin's behalf, giving her an unusual amount of power and responsibility. In 1965 Mao asked Ye to publicly criticize Lin's chief of staff, Luo Ruiqing, on Lin's behalf, even though Ye did not yet hold any high political position. When Lin discovered that Ye had done so (after Luo was purged), he was angry at Ye, but powerless to alter Luo's disgrace.
Lin often read speeches prepared by others, and allowed his name to be placed on articles that he did not write, as long as these materials supported Mao. One of the most famous articles published in Lin's name was the 20,000-word pamphlet on revolution in developing countries, Long Live the Victory of the People's War!, which was released in 1965. This article made Lin one of China's leading interpreters of Mao's political theories. The article likened the "emerging forces" of the poor in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the "rural areas of the world", while the affluent countries of the West were likened to the "cities of the world". Eventually the "cities" would be encircled by revolutions in the "rural areas", following theories prevalent in Mao Zedong Thought. Lin made no promise that China would fight other people's wars, and foreign revolutionaries were advised to depend mainly on "self-reliance".
Lin worked closely with Mao, promoting Mao's cult of personality. Lin directed the compilation of some of Chairman Mao's writings into a handbook, the Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, which became known as the Little Red Book.Lin Biao's military reforms and the success of the 1962 Sino-Indian War impressed Mao. A propaganda campaign called "learn from the People's Liberation Army" followed. In 1966, this campaign widened into the Cultural Revolution.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Lin Biao continued to suffer from poor health after 1949, and chose to avoid high-profile military and political positions. His status led him to be appointed to a number of high-profile positions throughout most of the 1950s, but these were largely honorary and carried few responsibilities. He generally delegated or neglected many of the formal political responsibilities that he was assigned, usually citing his poor health as an excuse.
After Lin's injury in 1938, he suffered from ongoing physical and mental health problems. His exact medical condition is not well understood, partially because his medical records have never been publicly released. Dr. Li Zhisui, then one of Mao's personal physicians, believed that Lin suffered from neurasthenia and hypochondria. He became ill whenever he perspired, and suffered from phobias about water, wind, cold,light, and noise.He was said to become nervous at the sight of rivers and oceans in traditional Chinese paintings, and suffered from diarrhea, which could be triggered by the sound of running water.Li's account of Lin's condition is notably different from the official Chinese version.
Lin suffered from excessive headaches, and spent much of his free time consulting Chinese medical texts and preparing traditional Chinese medicines for himself. He suffered from insomnia, and often took sleeping pills.He ate simple meals, did not smoke, and did not drink alcohol.As his condition progressed, his fear of water led to a general refusal to either bathe or eat fruit. Because of his fear of wind and light, his office was gloomy and lacked any ventilation. Some accounts have suggested that Lin became a drug addict, either to opium or morphine.
As early as 1953, Soviet doctors diagnosed Lin as suffering from manic depression. Lin's wife, Ye Qun, rejected this diagnosis, but it was later confirmed by Chinese doctors. Lin's fragile health made him vulnerable, passive, and easily manipulated by other political figures, notably Ye Qun herself.
Lin's complaints got worse with time and age. In the years before his death, the fiancee of Lin's son reported that Lin became extremely distant and socially and politically detached, even to the extent that he never read books or newspapers. His passivity made him difficult to connect with at any meaningful level: "usually he just sat there, blankly". In Lin's rare periods of activity, he used his time mostly to complain about, and seek treatment for his large variety of medical issues.
Connections
When he was 20 Lin married a girl from the countryside with the family name "Ong". This marriage was arranged by Lin's parents, and the couple never became close. When Lin left the Kuomintang to become a communist revolutionary, Ong did not accompany Lin, and their marriage effectively ended.