Lin Liguo

Early Life and Entry into the Air Force (1945–1969)

Lin Liguo, nicknamed "Tiger", was the son of Lin Biao and Ye Qun; his elder sister was Lin Liheng. According to an article published by People's Daily Online's Party history channel in 2014, he was born in 1945 and entered the physics department of Peking University in 1965; when classes stopped at the start of the Cultural Revolution he stayed at home. In March 1967, not yet a Party member, he put on uniform and joined the Air Force without completing enlistment formalities, becoming a secretary in the Party committee office of Air Force Headquarters. According to Global People magazine (2014), he joined the Air Force under the alias "Li Guo" and was admitted to the Party a few months later on Wu Faxian's recommendation.

On 17 October 1969 the Air Force commander Wu Faxian appointed Lin Liguo deputy director of the Air Force Headquarters general office and deputy head of its operations department (a deputy division-level post), less than three years after he had joined. According to the Central Committee's 1971 document "The Struggle to Smash the Lin–Chen Anti-Party Clique's Counter-Revolutionary Coup (Material No. 1)", Wu then declared that "everything in the Air Force can be deployed by Comrade Liguo, everything in the Air Force can be commanded by Comrade Liguo". The 1981 judgment of the Special Court found that Wu thereby "handed all command and deployment authority over the Air Force to Lin Liguo".

The "Report on Applying Mao Zedong Thought" and the "Joint Fleet" (1970)

The People's Daily Online article records that on 31 July 1970 Lin Liguo gave an eight-hour "report on studying and applying Mao Zedong Thought" to a meeting of Air Force Headquarters cadres; Wu Faxian said it had "launched a political satellite", while Zhou Yuchi, Wang Fei, Yu Xinye and others called Lin Liguo "an all-round talent, a commander's talent, a talent above the crowd" and "successor of the third generation", and more than 70,000 copies of the report were printed. On his southern tour in 1971 Mao remarked, without naming him: "Praising someone in his twenties as a 'super-genius' — what good does that do?"

The judgment found that in October 1970 Lin Liguo formed the secret core force for an armed coup, which he named the "Joint Fleet". According to the Central Committee's 1972 document "The Struggle to Smash the Lin–Chen Anti-Party Clique's Counter-Revolutionary Coup (Material No. 2)", the group set up the "Joint Fleet" headed by Lin Liguo, with "branch fleets" in Shanghai, Guangzhou and elsewhere; the document quotes Lin Biao as saying that "Lin Liguo should command not only the small joint fleet of the Air Force; the big joint fleet of the whole army should also come under his command".

The "Outline of Project 571" (1971)

According to the Central Special Case Group's investigation as set out in Material No. 2, in February 1971 Lin Liguo went from Suzhou to Shanghai and Hangzhou on the instructions of Lin Biao and Ye Qun; on 18 March he told Yu Xinye and Li Weixin that "in view of the present situation we must draw up a plan for a coup". After Zhou Yuchi arrived in Shanghai on 20 March, Lin Liguo held a meeting with Zhou, Yu and Li, saying "I have talked about this with the Chief [Lin Biao], and the Chief said to draw up a plan first"; between 22 and 24 March they wrote the coup programme, which Lin Liguo named the "Outline of Project 571", 5-7-1 (wu-qi-yi) being a homophone of "armed uprising" (wuzhuang qiyi). The document states that the outline was later seized at Lin Liguo's secret base at the Air Force Academy in Beijing and identified by handwriting as written by Yu Xinye. It includes such lines as "Overthrow the contemporary First Emperor of Qin — B-52 — and topple the feudal dynasty that hangs out a socialist signboard". On 31 March Lin Liguo convened Jiang Tengjiao, Wang Weiguo, Chen Liyun and Zhou Jianping in Shanghai for the so-called "three kingdoms, four parties" meeting.

The judgment found that after learning on 5 and 6 September 1971 of Mao's remarks showing he was aware of their activities, Lin Biao and Ye Qun decided to try to kill Mao during his travels; on 8 September Lin Biao issued a handwritten order — "Hope you will act according to the orders conveyed by Comrades Liguo and Yuchi" — after which Lin Liguo and Zhou Yuchi gave detailed instructions to Jiang Tengjiao, the Air Force deputy chief of staff Wang Fei and other core members of the "Joint Fleet"; Mao changed his itinerary and returned to Beijing on 12 September. When Zhou Enlai began investigating that night why aircraft No. 256 had been sent to Shanhaiguan, Zhou Yuchi reported this to Lin Liguo. At 12.32 a.m. on 13 September Lin Liguo, Lin Biao and Ye Qun forced the aircraft to take off from Shanhaiguan airfield; it crashed near Öndörkhaan in Mongolia, killing all nine on board. In 1981 the judgment listed Lin Liguo among the principal culprits in the case of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing counter-revolutionary cliques, adding that as he was dead no criminal responsibility would be pursued.

Sources and Scholarship

The official account holds that Lin Liguo planned the coup at the instigation of Lin Biao and Ye Qun. In The Tragedy of Lin Biao (1996), by contrast, Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun argue that, to the extent that coup plans existed, there is much to suggest that Lin Liguo organised them without his father being aware. They cite a Party historian in the military as saying that the document issued in 1972 as the "Outline of Project 571", while not created out of whole cloth, was constructed on the basis of confessions by Lin Liguo's collaborators, and that the notion of a "571 project" came from an isolated scrap of paper bearing the circled number 571 found among the effects of one of his accomplices.

Reviewing the book What You Don't Know: The Rise and Fall of Lin Liguo's "Small Fleet" (Beijing Publishing House, 2014) in Yanhuang chunqiu in 2015, Yang Gang, a senior editor at Beijing Publishing Group, wrote that Lin Liguo, as a Peking University physics student, had proposed developing small radars and vertical take-off fighters; the book's author regards him as "at once a beneficiary of, a rebel against, and in the end a victim buried with the political-military system of the Cultural Revolution".