Wu Faxian

From the Red Army to the Air Force (1915–1965)

Wu Faxian, born Wu Wenyu in Yongfeng, Jiangxi, in 1915, joined the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army in 1930, entering the Communist Youth League the same year and transferring to the Communist Party in 1932, according to the People's Daily directory of the PLA's founding marshals and generals. An article in Dangshi zonglan (no. 5, 2010; reprinted in People's Digest) notes that he was fifteen when he enlisted; he fought through the first to fifth campaigns against the Nationalist "encirclements" of the Central Soviet. On the Long March he was general Party branch secretary of the 2nd Regiment, 1st Division, Red First Army Group, losing two fingers to shrapnel in the crossing of the Dadu River and the seizure of the Luding Bridge; after the Central Red Army reached northern Shaanxi he became political commissar of the 2nd Regiment of the 2nd Division.

During the war against Japan he served in the Eighth Route Army as a political commissar, director of a brigade political department, director of the political department of the 5th Column and political commissar of the Jiangsu–Shandong–Henan Detachment; after the New Fourth Army Incident of 1941 his Eighth Route Army units were incorporated into the reconstituted New Fourth Army, where he headed the political department of the 3rd Division. In the Civil War he was deputy political commissar of the Western Liaoning Military District and political commissar of the 2nd Column of the Northeast Democratic United Army, and in 1949 political commissar of the Fourth Field Army's 39th Army and deputy political commissar and political department director of the 14th Army Group, taking part in the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns. From 1950 he was deputy political commissar and director of the political department of the Air Force, was made a lieutenant general (zhongjiang) in 1955 and later became the Air Force's political commissar.

Air Force Commander and the CMC Administrative Group (1965–1970)

When Air Force Commander Liu Yalou died of illness in 1965, Wu moved from political commissar to commander of the Air Force. According to the same article, at a central meeting in Shanghai that year he stated that Luo Ruiqing had asked Liu Yalou to pass four points to Ye Qun, to the effect that Lin Biao was in poor health and would sooner or later step aside and should let Luo run the army; Luo was subsequently dismissed and placed under investigation. The 1981 judgment of the Special Court found that in August 1966, on Lin Biao's instructions, Wu wrote material dated 3 September falsely accusing He Long of "plotting to seize power in the Air Force" and sent it to Lin; that in August 1968 he and Huang Yongsheng fabricated facts to accuse Luo Ruiqing of being a "counter-revolutionary of the most heinous kind"; and that he approved the detention and persecution of 174 Air Force cadres and others, among whom Gu Qian, chief of staff of the Nanjing Air Force command, and Liu Shanben, deputy provost of the Air Force Academy, were persecuted to death.

According to the official Chronicle of the Communist Party of China, on 17 August 1967 the Central Committee and Central Military Commission set up the CMC Administrative Group, made up of Wu Faxian, Ye Qun, Qiu Huizuo and Zhang Xiuchuan, with Wu in charge; after its reorganisation in March 1968 Huang Yongsheng became its head. At the First Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee in April 1969 Wu was elected to the Politburo, and became deputy head of the Administrative Group. According to the directory of founding generals, he had served since 1967 as deputy chief of the General Staff while remaining Air Force commander.

On 17 October 1969 Wu appointed Lin Biao's son Lin Liguo deputy director of the Air Force Headquarters general office and deputy head of its operations department. 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)", after Lin Liguo delivered a "report on applying Mao Zedong Thought" to the Air Force in 1970, Wu 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 judgment found that he thereby "handed all command and deployment authority over the Air Force to Lin Liguo", enabling Lin Liguo to form the "Joint Fleet".

Lushan and 13 September (1970–1971)

According to the same Central Committee document, during the 1970 dispute over whether to retain the post of state chairman Ye Qun told Wu: "If there is no state chairman, what will become of Lin Biao, where will he be put?" On 13 August Wu clashed with other members of the constitution-drafting group over the question of Mao's "genius" (described in the document as "launching an attack on leading comrades of the Centre"); during the Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee at Lushan in late August, he, Chen Boda, Ye Qun, Li Zuopeng and Qiu Huizuo presented material praising Mao's "genius" in different discussion groups. After Mao criticised Chen Boda in "A Few Opinions of Mine" on 31 August, Wu submitted a written self-criticism. On 14 October 1970 Mao annotated it: "As a Communist, why such a lack of open and aboveboard spirit? A few people raising trouble and trying to deceive more than two hundred Central Committee members — this has never been seen since the Party was founded."

The judgment states that after Lin Biao's assassination plan failed in September 1971 he prepared to take Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, Qiu Huizuo and others south to Guangzhou, and that Zhou Enlai ordered that night that aircraft No. 256 could fly only "on the joint order of four people" — Zhou, Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian and Li Zuopeng. After the 13 September incident Wu was placed under investigation in detention, and in August 1973 he was expelled from the Party.

Trial and Later Years (1980–2004)

From November 1980 to January 1981 Wu was tried by the Second Tribunal of the Special Court of the Supreme People's Court, defended by the lawyers Ma Kechang and Zhou Hengyuan. The judgment states that he "confessed to his criminal acts" and "exposed the criminal acts of Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and other co-defendants". According to the Dangshi zonglan article, during the pre-trial investigation he volunteered a confession of more than seventy pages; asked by a procurator why Jiang Qing now appeared in episodes where his earlier statements had not mentioned her, he replied: "When I was arrested after the 13 September incident and examined by the Central Special Case Group, Jiang Qing was still in power — how could I dare to write about her?" On 25 January 1981 the Special Court convicted him of organising and leading a counter-revolutionary clique, conspiring to overthrow the government, and false accusation, sentencing him to seventeen years' imprisonment and five years' deprivation of political rights.

The same article says that in August 1981 the Central Committee, taking account of his attitude in admitting his guilt and his advanced age, granted him release on medical parole; he then lived in Jinan, taking up calligraphy in his later years. Wu Faxian died of illness at Qilu Hospital in Jinan on 17 October 2004, aged 89.

Official Verdict and Scholarship

The People's Daily directory of founding generals states that during the Cultural Revolution he "took part in Lin Biao's conspiracy to usurp the supreme power of the Party and the state", and that in 1973 he was expelled from the Party and removed from all posts inside and outside it.

In The Tragedy of Lin Biao (1996), Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun write that Wu Faxian provided some of the most significant trial evidence about Lin Biao's activities, but that according to a well-informed Party historian he was deeply remorseful over his testimony, parts of which he claimed to have invented to please his interrogators; the authors conclude that the testimony of leading figures at the trial is "of questionable validity".

In his later years Wu left a long memoir, Difficult Years (Suiyue jiannan), edited by his daughter Jin Qiu and published in Hong Kong. Jin Qiu, who teaches at Old Dominion University in the United States, published The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution with Stanford University Press in 1999; the publisher's description says the book draws on her father's unpublished memoirs and puts forward "a radically different interpretation" of the incident, arguing that in a narrow sense it was a consequence of the interaction of governmental and family politics during the Cultural Revolution.