Ye Qun

Early Life and Yan'an (1917–1949)

Ye Qun, whose family came from Minhou, Fujian, was born in Beijing. There is no official account of her early life, and the versions in circulation differ considerably: her birth year is usually given as 1917, while an article from Dangshi bocai (excerpted in Kuaile laoren bao in 2016 and reposted by Phoenix New Media) gives 1 December 1920; her original name is variously written Ye Yijing or Ye Jingyi; and she is said to have joined the Communist Party in either 1936 or 1938.

The accounts broadly agree that as a pupil at the middle school attached to Peiping Normal University she took part in the December Ninth student movement of 1935; that after the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan she made her way to Yan'an around 1938 and worked at the Chinese Women's University; and that in the early 1940s she married Lin Biao in Yan'an. They had a daughter, Lin Liheng (known as Doudou), and a son, Lin Liguo.

Lin Biao's Office and the Luo Ruiqing Case (1949–1966)

After 1949 Ye Qun worked at Lin Biao's side for many years, becoming director of his office in the 1960s. According to the entry on the "Peng–Luo–Lu–Yang affair" on the website of the CCP Institute of Party History and Literature, in 1965 Air Force Commander Wu Faxian, Navy Deputy Commander Li Zuopeng and others, prompted by Lin Biao and Ye Qun, wrote material falsely accusing the Chief of the General Staff, Luo Ruiqing; on 30 November Ye Qun took a handwritten letter from Lin Biao and this material to Mao Zedong in Hangzhou, "falsely accusing Luo Ruiqing of opposing 'putting politics in command' and of seeking to seize control of the army". At an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee held in Shanghai from 8 to 16 December to criticise Luo in his absence, "Ye Qun, who was not even a member of the Central Committee, spoke for several hours". According to the Party historian Luo Pinghan, Ye reported to Mao alone in Hangzhou for several hours; the official Biography of Mao Zedong (1949–1976) states that what she said "can no longer be known". Luo Ruiqing was then placed under house arrest and removed from his posts.

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1970)

The 1981 judgment of the Special Court of the Supreme People's Court found that in August 1966 Lin Biao had Ye Qun dictate fabricated material slandering Liu Shaoqi to Lei Yingfu, deputy head of the General Staff's operations department, and instructed Lei to write it up; that in October 1966 Jiang Qing, colluding with Ye Qun, had Jiang Tengjiao illegally search the Shanghai homes of Zheng Junli, Zhao Dan, Gu Eryi, Tong Zhiling and Chen Liting; and that in June 1968 Huang Yongsheng passed to Ye Qun material falsely accusing Ye Jianying of "plotting a counter-revolutionary coup".

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. On 28 April 1969 the First Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee elected Ye Qun to the Politburo; she and Jiang Qing were its two women members.

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)", during the 1970 dispute over whether to retain the post of state chairman Ye Qun told Wu Faxian: "If there is no state chairman, what will become of Lin Biao, where will he be put?" At the Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee at Lushan that August she spoke in the Central-South group, insisting on a state chairman and declaring of the description of Mao as a "genius": "We will never take it back — not even with a knife at our throats!" The document also says that afterwards she failed to hand back the record of her own speech, which she had torn out of the official minutes.

13 September (1971)

The official account treats Ye Qun as one of the central figures in the Lin Biao group's coup plans. The Chronicle states that in March 1971 Lin Biao and Ye Qun directed Lin Liguo, Zhou Yuchi and others to draw up the armed coup plan "Outline of Project 571" in Shanghai; the judgment states that on 5 and 6 September Lin and Ye learned, from secret reports by Zhou Yuchi and Huang Yongsheng, of remarks by Mao showing he had become aware of Lin's plotting. The Central Committee's 1972 "Material No. 3" lists switchboard records of the Central Military Commission for 6–12 September, according to which Ye Qun at Beidaihe spoke by secure line 16 times with Huang Yongsheng, 5 times with Wu Faxian and 10 times with Qiu Huizuo — 31 calls lasting 948 minutes in all.

On the evening of 12 September, according to the same document, the Centre acted on a report by Lin Liheng to Unit 8341 and began investigating why Trident aircraft No. 256 had been sent to Shanhaiguan. At 12.32 a.m. on the 13th Lin Biao, Ye Qun and Lin Liguo forced the aircraft to take off from Shanhaiguan airfield; it crashed near Öndörkhaan in Mongolia, killing all nine people on board. On 20 August 1973 the Politburo approved the Central Special Case Group's "Report on the Investigation of the Counter-Revolutionary Crimes of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique", expelling Lin Biao, Chen Boda, Ye Qun, Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, Qiu Huizuo and Li Xuefeng from the Party for ever. In January 1981 the Special Court's judgment named Ye Qun as one of the principal culprits in the case of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing counter-revolutionary cliques, adding that as she was dead no criminal responsibility would be pursued.

Sources and Scholarship

Scholars and the official account differ over Ye Qun's role in the 13 September incident. In The Tragedy of Lin Biao (1996), Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun write that, to the extent that coup plans existed, there is much to suggest that Lin Liguo organised them without his father being aware, citing the military Party historian Wang Nianyi's view that there is no evidence of Lin Biao's awareness. They describe I Knew Ye Qun (1993) by Guan Weixun, who was hired to read classical texts to Ye Qun at Lin's residence, as providing "further credible information", and the memoir of Lin's secretary Zhang Yunsheng, True Account of Maojiawan (1988), as "broadly reliable" though containing some factual errors.

The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution (Stanford University Press, 1999), by Jin Qiu, daughter of the former Air Force commander Wu Faxian, is described by its publisher as the first work in any language to discuss Lin's wife and son in depth; it argues that in a narrow sense the incident was a consequence of the interaction of governmental and family politics during the Cultural Revolution.