Lin Biao

Biography

Lin Biao was born in 1907 in Huanggang, Hubei, into a merchant family. Drawn to student politics, he took part in the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925 and enrolled at the Whampoa Military Academy, where Zhou Enlai was among his teachers. He joined the Communist Party during the Northern Expedition and, after the failed Nanchang Uprising of 1927, made his way to Mao Zedong and Zhu De in the Jiangxi base area.

He became one of the Red Army's most successful field commanders, leading the First Army Group in Jiangxi and on the Long March and supporting Mao's rise at the Zunyi Conference in 1935. In the war against Japan he commanded the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army and in September 1937 organised the ambush at Pingxingguan. In the civil war he led the Communist forces in Manchuria to victory in the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns, entered Beijing and drove the Nationalists from the southern coastal provinces. He was ranked third among the ten marshals of the People's Republic.

After 1949 he at first stayed out of active politics, but he became a vice premier in 1954, a party vice chairman in 1958 and, after Peng Dehuai's fall, minister of national defense in 1959. He built up Mao's personality cult in the army, and during the Cultural Revolution he was named the party's only vice chairman and Mao's designated successor.

On 13 September 1971 the aircraft carrying Lin and members of his family crashed in Mongolia, killing all on board. The official account holds that he was fleeing after a failed coup against Mao; others argue that he fled fearing a purge. He was posthumously condemned as a traitor and is officially blamed, together with Jiang Qing's group, for the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution.