Mao: The Unknown Story

By mid-August, a year after Lushan, Mao was ready to purge Lin. On the 14th he left Peking to prepare provincial leaders. He had to make sure that these men, most of them Lin appointees, would not side with Lin in a showdown. During his tour, Mao made repeated damning remarks about Lin, like: “He wants to split the Party and can’t wait to seize power.” Although Mao told his audiences not to report to Lin on what he said, a few of Lin’s followers disobeyed. Mao’s words reached the Lins at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, east of Peking, on 6 September. The Lin villa occupied a whole hill, well shielded from the sea by luxuriant vegetation, as Lin could not stand the sight of water, though he liked the sea air. For kilometers there was not a soul around, except guards and staff.

Lin and his wife and Tiger decided to flee abroad at once. They planned to depart from the nearby airport at Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea. Tiger flew to Peking on the 8th to secure planes for the escape. He brought with him a handwritten note from his father: “Please follow the orders relayed by comrades Li-guo [Tiger] and Yu-chi [Tiger’s closest friend]. (Signed) Lin Biao 8 September.” The man in charge of dispatching planes at Peking military airport agreed to bypass regular channels to get Tiger the planes.

But Tiger did not want to flee without first making an attempt to assassinate Mao. At that moment Mao was in the Shanghai area, where officers loyal to Lin held key positions, and even had partial charge of Mao’s security in the outer ring. It seems that at the eleventh hour, Lin Biao agreed that Tiger could try. Mrs. Lin was all for having a go. When Tiger kissed his fiancée goodbye at Beidaihe, he said: “In case something happens to me, you don’t know anything; I won’t incriminate you.”

In Peking, Tiger asked the deputy chief of staff of the air force, Wang Fei, to mount an assault on the compound where Mme Mao and her coterie were living, the Imperial Fishing Villa. Tiger told him that simultaneous action would be taken “in the south,” where Mao was. Wang Fei was a good friend, but his reply was disappointing. He did not think he could persuade any troops to do what Tiger was asking. In any case, his troops were not allowed to carry weapons into Peking.

Next, Tiger met a senior air force officer called Jiang Teng-jiao, who was the youngest general in China, and who, for various reasons, hated Mao. Tiger asked him to try to kill Mao while Mao was still near Shanghai. Jiang agreed, and the two aired various ideas. One was to shoot up Mao’s train with flame-throwers and bazookas; another was to shell it; a third was for the Shanghai military chief, a man trusted by the Lins, to shoot Mao on his train. The fourth was to bomb Mao’s train from the air. But the man they approached to drop the bombs, a Korean War ace, replied that there were no bomber aircraft available. He took fright, and asked his wife, who was a doctor, to rub salt water and old aureomycin into his eyes so that they would swell up, and he thus got himself hospitalized. The other ideas also proved non-viable, as it was impossible to get lethal firepower anywhere near Mao’s closely guarded and heavily armor-plated train.

Over the next couple of days, tense discussions continued. “I just can’t stomach him any longer!” Tiger would shout, waving his fists. “OK,” he would say, “the fish dies, but it breaks the net!” indicating that he was ready to make a suicidal attack if that was what it took to bring down the Mao regime.

Fast running out of ideas, Tiger sent a friend back to Beidaihe on the 10th to get his father to write to Army Chief of Staff Huang Yong-sheng, asking him to cooperate with Tiger. Lin wrote the letter, but it was not delivered. The plotters could not trust Huang not to betray them.

It was also too late. Next day, news came that Mao had left Shanghai by train. Several of Tiger’s friends offered to fly helicopters on a suicide attack against Mao on Tiananmen Gate on National Day, 1 October. Tiger vetoed the idea, in tears. He had not anticipated any action of this magnitude.

All assassination plans were aborted, and Tiger decided to revert to the plan to flee to Canton, and then Hong Kong. On the evening of 12 September he flew back to Beidaihe in Lin’s plane, a Trident, intending to leave with his family next morning.

Mao had returned to Peking late that afternoon, completely unaware that an assassination plot had been afoot. His train stopped outside the capital at a station called Fengtai, where he was given a routine briefing by his newly appointed Peking commanders on what had been happening in the capital. The meeting opened with a report about an army delegation’s visit to Albania. Back in Zhongnanhai, it was like the end of any other trip. Mao’s security chiefs and the head of his guards, who lived outside the compound, went home. Some of them took sleeping pills. Mao, too, went to sleep.