Person1907 – 1971

Lin Biao

Also called: Lin Piao

PLA marshal who led the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns and, as defence minister, spread the “Little Red Book”; named Mao’s successor in the 1969 party constitution, he died in a plane crash in Mongolia in 1971

Born at Huanggang in Hubei, he graduated from the fourth class of the Whampoa Military Academy, took part in the Nanchang Uprising and followed Zhu De to Jinggangshan. In his twenties he commanded the Red Army’s First Army Corps, and early in the war against Japan he made his name with the ambush at Pingxingguan. In the civil war he led the Northeast Field Army to victory in the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns and pushed south as far as Hainan. Succeeding Peng Dehuai as defence minister in 1959, he spread the cult of Mao in the army and in 1964 issued Quotations from Chairman Mao (the “Little Red Book”). Written into the party constitution as successor in 1969, he died in a plane crash in September 1971 and was afterwards branded the head of a “counter-revolutionary clique”.

Show on the map

Where they went

Open the full map

OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap contributors

4 related events

1
1948 – 1949Liaoshen, Huaihai and Pingjin Campaignscommander
Between September 1948 and January 1949 the People’s Liberation Army won the Liaoshen campaign in the Northeast, the Huaihai campaign around Xuzhou and the Pingjin campaign around Beiping and Tianjin, destroying the Nationalist main forces. Beiping changed hands without a fight.
1966 – 1976Cultural Revolutionkey figure
A political movement launched by Mao Zedong in May 1966, claiming that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” had infiltrated the party. Red Guards and rebel factions attacked party organisations and fought one another, and leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were purged. Society and the economy were convulsed for ten years until the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976.
2
1966 – 1968Red Guardsrelated figure
After Mao Zedong first received Red Guards in Tiananmen Square on 18 August 1966, the student Red Guard movement spread across China. By November eight rallies had drawn 11 to 13 million young people to Beijing, and the Red Guards turned to violence in the name of smashing the “Four Olds”.
3
1971Lin Biao Incidentkey figure
On 13 September 1971 Lin Biao, Mao Zedong’s designated successor, fled China by air with his family; the plane crashed near Öndörkhaan in Mongolia, killing all on board. The Chinese government announced that he had fled after a coup plot was exposed, but much about the affair remains unclear.

People who appear alongside

Mao Zedong1893 – 1976
Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
Deng Xiaoping1904 – 1997
General Secretary of the Communist Party (1956–1966), twice purged during the Cultural Revolution, and from 1978 China’s paramount leader who launched “reform and opening up”
Jiang Qing1914 – 1991
Wife of Mao Zedong, a former Shanghai actress who married him in Yan’an, led the Central Cultural Revolution Group and was arrested in 1976 as one of the “Gang of Four”
Zhou Enlai1898 – 1976
First premier of the People’s Republic of China (1949–1976), long in charge of diplomacy, who arranged Nixon’s 1972 visit
Chiang Kai-shek1887 – 1975
Leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party who unified China through the Northern Expedition and led the Nanjing government through the war with Japan; after losing the civil war he moved to Taiwan and ruled the Republic of China there
Liu Shaoqi1898 – 1969
Chairman of the People’s Republic (1959–1968) who led economic readjustment after the Great Leap Forward, but was branded a “capitalist roader” in the Cultural Revolution, expelled from the party and died in detention

Themes this person appears in

From the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution1927 – 1976
From the collapse of the United Front in 1927, through rural bases, the Long March and Yan’an, to the Communists’ victory in the civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic — then land reform, the Great Leap Forward and famine, the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution, up to Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, while the Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan