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你好,欢迎收听BBC History Magazine的History Extra Podcast。这是英国最畅销的历史杂志。
Hello and welcome to History's greatest mysteries. I'm Rob Atta, the editor of BBC History Magazine. This is episode four of this series and it finds us in Communist China in the final years of Chairman Mao.
In 1971, the likely successor to Mao was the Army General Lin Biao. But that September, he inexplicably boarded a flight out of China which crashed shortly afterwards in the Mongolian desert. 50 years later, numerous questions remain about the mysterious Lin Biao incident. And to try to answer them, I spoke to Professor Ran Amitur, an expert in Chinese history at the University of Oxford.
Ranat, could you please tell us a little more about Lin Biao and his backstory? How has he risen to become one of the leading figures in Communist China?
Lin Biao's claim to the legitimacy, Rob, really comes from the fact that he was probably, even without exception, the finest general that the Chinese Red Army, the Communist Army, had during the 20th century. There are other figures, Pung Dahuai is one who comes to mind who were very close in that sense, but I think many people would argue that overall Lin Biao was the most important.
And in a sense, his life story tracks much of that bigger story of the Chinese Communist Revolution across the 20th century. He was, for instance, present in the 1930s and 1940s alongside Mar-Zhidung, Chairman Mao, as he became, and other top Communist leaders in the city or town, really, we should say, of Yanan in Northwest China. That was where the diehard Communist revolutionaries ended up at the end of the famous Long March of the 1930s. And Lin Biao, we know, was there living in these cave dwellings, very much part of this little revolutionary base that became a rather big revolutionary base.
But the place that was almost a thinking shop, you might say, a place to think again about how the military and political nature of China might change once they had achieved their revolution in 1949. But Lin Biao really comes of age, really makes his mark in the Civil War in the years 1946 to 1949.
This is after World War II. The Japanese were defeated by an uneasy combination of the Chinese nationalists and Chinese Communist armies, but those two armies then turned on each other, the nationalists under Changkai Shik, the leader of China and the Communist led by Mar-Zhidung. And essentially for three years, three very vicious years, China's Communist and nationalists fought each other on successive battlefields. The major battle really took place between, well, that's in 1947 and 1949, very early 1949. And Lin Biao, in particular, was central to that.
And I guess we would say that his particular contribution came in an understanding gained over time about how to balance set peace warfare, you know, big regiments, big battles, big order of battle with guerrilla warfare, the classic form of cut and run, chase and run that had been actually in some ways pioneered against the Japanese during the Second World War and then was brought to bear again in various ways during those Civil War years.
Essentially Communist China's finest general, that was what gave Lin Biao tremendous amounts of prestige. And then by the time of the incident we're going to talk about, is it fair to say that Lin is at the height of his powers and the height of his influence within China?
By the time of the Cultural Revolution, which is generally reckoned to have lasted from 1966 to 1976, a decade, Lin Biao essentially reached the peak of his influence. It's just worth noting what kind of personality he had to make it clear why in some ways this was a slightly unexpected outcome.
Lin Biao, unlike some of his top communist rivals, I think rivals is not too strong word, but certainly comrades, was not a particularly personable character. He was regarded as being in some ways a bit standoffish, not someone who necessarily was very kind of a bonnemy, not hail fellow, well met.
He was often said to be quite photophobic. In other words, bright lights bothered him and he preferred to sort of be a little bit in the dark. Certainly it was said that when younger women were brought close to him in Yanan and the wartime years against Japan, that being close to Lin Biao, it was not something they much liked to do.
So he was not a personality who was generally charismatic in the ways that, of course, Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao, absolutely was. Well yet he rose tremendously in terms of the party leadership in the 1960s and 1970s.
And that was really for several reasons. One was that what you might call the conventional leadership of the party, the conventional civilian leadership of the party. If you do my spire, perhaps more than anyone else by Liushaochi, Liushaochi was the chairman of the Republic and president of the Republic of China.
Now, that's different from being the chairman of the party, which actually even today is really the more important post in terms of power. But nonetheless, Liushaochi was very much second in command to Mao from that whole period from the 20s up to the 1960s.
And yet Mao came to distrust him in large part because Liu had had a quite significant role in shutting down the great leap forward of the 1950s, 1960s as socialist experiment in collective farming, collective industrialization that went horrifically wrong.
The bottom line was that the agricultural calculations were made so badly that essentially more than 20 million people starved to death in the countryside. So absolutely horrifically so policy making, eventually after much effort brought to an effort in 1962 and Liushaochi, and another one of his Virginia comrades, Deng Xiaoping, who would go on to become, of course, the man who was felt to have modernized China's economy after Mao's death.
They basically pulled Mao's great leap forward policies away from the front line. They instituted, instead, actually limited market reforms that look very much like capitalism to many looking on. And since she tried to send Mao to an elevated but actually less powerful position, and to put it its most concise, he wasn't having any of it.
He felt extremely sideline. He felt extremely angry and looked to instead another center of power where he might be able to exercise his authority. And being quite cut out, but certainly sideline in the civilian leadership, he turned to the army. And Lin Biow, by that stage as Minister of Defence, was a figure who had essentially set up almost an alternative power base in the People's Liberation Army.
The army, technically speaking, then and now, not all the people's Republic of China, but of the Chinese Communist Party. So the world's biggest party army, rather than national army, you might say. And learning from the People's Liberation Army, the learn from the PLA campaign with Lin Biow's name very much attached to that, became one of the catchphrases of the early to mid-1960s.
And that was then mixed in even more strongly when the Cultural Revolution began this huge internal revolt actually sponsored by Mao himself against his own party and against ultimately figures like the Oshouchi. And that context Lin Biow made a very powerful alternative second-in-command, and that use of China's army became particularly important in 1969.
Because after three years of the face of the Cultural Revolution that listeners may be perhaps more familiar with in the number of Chinese history, the Red Guards, with their little red books, the Thoughts of Chairman Mao waving them in the air in Tiananmen Square, a million of them in front of the Chairman.
That was really the first three years of the Cultural Revolution. 1966 to 1969. And by the end of that time, things were getting so out of hand that actually Mao and top leadership, the ones who were left, Liyou Shouchi was already pretty much on the way out to being essentially confined and then died through neglect.
But people like Mao, people like Lin Biow and others, essentially decided they had to shut this really tumultuous part of the Cultural Revolution down. And they used the army to do that. So by 1969, you could argue that the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, is the most powerful entity in China, even during the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and Lin Biow, this powerful, enigmatic figure, the Minister of Defence, this story general from China's Revolutionary War, he's very much in charge of it. And seen by that stage as Mao's eventual successor.
So most people had looked at Lin Biow in 1969, in the early 1970s and said, okay, he's sitting very, very pretty indeed. So Lin by the turn of the 1970s is essentially the number two figure within China. But am I right to say that things had already begun to unravel for him even prior to the incident?
I think most of the Beijing watchers, I think in those days they still would have called this other West actually Peaking Watchers, because people didn't tend to use the kind of properly pronounced name for Beijing until probably the 1980s. Most of the Beijing watchers at the time would have said that Lin Biow seemed pretty much to be clearly designated as the successor to Mao, the number two in very opaque, very non-transparent leadership of the Chinese Party by the early 1970s. And yet, yes, there are many ways we can now see that clearly things were beginning to crumble away.
There were quite a few factors involved. One was that he may have been number two, but there were other people in the leadership who were unhappy about that. And wanted to try and take China a different path. And perhaps the most significant is the thing we haven't yet mentioned, but in some sense is the only other figure who Mao really felt he had to listen to him. They didn't always agree with him, sometimes treated him rather contemptuously. That was the Prime Minister, Joe N. Li.
And Joe N. Li is often regarded as the figure who perhaps relatively speaking tried to moderate at least some of the aspects of the culture revolution, although that may be more in rhetoric than reality to be honest. He was not happy by the direction of travel, the way in which essentially the army and the Giao would be brought to the forefront in terms of the way in which China was going.
China was a revolutionary state. China was run by Communist Party, but Mao himself had made a very powerful statement decades before, which I suspect was in Joe's mind. And it's one of the most famous quotations from Mao. I'll give it to you now. It's that power comes from the barrel of a gun. That's the phrase that people tend to know. They often forget what comes in part two. And that is, therefore, the party must always control the gun, the gun must never control the party. And people like Joe and Li, I think we're very worried that essentially if China became a military state, rather than a civilian, but authoritarian state, that would send China in the wrong direction.
But there are also factors to do with Lin Biao himself. And this is something that again, perhaps only became obvious later to the outside when members of his family and other people were interviewed and asked some rather discreet questions. Lin himself wasn't actually that interested in politics, which was seen by this time. One of the questions we have to ask, we still need to have partial answers is, was his rise to the top more to do with a very ambitious family? Wife, son, other people in his entourage, rather than Lin himself.
It was always said that Lin himself was never a very natural politician, even back in the 1940s and the 50s. Of course, he was in the top leadership, but it was general ship, not political maneuvering that really made his name. And that may have been one of the other factors that meant that actually his dedication to taking on that role as the second in command may have come from others around him rather than from the man himself.
And what do we know of Lin's relationship with Mao at the time when the incident took place? One of the things we do seem to see is that Mao himself continued to be quite fond of Lin to regard him as a serious figure who was high up in the leadership. But he also became clear at about that time that new international moves were happening and those created a split within the leadership, it would appear that probably exacerbated the sense of difference between them.
And the most important of those splits and the one that has has become most globally famous was the decision whether or not become closer to the United States. I mean, just a reminder that although China was, of course, a communist state, it had had an alliance with the Soviet Union that had gone horribly wrong about a decade before it.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the two big communist giants had fallen out and essentially by the period we're talking about by the late 60s, early 70s, China was pretty isolated from the rest of the world. It wasn't talking to the capitalist world, but it also wasn't talking to what had been its old Soviet allies. And this created, disquiet, in the minds of many of the top leadership.
In between those who were, the relationship with the Soviets might get so bad that actually there could be a war. In 1969, there were actually shots fired over the Jambar Islands in the Asuri River, which marked them parts of the River Island border between the Soviet Union and China at the time.
And while it didn't turn into an all-out war, many people at the time thought that it could well have escalated, so that kind of incident was something they were really keen to try and get away from. And what this meant in practice was that there had to be debate about if they weren't going to get close to the Soviet Union, that just looked impossible at the time, was there a way in which they could start talking to the Americans, particularly at the time when, as we know, thanks to the approach of Richard Nixon, who had been elected president of the United States just a few months before, and had taken office in January of 1969. And of course, the National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, who undertook at Chinese encouragement, secret visits, Fire Park Star, to China.
There was clearly an opening that was being made that might lead to a rapprochement. And what we think we know now, and again, it's still very hard to know because the documentation has never been made openly available.
明显有一个可能导致和解的机会正在出现。我们现在所知道的是,尽管很难确定,因为相关文件并未公开发布。
What we think we know is that some in leadership, Joe and I, the Prime Minister, being good example, were pretty keen to push the opening to the United States. Others were not keen, and it would appear that Lin Biao himself, or those around him, thought this was an extremely bad idea. And therefore, this growing sense of a split within the very top leadership, with Mao himself, perhaps I'm prevalent about what he felt about this idea of opening to America. And of course, himself, very ill by the stage, don't actually live for a few years.
After that, we now know that Mogenura and disease, which she was suffering from, was beginning to encroach on Mao's powers during that time. So all of these factors were under the surface when that fateful decision to open to up to America was being made, and that probably fed into decisions that Lin Biao and his family made when it came to how to react.
And so then, on the morning of the 13th of September, Lin Biao and a small group of his family supporters boarded a plane in China and soon after crashed in Mongolia.
First of all, what do we know about the crash itself? So the crash of Lin Biao's plane in which he died along with various members of his family and some of his own to Raj, was something that seemed pretty amazing at the time.
We don't really have good documentation. A much of it we have had through various sources, a suggestion that was destroyed actually afterwards.
我们实际上没有很好的文档。我们拥有的大部分文档都是从各种来源获得的,但后来被销毁了。
But it does seem to have come as something of a surprise to many in the top leadership. It wasn't expected that he was going to try and flee. The plane that was basically fuelled and took off from an airport in northern China was actually a British trident plane, British mate.
And the original story, which is still, I think, the official version of the story that has it, I think, been a adjustment, but essentially the version of the story is that Lin Biao and family were launching an attempted military coup against Mao, against leadership.
They were found out. They fled to the plane. They got in it. They flew off towards the Soviet Union, whether we're going to try and seek some kind of sanctuary.
他们被发现了。他们逃到了飞机里。他们上了飞机。他们飞向苏联,希望能找到某种庇护。
But the plane ran out of fuel, crashed in Mongolia, and there was forensic work done by the Soviets and others afterwards, which suggested that this was what had happened. It wasn't Lin Biao and others who were there and killed, and that was the end of the story.
This version of the story has been subjected to quite a lot of questions. First, some people have asked, would it have been logical for them to actually go to the Soviet Union, yes, the Soviet Union wasn't enemy of the PRC at the time.
But in terms of the next stage of what they'd be able to do, would it not, for instance, have made more sense to fly to Taiwan, where, of course, the nationalist government continued to be in exile on the island?
但就下一阶段他们所能做的事情而言,飞往台湾不会更有意义吗?毕竟,在那里,国民政府仍然流亡于该岛上。
More suspicious than that, though, perhaps, is that it would appear apparently from evidence that the crash site, which is expected more than once by Soviet inspectors, did it appear to be at the time of crash flying not towards the Soviet Union, but away from the Soviet Union? Again, is there a clear explanation for that? There hasn't been one, but it does suggest that something more complex may have been going on.
There's also a great deal of dispute about how far ahead of that particular flight, in the sense of the word flight, the flight and the plane, but also fleeing from the capital from Beijing. What the role was of Yetchun, who was Libya's wife, and of Limeboa, one of his sons, and the most ambitious politically, whether or not intrigues concerning their desire to get to the top, along with, as I said, this idea that Libya himself made just to be really quite passive by the stage, not that interesting politics, but basically going along with what his family wanted to do. All of these rumors swirled around, not necessarily even resolved today, about what was going on when they fled for the plane and took off and then crashed within a few hours.
From your reading of it, how likely do you think it is that Limeboa, and potentially his family as well, would have tried to topple the Chinese Communist government? It sounds quite implausible. One of the things that we have come to realize is that politics at the top of the Chinese Communist Party over decades is both fiercely rival us and very, very opaque.
The example I give you as a parallel to that, which comes from a more contemporary example, happened only about ten years ago. Many listeners might remember either clearly or perhaps a bit vaguely, the case of Borsi Lai, who was a man in the eyes of many, not least himself, heading for the top of Chinese politics, senior communist official, very suave, he'd been the trade minister, seemed to be heading for the top echelon of the Chinese Communist Politburo. Then almost without warning in 2012, there was a warrant for his arrest.
He was tried and convicted of essentially trying to undermine the Chinese Communist Party. I think is in jail to this day, as far as I know, even more spectacularly his wife was accused and convicted of having murdered a British businessman by essentially poisoning him in a lonely hotel in southwest China. Deeply lurid story, probably one for a future episode of the BBC History Podcast, mysteries series I have to say, because we still don't know all that we could do about that particular story.
But the point is that Chinese Communist politics, which often looks very grey and very dull and full of men in grey suits with dyed hair from the outside, there's a lot of emotions under the surface. People mind a great deal about getting to the top, because of course the price very often for not getting to the top is not well, you've got second place, it's basically you may be purged or you may lose all your family assets or you may find yourself an exile never to be seen again. So the stakes are very high. And in that context, we don't know yet, even now, enough about the ups and downs of the culture revolution, but it is worth remembering that this all happened a few years into even by China's standards, the most turbulent, the most politically toxic period in recent Chinese history.
And it seems to me that we can, you know, we can't, I don't know, we can never know, but we need a lot more archives to open up, not very likely in the near future, to be able to know quite what was in the minds of any of the top leadership at that time. But it certainly seems to me that, you know, a top leader might have looked at what had happened to other leaders. And you know, you're sure she, as I said, President of the People's Republic of China, he died. I think that was also in 1969 in the city of Kaifeng in an airless basement where essentially we held a prisoner denied medical care. So he died of neglect essentially. 20 of other top leaders, I mean, Deng Xiaoping, who would go on to become a paramount leader of China.
He wasn't physically harmed, but he was his son, Deng Kufang was chucked out of a window by red guards. He's still alive to this day, he's in a wheelchair for decades because his back was broken. One other example, the man who lead to China now, Xi Jinping, not physically harmed, but essentially as a teenager, sent out the most remote part of the countryside from all accounts. He didn't have a great time there, didn't enjoy it very much. And presumably for years, I had no idea if he was going to get back or not.
We know now that he got back and rose to the top, but he wasn't going to know that in 1967. So if you're Limpia, if you are at the top, I can see that there is a plausible scenario in which you and those around, you might say in this politics that we have around us, who want Earth knows what's going to happen tomorrow, or the day after, or next month, or next year, better act now. It doesn't mean he did it. It just means that it doesn't seem illogical that he could have done.
Now, clearly in the crash, Limpia lost his life and many of the closest people around him, but did anyone survive from Limpia's circle who could shed any light on what happened? Nobody survived from the crash, but he did have other family members, including one daughter, Lin Do Do, who from all accounts was not thought to have been, even by the very paranoid party state to have been involved in the plot at all, who afterwards were able to give some sorts of accounts of the state of mind of the family at that time. I think that's where some of these stories about Limpia himself, not seeming to be terribly involved with politics, but those around him, son, wife, and so forth being a little more enthusiastic about trying to be politically active. That's where this comes from.
It's fair to say it's been hard to find out more because the Chinese state has been very, very keen indeed, not to say anything very much about this. They say there's an official verdict given way back in the 1970s, there was an attempted coup, it was foiled, that's it. Much of the information we've had has come actually from the Soviets and then the Russians, who, as I mentioned, did the inspection on the ground in Mongolia, which at that point of course was a Soviet ally at state, to see what the wreckage might tell us.
Some of the evidence quite circumstantial, as I say, the direction of impact of the plane, apparently to those who know about these things, suggested it was flying away from the Soviet Union, not towards the Soviet Union, again, what that meant, not clear. Questions about where the corpses actually, who they appear to, because there was a room about Slimia, I'd never been on the plane. They discovered one of the corpses seemed to have scars from tuberculosis, which Lin was known to have suffered from. So there is a circumstantial, but a strong, so substantial sense, that it must have been here in that particular case.
But nobody as far as I know had found any last minute notes or any particular documentation suggesting what they thought they were doing. I don't think there's ever been any suggestion that there was complicity from within the Soviet Union, in other words, this wasn't something that's been plotted from outside. This does appear to have been whatever it was, plot a coup, a attempt to get away, that was generated from within the Lin family and their entourage. And since, as I said, most of them perished in the crash, and the few who didn't seem to be the ones who weren't involved in the plot, or at least very wisely suggested that they weren't.
I think I would have said something quite similar, I have to say. We may never know much more than that, until files that are closed down are opened up.
我想我可能会说出相似的话语,我不得不说。除非关闭的文件被打开,否则我们可能永远不会知道更多的信息。
Has there been any suggestion that the crash itself wasn't an accident that either Chinese somehow brought the plane down, or perhaps the Soviets? It's difficult to say precisely, of course, because all of these things were, obviously someone must have, from the People's Liberation Army, Air Force must have, in fact, have been put on standby to be able to actually fly the plane, and therefore presumably someone within the structure of government must have known that this was going to happen. So could that have been in complicity with someone, could that have been maybe someone else who wanted them to get away or was planning to kind of trap them? These are things that aren't generally subject to much evidence.
As I've said, it does seem to be in the case that the vast majority of any of the evidence within China was actually destroyed pretty much after the official investigation. It was a coup, and that's it.
There have been rumors on other sorts of matters, rather than it being formally made to crash. The idea that there may have had to be contacts with Taiwan.
有传言称,除了正式意图将其坠毁外,还涉及其他各种问题。有可能需要与台湾进行接触。
As I've said, there is some suspicion that maybe the Soviet Union wasn't actually the intended destination of that particular flight in the first place at all, but it's not entirely clear quite what might have been done to sabotage a plane of that sort.
As I said, the official version that was given was that there wasn't enough fuel, basically it ran out of fuel at that time, and it hadn't been sufficiently fueled.
正如我所说的,官方给出的版本是燃料不足,基本上在那时耗尽了燃料,并未充足加燃料。
I suppose it's plausible enough that if you had a plane that had been put together at short notice because you were fleeing, then you might not have had time to make sure it was sufficiently well-fueled and properly treated by engineers before it actually went up in the up and year.
I should add, by the way, I said before, the Soviets had inspected the wreckage. In fact, the Chinese authorities were given access to it as well early on, but again, the products of their particular investigation have not been made public, and whether they've been destroyed is another question, but certainly they were not keen to provide documentation that would suggest any kind of wider sense of what had gone on.
Beyond the official Chinese version of the story, have there been any other theories that have gained much currency? Interestingly, I think it is interesting, and perhaps oddly, I don't have a sense that there's one sort of definitive alternative explanation that people have put forward.
It's a little like the Hushot JFK mystery in one sense in that, at one level, there's a very clear explanation of that. On the other hand, there's also lots of sort of penumbres of things that might have happened, but we're very hard to actually prove in that sense.
I think what most people who wanted to explain the incident self-of-try to do is to follow some sort of logical thread as to who would have an interest in it happening and who would have an interest in preventing it.
For that reason, I think it's probably fair to say that there might have been perhaps an interest in getting to Taiwan, rather than the Soviet Union. There are rumors that perhaps there may have been slightly more contact than has been realized with the Nationalist Authorities in Taiwan, who had been there in the 1970s, that that time, very much that Shanghai Shet was still alive at the time, although quite elderly by that stage.
The island itself was still quite heavily fortified. It's still, of course, the 1970s was the year that it was only in 1971 that official recognition of China, the United Nations moved from Taiwan to the mainland. So it was still in some ways a relatively geopolitically quite fluid period, but even within all of that, there's no one definitive answer.
The answer that also some people who have found the idea of the coup unlikely have put forward is that it must have been obvious to anyone who was involved in the top leadership by that stage that Mao is a serious ill man.
This was something that anyone close to him must have realized. And I think most Americans who finally got to meet him and said to realize that this was someone who was still functioning perfectly well, but it was clearly not in top health. So I suspect that for those sorts of interpretations, the idea that actually the successor, whoever that might be in Bia, would have actually got to take over quite quickly afterwards.
Would have been something you have to catch in mind. It was a double or quits thing. Do you hang on and get to take over as it turned out, it would have been four or five years later, or do you make the also possibly equi-rational calculation that five years with highly unpredictable, very violent form of politics is a very long time to wait. And maybe you should get out while the going is good. But there is, as of now, no one clear definitive answer. Lots of things in the mix, including attitude towards the mix and visit, try to work out with direction to travel or the culture revolution, personal ambition, of course, could want to be very important. But no one smoking gun or a piece of evidence that suggests that it was definitely done for one reason or another.
Now you've mentioned the fact that the Soviets think they found in Limby Al's body, but am I right to say that having theories put forwards that Lim wasn't even on the plane and that he'd been done away with some other means? I think actually the sense is more, as I understand it, that there were such theories put forward quite early on actually after the crash, the idea that maybe this was a faint or a scarlet scar, and in fact, he'd been spiritually aware of it.
I think it was the later Soviet inspection that looked at the tuberculosis scars on one which one of the corpses had, which seems to suggest it was Limby Al who had tuberculosis and this was a known thing from earlier life. In any scenario which the corpse wasn't here and someone else, there would presumably have been a sort of alternative version in which Limby Al turned up somewhere or made his way to some other place. And I've not seen any significant or plausible alternative explanation for where he would have been at that time.
It also makes sense if one accepts the idea that actually himself may not have been terribly keen on being very actively, but his family were very close to him, that they would have taken him almost as the token, so to speak, in that trip to the plane to escape.
And do you yourself have a personal view on this, on where do you come in the various explanations? My guess, and it's just a guess, would be that in this sort of balancing cock-up and conspiracy, there's perhaps more cock-up than people have realized. So I think the idea that there was a carefully laying down set of plans and plots and so forth may not have spoken to the reality of what life was like in Beijing at that time.
And that's one of the things we do know I think more about from the history of the culture revolution. Life was very unpredictable. I was going to say even for the top leaders, but you might say especially for the top leaders. This was a period when, as I say, people would be disappearing left, right, and centre. And I can see that at this point, all sorts of policy difference, something that might have been, in other circumstances, just been a disagreement over policy direction, should be let the Americans in or not. Might quite clearly in your mind turn into the idea that if we're on the wrong side of this argument, we might just lose. You might actually be purged, wiped out, killed.
And in that context, thinking, well, maybe just having a plane on standby, ready to take us away from all this just in case, might not have been a bad idea at all. I'd refer you back as I did earlier to that much more recent, but also in some ways inexplicable scandal about what you got. This was someone who in some ways appeared to be riding for the top anyway. There were questions about would he be able to get there because of his age or other means too.
In a sense, the many risks he appears to have taken, which ended in disaster for him, in some ways, emphasised that even in the very fevered, very inward looking crucible that is the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. And I suspect that in different ways, that's just as true today as it was in the 1970s, or the 1950s. In that crucible, what might seem to us looking from the outside with distance as being a decision that doesn't make any sense rationally might seem deeply rational at the time, because you have to remember that of course they were not making these decisions in the cool, calculated circumstances that a leader might do in a capital city where there's lots of advisors, where there's free media, where people are discussing policy the whole time.
We're talking about a very, very capsule-like sort of environment, and it seems to me entirely plausible in that sort of context. That's how Lin and his family may have got himself in the situation where they found themselves.
Do you think that any documents or any other evidence will emerge from China at some point that might finally solve this mystery? At some point, yes. It has been said that everything was destroyed, but something about me tells me that the Chinese archives tend to hold all sorts of secrets, which with the current administration in place are never going to be released. We could be talking about decades or period even beyond that. It also seems to me that the Chinese state is very good at keeping tabs on people and having evidence just burning it doesn't seem to me the way in which the state and the party operate. I suspect there's more information somewhere, but I think it may be much later generation of historians than actually gets to find out what it is.
And just finally, Rana, we're talking now almost 50 years after Lin Bial's death. I'd be interested to know what his reputation is like in China today. His reputation has really shifted over the last half century in the immediate aftermath of the plane crash and the shock news, even in the highly buttoned down society that was late cultural revolution in China. The idea that Mao's designated successor had tried to launch to escape and then been killed was big and very depressing news for many people. So at that point, there was a huge campaign against him, the so-called criticise Lin Bial, criticise Confucius campaign that was essentially promulgated throughout the entire country.
50 years on, though, things have changed somewhat. I think it's still fair to say that his name sits a bit in the shadows because of that reputation of having tried to undermine Mao. But also the earlier part of his life that I talked about, in fact that he was this immensely skilled and brave general in the People's Liberation Army, that he was someone who had helped to bring about military victory in the 1940s and peed up to the establishment of the PRC in 1949. Those sorts of accomplishments are now remembered more openly. And while his reputation, I think, will never be in the top pantheon of leaders in a way that say, Joe and I, who almost regard this great rival, has remained very much the top of people's lists of those who were respected. Nonetheless, he is regard to someone I think today who, while committed this absolutely sort of fateful deed, nonetheless actually is a military commander and someone who was a contributor to the Chinese Revolution who is well worth remembering for those reasons.