China: The Fall of Mao's Heir

WITH mounting frustration, outsiders have sought for more than two months to make sense of portents from Peking suggesting an epic struggle for power in China. Last week China watchers from Hong Kong to Washington at last claimed to have some tangible evidence about the mysterious events. Only the barest dimensions of the conflict are discernible, but Western intelligence experts now believe that they have enough clues, including several from sources within China, to draw some dramatic conclusions:

> Lin Piao, war hero, defense minister and the man whom Mao Tse-tung personally anointed as China's future leader only 2 1/2 years ago, is politically finished and very possibly dead as well.

> Of the 21 full members of the Politburo, only nine are now active; of the remaining dozen, six have dropped completely from view since the puzzling happenings of September.

> Chou Enlai, China's agile Premier, is the most powerful man in Peking after Mao, but he stands at the head of a Politburo decimated by purges and a government riven by myriad factions.

Lin's Sins. The climax of the struggle came in mid-September. In one frantic four-day period Chou En-lai abruptly canceled most of his appointments and the entire Politburo dropped from public view, possibly because its members had been summoned to an emergency session in Peking. China's military leaders also disappeared, including Chief of Staff Huang Yung-sheng, one of his deputy chiefs of staff, the chief of the air force, the First Commissar of the navy and at least twelve senior officers in the Peking military headquarters; they have not been seen since. After a British-made tri-jet Trident transport mysteriously crashed deep in Mongolia, the Chinese air force was grounded; not until seven weeks later were some essential flights resumed.

From sources inside China and probably fairly high in the Communist Party hierarchy, Western experts have learned that the top men in Peking--perhaps including Chou En-lai himself--have been convening secret meetings of party officials to relate the "sins" of Lin Piao. One such meeting of 200 Communist leaders was held in Canton three weeks ago. Lin's sins are said to include no fewer than three attempts on Mao's life over an 18-month period.

Last September, Lin was somehow found out, and he decided to try to flee China. He raced to a military airfield near Peking with his wife, his son and two key coconspirators: Mao's chief ideologue, personal secretary and ghostwriter, Chen Pota. who was purged from his fourth-ranking spot in the Politburo last fall, and Wu Fa-hsien, boss of the Chinese air force. The would-be defectors took off in a Trident equipped with a special radar designed to permit flights at very low altitudes. Wherever they were headed, they never made it. Lin's own daughter. Lin Toutou, betrayed the escape attempt, and the Trident was somehow shot down.

Can the tale be true? The Soviets know the identites of the nine bodies found at the Trident crash site, but they will say only that the victims were in uniform, that one was a woman and that there were signs of an armed struggle in the aircraft, suggesting a hijack attempt. Experts tend to believe the fantastic story of Lin's flight, though they concede that the account of the assassination attempts might have been fabricated to make it less embarrassing for Mao to purge the man whom he had personally designated his "closest comrade in arms and successor." After all, the Chairman had purged another designated heir, Liu Shao-chi, only five years earlier. What was evident was that Lin had been in a showdown with Chou and Mao, and had lost.

No one knows what form the showdown took or why Lin felt compelled to seek it. Almost certainly, Lin's fall was related to a desperate drive by leftists who rose to brief prominence during the Cultural Revolution to regain power in the party, which has been rebuilt over the past 2 1/2 years under the military's aegis. Lin, of course, was vice chairman of the party. But was he resisting the leftists, in his role as China's Defense Minister? Or was he battling the military, in his role as a leading leftist?

Whatever his role was, Lin is now clearly being cast as an unspeakable villain. He has been the target of oblique attacks by the party journal Red Flag, which has been denouncing "political swindlers" and "criminal plots" hatched by "ranking leaders." There are other unmistakable signs. Copies of the Little Red Book of Mao's quotations have been withdrawn from libraries and bookshelves all over China because Lin wrote the introduction.

Pecking Order. At a Peking reception honoring the 30th anniversary of the Albanian Communist Party last week, a new Politburo pecking order emerged--and there were some stunning surprises. Predictably enough, Chou occupied Lin's No. 2 position. But No. 3 turned out to be none other than Mao's wife Chiang Ching. She was one of the reddest of the Red Guard leaders during the Cultural Revolution, and her rise may spell new power for the small nucleus of relatively youthful leftists in the Politburo. One of its key figures is Yao Wenyuan, who is rumored to be Chiang Ching's son-in-law and is Peking's new press and propaganda chief; another is Chang Chun-chiao, party boss of Shanghai, who recently has been working out of Peking as China's man in charge of relations with foreign Communists. That job was formerly handled by Kang Sheng, a leftist Politburo member who may have been one of the earliest casualties of the political infighting that boiled up over the summer.

Chou's clique within the Politburo includes his deputy, Li Hsien-nien, and his old confidant Yeh Chien-ying, 73, a former marshal who was bumped up several places to the No. 4 position behind Mme. Mao. Yeh was with Chou in 1945 when General George C. Marshall was trying to mediate the civil war between the Nationalists and Mao's Communists. His youthful secretary at the time was Huang Hua, who arrived in New York last week as Peking's Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Yeh is expected to serve as chief of staff, at least for a while, to fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of the military chiefs.

Good Humor. So far, the palace infighting has had no effect on Peking's foreign policy or on China's more than 750 million people. Recent mainland visitors, among them Old China Hand John S. Service, have left the country strongly impressed by a pervasive atmosphere of good humor and relaxation. But that is not surprising in view of the regime's inclination to keep its internal problems to itself. In fact, the lead item in every Chinese newscast these days is the Afro-Asian table tennis tournament in Peking.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.