Lin on the Boards?

Peking has never publicly revealed the fate of former Defense Minister Lin Piao, Mao's heir apparent, who mysteriously disappeared last summer. Party officials were privately told that Lin was killed aboard an aircraft that crashed in Mongolia in September. Now a fictionalized version of his possible fate seems to have been spelled out in the revolutionary opera On the Docks, as performed by a troupe of Peking opera players in Shanghai.

First performed in 1969, On the Docks originally told of the reform of a careless young dock worker, whose mistakes were compounded by a grumbling, bourgeois warehousekeeper. Now the opera has been rewritten to make the warehousekeeper the main villain; he has been upgraded to a traffic-control man, and is an active saboteur. At the end he tries to sneak aboard a "foreign freighter" from "northern Europe" but is captured after a fight. This would change a major detail in the story of Lin's attempted defection. The opera says, in effect, that he was intercepted trying to board the aircraft that crashed in Mongolia, and was arrested after a bloody battle at Peking airport.

The party journal Red Flag ran the full libretto of the opera, along with a commentary noting that the traffice-control man's crime was maintaining "illicit relations with foreign countries"--precisely the charge that had been made repeatedly against Lin Piao.

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