Silverio Corvisieri, The True World Revolution - The Seventies in the People's Republic of China, in "L'Ebdomario" (weekly supplement to L'Unità), y. 18, n. 2, 14.01.1980
[...] As member of the Politburo Standing Committee, Marshal of the People's Liberation Army and pioneer of the Communist Party of China Zhu De stated in his speech at the funeral of the first Paramount Leader of the CPC, the man he had stuck to through thick and thin for 38 years, the legacy of Mao Zedong was too big for any single man and everyone would have soon realized it. That line in his speech could have been interpreted as a cheap shot at Mao's heir apparent, Lin Biao, Minister of National Defense, Vice-Premier and most importantly First-ranked Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee, a position he had been promoted to little more than one month before at the insistence of Mao and after the successful withdrawal of Premier Zhou Enlai's candidature, and could have cost a lot to the elder statesman if Comrade Lin had taken umbrage at the Marshal's insinuation that leading the People's Republic was too heavy a task for his shoulders. But luckily for Comrade Zhu, Lin Biao had probably reached the very same conclusion minutes after the physicians had confirmed that there was no hope for recovery for the Paramount Leader and the Marshal kept his office until his death, almost ten years later, without being involved in any purge.
Lin's actual merits and Mao's seeming obsession to have him as his successor might have earned the former a direct path to the Chairmanship, but the organs of the Communist Party of China dutifully following the last will of the lamented Paramount Leader and raising the Civil War hero to the Chairmanship didn't change the fact that, from the moment Comrade Mao drew his last breath, a large portion of the Party and of the nation at large was looking at Zhou Enlai for leadership in that new era for the still young People's Republic and not at him. The Premier's prestige and standing, both domestic and international, had been second only to Mao's and it's likely that even the Chairman himself wouldn't have bristled at somebody who dared to put him and Zhou on the same level -- though nobody ever tried to do that while the former was still alive. Opening hostilities -- politically speaking, of course -- with such an untouchable head of government would have greatly unwise for anyone, especially for somebody like Lin, who had been propelled to the Chairmanship despite his opposition and therefore had little to no idea about the best way to consolidate a leadership he didn't want for himself to begin with. But Zhou wasn't the only person commanding more authority than him. Liu Shaoqi, head of state of the People's Republic of China, had been saved from a certain purge by the timing of the passing of Mao, after the relationship between the two men had become more and more strained throughout the Sixties. The Chairman had even summoned him to his bedside just hours before dying to forgive him and ask for forgiveness in return for everything that had pulled them apart in the previous five years and that gesture had instantly reinstated Liu as the third -- and soon second, despite Mao's great ambitions for his heir -- most powerful man in China. Luckily for the new Party leader, he had always enjoyed an excellent relationship with the head of state, whom he had come to admire as the finest political theorist in China. The fact that the Chairman of the PRC -- an office wielding less power than the Party Chairman, according to the 1954 constitution -- was held in higher regard than Lin was definitely frustrating for the latter, but the Paramount Leader preferred to think about Liu as an important asset for the whole country rather than as a threat to his authority. And lastly there were the inexhaustible cohorts of Red Guards, who had lost their leading light with the premature death of Chairman Mao Zedong but had been kept alive as a cohesive organization -- and therefore as a force to be reckoned with -- by the Cultural Revolution Group, the institution that had replaced the Central Committee Secretariat in May of that year. While the actual influence of Jiang Qing, Mao's widow and the main spokesperson of the CRG, over the Party's upper echelons was negligible and the PLA -- whose unquestionable loyalty to Lin was the latter's greatest asset -- could have easily done away with the Red Guards in the not-so-remote chance that they would suddenly turn violent against the many entities they deemed counter-revolutionary, the Chairman had no intention to start his tenure in office with a bloodbath. The fact that Jiang Qing's faction was seemingly willing to offer their support to Lin's leadership in exchange for a continuation of the Cultural Revolution's policies made a negotiated agreement with the other main players the most logical path to travel.
The negotiation between Lin, Zhou, Liu and the representatives of the CRG was a real trial by fire for the new Chairman's political skills, but the agreement that was hammered out after weeks of wearying discussions showed that at least he was far from having no common sense. Comrade Lin would have been confirmed Paramount leader of the CPC and uncontested number one inside the Party hierarchy, all matters related to military affairs, foreign policy and internal security would be supervised by him and he would be the ultimate authority on all matters related to the Cultural Revolution, which would have been carried on like Mao had wished on his deathbed. Comrade Liu would be formally reinstated as number two in the Party hierarchy -- a predictable outcome, given how highly the Chairman thought of him and Mao's pardon of his old friend being witnessed by most of the CPC leadership -- be officially recognized as the Party leader's main advisor on all ideological matters and start acting as a guarantor of the harmony between the other sides of the agreement, so that nobody could overstep the boundaries of his authority without a clear reason. Comrade Zhou would keep the Premiership and his rank as number three and have oversight of all matters related to economic planning and trade. Finally, Chen Boda, the official leader of the Cultural Revolution Group, would become the number four in the CPC hierarchy as First-Ranked Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee -- Lin's former political office -- and, by virtue of that, the Paramount leader's heir presumptive and right-hand-man for all matters related to the Cultural Revolution. It was on the whole a well-thought out arrangement and by November 1966 this "Gang of Four" -- the nickname that the Chinese collective leadership was given by American newspapers, a term which percolated to the Eastern Hemisphere with alarming ease -- had settled in their roles, new or old, rather well.
The People's Republic was under a new administration, but the change was less noticeable than one would have expected since the tidal wave of the Cultural Revolution that would have swept up the "Four Olds" failed to materialize in the expected extent. To the CRG's chagrin, Lin had no real interest in promoting the Cultural Revolution, an endeavour which he didn't even fully understand well as for its purpose and generally made him uneasy since he really didn't like the concept of the Red Guards as a paramilitary organization roaming free and handing judgments on the right of people and objects to exist. Vice-Chairman Chen stayed out into the early hours nearly every day to prepare his blacklists of counter-revolutionary people and institutions, but less than twenty percent of the targets actually faced dramatic consequences from their inclusion. Chairman Lin, assisted by the invaluable President Liu, blocked every proceeding based on clearly outrageous claims -- which ranged from at least two thirds of the total to all of them, according to any top Party official not involved with the CRG -- and the ones which targeted the institutions and figures which wouldn't have been easily replaceable. The ultimate effect of the Cultural Revolution being bridled in such a way by the Paramount Leader was the one Lin and Liu had hoped for from the beginning. The Red Guards started losing appeal in popular consciousness. An act of force against the "feeble, misguided" Party leadership was utterly unadvisable since the PLA never failed to react with astounding force any time an overzealous Red Guard cell tried lynching somebody they weren't supposed to or torch a museum they had been instructed to leave alone. The ranks of the troublesome paramilitary movement grew thinner and thinner over the four years after Lin's reaching the Chairmanship and the Cultural Revolution, like every mass movement when its members realize they're actually kept on a leash by somebody more powerful than them, seemed doomed to fizzle out in a very ignominious way without having changed anything of substance in the country.
[...] 1970 saw Lin Biao's leadership reach its nadir. The notoriously anti-Chinese Mikhail Suslov becoming the sole leader of the ruling neo-Stalinist faction in the USSR had been a death blow for the Little Eurasian Detente that had started in 1965 at the initiative of then-First Secretary Kosygin. Lin had worked so hard to keep the hope of gradual Soviet-Chinese reconciliation alive after the January Putsch in 1968 and he had overexerted his precarious health conditions, to the point that for a whole year, from February 1969 to February 1970, the Paramount Leader of the CPC was not seen in public. With his pro-Soviet foreign policy in tatters, the Chinese state apparatus started looking at Premier Zhou Enlai as the new guiding light in the complicated world of international diplomacy and alliances, particularly after the CPSU and the KGB for all purposes declared war at each other with First Secretary Kaganovič's speech in October 1969 and the possibility that the Soviet Union could collapse on itself became hard to ignore. In that unique environment, Comrade Zhou's vision of a People's Republic of China taking the Soviet Union's place as the beacon of the International Communist movement was incredibly alluring for a vast majority of Chinese Party members. But it wasn't the Premier's trespassing into a territory that should have been under Lin's jurisdiction that ended the experience of collective leadership commonly known as the Gang of Four. That was Chairman of the People's Republic of China Liu Shaoqi's death on 24 April 1970, caused by an embolic stroke.
Liu had been the glue that had kept the Gang together, the oil that had kept its gears turning. The state funeral organized by Lin himself was a solemn, majestic ceremony that rivalled even the last good-bye to Mao Zedong. In a call-back to four years before, PLA Marshal Zhu De once more perfectly summarised the new political status quo of the People's Republic when, during his speech, he mentioned that men like Liu had been so essential to the existence of revolutionary China that even just moving on from his death would have been impossible without undergoing some sort of change. Chairman Lin realized this the hard way when, one week later, while the National People's Congress was in the process of being assembled to elect the new head of state, Premier Zhou Enlai presented Marshal Ye Jianying to the Chinese Politburo as the Party's right choice for the Presidency. Saying that the First Chairman was less than pleased by this turn of events would be the understatement of the century. Ye hated Lin with a passion after he had been removed from all his political posts a few years before in favour of his fellow Marshal in one of the late Mao's blatant acts of favouritism towards his protégé. Conversely, he had always been in excellent terms with Comrade Zhou from that time when they fled together to British Hong Kong in 1927 following the failed Nanchang Uprising. Lin and Zhou had been discussing the matter of Liu's succession even before the last beat of the late head of state's heart and had even come up with a shortlist of names -- one which definitely didn't feature the Marshal's name -- and in the end it had been all for nothing. Zhou had always had a candidate ready for the job and for all that time he had been pretending to be working with his Party leader on a shared candidate to prevent Lin from finding his own. The Gang of Four was over. The rivalry between Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai had officially become the struggle for supreme leadership of the PRC and Zhou held almost every good card in the deck.
With Ye's candidacy being met by nearly every other Politburo member with a round of applause and with every name on his shortlist declining the Paramount Leader's offer to become Lin's candidate for the Chairmanship of the PRC as an act of respect towards the Premier's wisdom in selecting Marshal Ye for the job, the Chairman was so desperate that he resolved to ask out for the help of the other member of what had by then become a Gang of Two, his First Vice-Chairman Chen Boda and, by extension, the Cultural Revolution Group. The prestige of the Cultural Revolution was definitely not what it used to be in the immediate aftermath of the Mao's death, but at least Chen's loyalty meant that Lin still had something resembling a faction of allies in the Chinese nomenclature. On the other hand, he couldn't help but think that it was in part because of the CRG that he suddenly found himself at risk of losing all real power in the People's Republic. If Ye's name had appeared even once in the lists that Comrade Chen sent to his office, Lin would have had no qualms with unleashing the Red Guards against him. Unfortunately for the Chairman, the Marshal's silence about all things related to the war waged against the Four Olds had given Chen and his comrades the wrong impression that Ye was actually a sympathizer of the Group's activities -- at least until his alliance with their arch-enemy, Premier Zhou Enlai, had been revealed to the Party at large.
Chen Boda's plan to prevent Ye's accession to the Presidency was extremely simple. While Liu Shaoqi's unwillingness to commit to the true revolutionary ideals espoused by the Cultural Revolution were borderline traitorous to the First Vice-Chairman, the consensus in the Party by 1970 was that the late head of state was a giant when it came to his understanding of Communist doctrine. According to Chen's "informed" opinion, it was very unlikely that the Party would have fallen in line behind the candidature of a mere military officer who owed his sudden, meteoric rise in the nomenclature exclusively because of the shameless patronage of a top-level Party official [1] if they were to be presented with a more prestigious choice. That choice, according to Chen, was Kang Sheng, the number one overseer of the CPC propaganda apparatus as head of the Central Organisation and Propaganda Leading Group -- an agency that had become the bulwark of the Cultural Revolution Group against the danger of sliding into political irrelevance. Chairman Lin was sceptical to say the least about Comrade Kang's chances to muster enough support to overcome an incredibly strong candidate the likes of Ye Jianying. First of all, the memory of him being Mao's "attack dog" in the year preceding the great leader's death was still quite fresh in the Party members' collective memory and therefore everybody remembered his ferocious invectives against President Liu, a man whose popularity was at an all-time high after his death. Secondly, from a more personal perspective, Lin didn't like at all the idea of having a second member of the CRG occupying another of the great political offices of the People's Republic, since he liked the idea of keeping them in a state where all of their authority ultimately descended from him quite a lot. But, to reiterate the concept once again, Lin was desperate and he had no better alternatives to Chen's plan. Three days after Premier Zhou's candidate had formalized his candidate to the office of head of state, the Paramount Leader did the same with his own, to a polite but much more subdued reaction.
On 11 May 1970, Marshal Ye Jianying was elected Chairman of the People's Republic of China by 87% of the vote of the National People's Congress.
By 1 June 1970, the phase of China's history known as Cultural Revolution was declared as having reached its completion, Chen Boda was removed from the Vice-Chairmanship, the Central Committee Secretariat was reinstated as part of the PRC state apparatus, the whole Cultural Revolution Group was put on trial, each one of them charged for at least a dozen counts, and every active battalion of Red Guards was dismantled and dispersed by force of arms if some additional persuasion effort was needed. Such a swift, complete eradication of the movement behind the Cultural Revolution would have been impossible if Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao hadn't joined forces one last time, united by their common goal to see the Group stop being a presence in the political landscape once and for all -- in the latter's case, mostly out of resentment for how badly Chen Boda's strategy had failed, throwing Lin out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire.
[...] Lin Biao's rise to power had started with a war, the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962. His chance to win back his power and prestige presented itself to him in the form of another war.
Burma's separation from the collapsing British Empire had been neither a straightforward nor a pleasant process. The Japanese invasion was going to be a traumatic event for the population of the British Crown Colony, but the successful formation of a -- somewhat -- independent national government by Aung San's Burmese Independence Army was paradoxically the event that poisoned the country's politics for the following three decades. The tendency to see ethnic struggle as a necessary component of any Burmese revolutionary effort was always going to be a dangerous proposition in such a heterogeneous territory, at the crucible of so many cultures and peoples. In 1970, Burma had been a divided country for twelve years, after Aung San's second attempt at achieving independence
and Socialism with the help of the Chinese. In the East, the Multinational State of Burma had mostly healed from the terrible wounds left by the civil war thanks to the monetary aid and economic advisors -- led by Dutch defector Albert Winsemius -- provided by the capitalist countries. The head of state,
Generalissimo Smith Dun, had spent a whole decade and tons of money and effort turning the army of a mutilated country into a formidable and disciplined fighting force -- the popular definition of the Multinational State as "the Prussia of South-East Asia" isn't too far from the truth -- all while cultivating the dream of reuniting Burma under a single flag. In the West, the People's Republic of Myanmar had the highest infant mortality rate in the whole world, the endemic corruption made it impossible for economic planners to exploit the country's substantial natural resources for the good of the nation and the army hadn't been re-equipped since the civil war. It was by all means an island amid a reactionary lake, since the lands of the Shan and Kachin peoples divided Myanmar from their patron in the north and the Indian democratic forces had had only limited success in their attempt at subduing the quarrelling statelets born from the collapse of New Delhi's authority in the eastern portion of the country following the great famine of 1959. Only a handful of tireless, dedicated Marxist intellectuals and statesmen kept the spectre of national implosion at bay, chief amongst them U Nu, on-and-off Prime Minister of Myanmar since independence.
On the morning of 30 August 1970, Prime Minister U Nu was found dead in his office. On 3 September, after a three-day period of national mourning, the Central Committee of the Myanmar Socialist Party was supposed to begin its proceedings to elect Nu's successor. Instead they were violently interrupted by a military coup carried out by junior army officers. With the great man's death, the civilian government seemed to have lost what little prestige it still had and the coup leaders were sure that they would have walked the path to absolute power with no noteworthy incidents. During those days of uncertainty, the hospital where U Nu's autopsy had been performed -- just like nearly every hospital in Rangoon -- was raided by a huge group of privates led by NCO's who were out for medicines and medical equipment and the report about the Prime Minister's actual cause of death was accidentally destroyed. To this day, the circumstances of his passing are still shrouded in mystery. The junta precariously stayed in control of the capital and little else for about nine days before being crushed by a counter-coup organized by an alliance of older military figures and ambitious bureaucrats, convinced that the young officers themselves had murdered Comrade Nu to create a pretext for a seizure of power. On the 16th, taking advantage of the short monsoon season of that year, President Smith Dun launched an invasion of the People's Republic to unite all the ethnic groups of the Burma of old under a single banner again. [2] The attack was helped by a concurrent -- and likely supported by the Multinational State itself -- insurrection of the Rakhine and Chin peoples in the western regions of Myanmar, the poorest and least developed in the whole country.
[...] A third of the country had fallen into the enemy's hands within less than one week, the forces of
Generalissimo Dun were taking Rangoon's outskirts district after district at an alarming rate, the Multinational State had spent the previous decade fortifying the Himalayan passes on the Chinese border and the nations of the Anglosphere had all given their blessing to their puppet's effort to reunify Burma. In normal circumstances, a Party Chairman rattling off this list of arguments against military intervention in South-East Asia to the CPC Politburo would have meant that the People's Republic of China wouldn't have lifted a finger to help its rapidly-collapsing ally. But there was very little that could be described as "normal" in the halls of power of Beijing in September 1970. Ye Jianying, in his roles as supreme commander of the armed forces of the People's Republic and chairman of the National Defence Council, was the supreme military authority in China and was therefore free to disregard any word coming out of Lin Biao's mouth if he so chose to. Zhou Enlai, despite some initial and completely understandable hesitation coming from the fact that China would have been completely alone in that endeavour, had come to see an intervention in Myanmar as a chance to assert his country's new leading role in the Freed World that could not be missed. China would have gone to war against the Multinational State.
One wouldn't need to have navigated the halls of power in Beijing for decades to understand that, if the war were to be a success for China, Ye and Zhou's positions would become utterly unassailable while Lin's Paramount Leadership of the Communist Party would find itself balancing on a razor's blade. But Lin's military acumen wasn't obfuscated by pride, ambition and thirst for revenge like the ones of his adversaries. He would have given them a free hand in the coming Sino-Burmese War -- in fact, he hoped that the conflict would enter popular consciousness as «Ye and Zhou's War» -- and once they would manage to get enough rope to hang themselves, he would have struck. But before that moment, he had a job for Yang Shangkun, his new First Vice-Chairman, a long-time supporter of Liu Shaoqi who Lin had expunged at least four times from Chen Boda's blacklists at the time he was "just" a member of the Central Committee. He had to discreetly get in touch with Hua Guofeng, Party Secretary of Hunan Province, member of the Central Committee and architect of the Second Great Leap Forward, and see if the man, whose political capital had skyrocketed in the previous year, was interested in the prospect of a career advancement.
[1] One can only hope that the First Vice-Chairman never explained that concept to his direct superior -- himself "a mere military officer who owed his sudden, meteoric rise in the nomenclature exclusively because of the shameless patronage of a top-level Party official" -- in those exact terms, but the way Chen presented the situation to a CRG meeting in early May is reported to have gone along those lines by official documents.
[2] The move enjoyed a huge amount of popularity especially with the Bamar who had chosen to stay on the side of the original post-colonial government or had defected over the years from Aung San's revolutionary Myanmar due to a variety of reasons, not the least the rise of a popular, grassroots movement vehemently opposed to Aung San's Bamar supremacist rhetoric and centred on the idea that peaceful coexistence and collaboration is the only path to prosperity Burma. The party representing the movement's political arm was in fact the second largest member of the parliamentary coalition supporting the policies of
Generalissimo Smith Dun.
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Different timeline, different Gang of Four. Given how generic it is, I feel like it's not implausible for a group of four Chinese Communist politicians to get that nickname in the
Meet the new boss-verse. The big difference here is that it's not the mere existence of the ATL-Gang of Four that brings interesting times to the People's Republic, but rather its demise and the following power struggle. But hey, compared to the general awfulness of the OTL Cultural Revolution, TTL PRC has had an outrageous amount of luck throughout the Sixties!
Only one more update left before
To discover a flaw in Nature goes back to Leninsleep, but don't worry: I left the juiciest one last on purpose.
