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Book Review

Asia

Jin Qiu. The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 279. $45.00.

The Cultural Revolution in China remains one of the most baffling events in recent Chinese history. Despite an increasing body of excellent research, much is still poorly understood in terms of the motivations of key participants. This is especially the case with respect to the death of Lin Biao, Mao Zedong's chosen successor, who according to official accounts died in a plane crash in Mongolia after trying to flee following a failed coup. How do we explain that China's top military figure, whose prowess on the battlefield was crucial in bringing the Communist Party to power in 1949, could have been so naïve to have turned against Mao, when he must have known that he could not win? Why would he have tried to flee to the Soviet Union of all places? 1

The increased availability of original sources in post-Mao China and the access to many of the participants in such events have allowed researchers to begin to answer a number of the conundrums. In so doing, they provide more plausible answers than either Chinese official accounts or those Western accounts that view the Cultural Revolution as a principled struggle over policy and the future of the revolution. Jin Qiu is in an ideal position to research the demise of Lin Biao, being the daughter of one of Lin's senior generals, air force chief Wu Faxian. She unabashedly notes that she began her research in order to clear her father, who was put on trial in 1980–1981 as a counterrevolutionary, together with others purged in the Cultural Revolution, including Mao's wife Jiang Qing. Qiu combines her privileged access to key survivors and unpublished materials with secondary sources to provide a highly informative and persuasive account of what might have happened. . . .

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