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janeiro 05, 2005

Lin Piao (Lin Biao)

1907-1971, Chinese Communist General
Lin Piao, one of the three or four outstanding generals who fought for the Communist cause in China, was a superior practitioner of guerrilla warfare. Lin grew up near the city of Wuhan on the Yangtze River in central China as the son of a well-to-do factory owner. He became involved in radical student circles in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when he joined the Communists and entered the Whampoa Military Academy. Though the academy was officially Nationalist, Russian advisers taught there, and many Communists studied there until the breakdown of the United Front in 1927.
Using guerrilla tactics, Lin scored several crucial victories to secure the Kiangsi Soviet (1931-1934), the first sizable piece of territory under Communist control. It was also Lin who in 1934 led the famed Communist breakout from Chiang Kai-shek's encirclement that began the Long March, and who scored a famous victory over the Japanese at the Ping-hsing Pass near the Great Wall in September 1937.
Lin knew, however, that guerrilla warfare was the weapon of the weak. Close to Mao Tse tung and with a reputation for tactical and strategic brilliance, in 1945 he was appointed the commander of all Communist forces in Manchuria, where the fate of China was decided in the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). Although initially forced to adopt guerrilla tactics, Lin gradually welded guerrilla units together into large armies capable of conventional warfare. Taking the offensive in 1947, he isolated Chiang Kai-shek's forces in the cities and put them out of action during the Liao-shen campaign of 1948. This was one of the great battles of the civil war period in which Lin showed off his tactical skills. His forces subsequently marched south, first taking Tien-tsin in a bloody battle and then securing the surrender of Peking. By the end of 1949, Lin's armies had marched through central China and taken the last major city in the south, Canton. Lin was only forty-two years old.
Lin today is much reviled. His reputation has suffered, perhaps because bouts of mental and physical illness kept him out of action during the Anti-Japanese and Korean wars. During the first, Lin was in Moscow between late 1938 or early 1939 and 1942, perhaps to recuperate from battle wounds, perhaps for other reasons. Between 1942 and 1945 Lin taught at the Resistance University at the Communist capital of Yan-an. In 1959 he became minister of defense and sought to strengthen Maoist principles in the army. He is famed for editing Mao's Little Red Book, requiring soldiers to study it endlessly, and he helped bring about the Cultural Revolution. In 1971 Lin attempted a coup d'état. Fleeing the country, he died when his plane crashed or was shot down over Mongolia.
Hans J. Van De Ven

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