Word: lin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This spirit is conveyed in other ways. In the evenings, officers often come into the barracks to talk about the revolutionary days. Their stories, like the articles in the army newspaper--The "Liberation News"--often mention Lin, who is generally conceded by everyone (including the Chinese Nationalists) to be the greatest strategist of the Civil War. But these stories are also flavored with examples of the old Red Army's devotion to their cause, the bestiality of the Kuomintang and their American allies, and the kindness of the Communist soldiers...
...Chinese really know how much national pride and Maoist commitment this training has awakened in the young soldiers or officers. Most of the experiences--the steady political education, the "Officers to the Ranks" movement, the "Emulate the PLA" campaign, the abolition of ranks--are devices introduced or reemphasized by Lin Piao since he took over the Defense Ministry in 1960, but Mao almost certainly had a hand in them also...
Although the Chairman has been recently quoted as saying he was forced out of control of the government in 1958, that apparently did not include the Army. A batch of secret army papers smuggled to the U.S. in 1961 contains Mao's terse approval of instructions Lin gave regularly to army cadres. If Mao and Lin weren't directly collaborating on the transformation of the Army, Mao at least knew he had a kindred spirit in Lin. The Defense Minister could be trusted, Mao apparently thought, to build the organization that would stand by Maoist principles in an emergency...
...emergency has obviously arrived, but where is the ideologically tough New Army? For some reason, Mao and Lin have not been able--or perhaps are unwilling--to cash in on it. For the first five months of the current upheaval, they ignored the PLA and put all their faith in the Red Guard. Now it appears that their problem may be the small impression ideological devices have made on the army officers. In the past month, Mao and Lin have begun to tinker with the army mechanism. They have taken some of their doubtful supporters out of the central military...
Their squeamishness, some analysts think, stems from an old argument among army officers that many observers thought Lin had settled years ago. In the late 1950's, many professional officers, including the Defense Minister at that time, P'eng Tehhuai, complained that the PLA was asked to spend too much time bringing in harvests and building dams. The officers wanted to build a crack modern army and felt too little time was left for military training. China, they thought, should swallow its pride and a little ideology and accept Russian help in building modern weapons stockpiles, including atomic bombs...