Word: lin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Birth of a Tiger Cat. The rise of Lin Piao to the penultimate rung on the Peking ladder of power is itself the story of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. No one in his native Hupeh province would have expected him to become a guerrilla leader 19 years after he was born in Twisting Dragon Hill, the son of a felt-factory owner. In Manchu China, boys would be soldiers: off to Canton's Whampoa Military Academy went Lin, where he studied under Chiang Kaishek, in the company of such revolutionary notables as Chou...
...hollow logs loaded with rocks and scrap metal. The troopers sang Chinese versions of Dixie and raided Nationalist camps on feast days in order to get food. But when Chu's forces joined up with the neighboring Red bands of a guerrilla leader named Mao Tse-tung, Lin was exposed to a guerrilla technique that was later to make Mao famous...
...guerrilla teachings, Chiang Kai-shek's superior Kuomintang forces drove the Reds out of populous South China, and thus began the legendary Long March-a year-long hegira of some 7,000 miles over seven mountain ranges to the remote fastness of Shensi province in the northwest. Lin commanded the vanguard of the 90,000 Red marchers, forging ahead personally on donkeyback in search of edible herbs and grasses. Riddled with illness and strafed by Kuomintang aircraft, Lin's van still managed to break through the ranks of the "six-legged enemy" (Chiang's cavalry) when...
...caves of Yenan, dug into the loess foothills of the Liang Mountains, the Chinese Reds began to recoup their losses and regain their strength. Then, with the Japanese pressing south from Manchuria, the stage was set for a rapprochement between the Communists and the Nationalists. Now a division commander, Lin made his debut against the Japanese the high point of his military career: at dawn on Sept. 25, 1937, Lin's men ambushed the Japanese Itagaki Division in the shadow of the Great Wall. The defeat is still recalled with awe in the bars of the Ginza, where former...
...Them Eat Kaoliang!" By 1946, Lin's tactical target was the northeast of China, where the Japanese had built up a thriving industrial base during World War II. The Russians, who had pounced like vultures at war's end, were busily dismantling the best of the Japanese factories when Lin and his 150,000 men arrived, but Lin sent cadres into the countryside with the order: "Take off your leather shoes, lay down your office bags, put on the clothes of the peasants, and eat kaoliang [the coarse sorghum of Manchuria]." The lessons of Yenan were being applied...