Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such stories spread all over the country in 1964 when an "Emulate the PLA" campaign began. The tales tailored for public consumption tole of modern army heroes who had glorified themselves by losing their lives in some courageous act, conveniently leaving behind a diary full of prayers to Mao...
...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...
Beneath these demands lay a clash between two different personality styles. P'eng, to some extent, represented the "experts," those who thought the most valuable men to China were the trained and ingenious technicians. Mao Tse-tung, who loathed the "expert" ideal, dismissed P'eng and replaced him with Lin. Mao's ideal man was the "red," a man of lower class background who believed, like Mao, that will power and unquestioned loyalty to socialism and to China would together win the world...