The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Throughout the 1960s, one of Mao Tse-tung’s most loyal and trusted followers was his minister of defense, Lin Biao. No one praised the Chinese ruler more fulsomely than Lin. And yet by 1970 Mao had come to suspect that the flattery was a ruse to disguise his intentions: Lin was plotting to be his successor. And what made Lin particularly dangerous was that, as minister of defense, he had accumulated allies in the military. Mao went to work with great subtlety. In public he went out of his way to support Lin, as if he, too, saw the minister as his successor. That soothed the natural wariness of the plotter. At the same time, however, Mao also attacked and demoted some of Lin’s most important supporters in the military. Lin was a bit of a radical, veering left on most issues; Mao urged him to propose some of his more extreme ideas for restructuring the military, secretly knowing that these ideas would prove unpopular. Lin’s support among the higher branches of the military slowly began to thin. Lin finally realized what Mao was up to, but it was too late. He had lost his power base. Frustrated and scared, he resorted to plotting a coup d’état, a desperate act that played straight into Mao’s hands. In 1971, Lin died under suspicious circumstances in a plane crash.