| This dissertation is a study of the Lin Biao Incident of September 13, 1971, which refers to Marshal Lin Biao's reported defection to the Soviet Union when his aircraft crashed in the Mongolian desert. Lin and his wife and son were killed. The Incident remains an unsolved mystery. The Chinese government issued accusations of an aborted coup d'etat and a plot to assassinate Mao supposedly masterminded by Lin Biao, but failed to establish a convincing link between Lin and the crimes of which he was accused.; This dissertation presents a different interpretation of the Incident. The Incident in its narrow sense was a consequence of the political involvement of family members during the Cultural Revolution. Based on this discovery, I made the Incident a case study of Chinese politics, illustrating the function of extra-institutional factors in the Cultural Revolution.; I employed the concept of "extra-institutional" factors to make a distinction between two groups of factors that function in Chinese politics, those related to an institutional study, such as ideology, organizations, decision-making; and those social, cultural and human factors usually excluded from an institutional study. More specifically, by extra-institutional factors I mean such elusive things as personality, individual experience, and social relationships, including family ties and personal connections (guanxi) and loyalties as these function in the political sphere.; In other words, I purposefully draw a distinction between two groups of general political phenomena--those that characterize or constitute political systems, and those that inform or pervade the context in which those systems function and provide meaning. Hopefully, this study of Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution from a perspective that relates to the political culture and human behaviors of the leaders adds a useful perspective to the study of Chinese institutional history. |
