Chinese top communist leader and a Marshal of the

BEIJING, CHINA: Chinese top communist leader and a Marshal of the Red Army Lin Piao (1907-71) smiles in May 1950 in Beijing. Lin Piao commanded the First Army Corps on the Long March (1934-5) and led the Red Army in Manchuria during the civil war. He became the minister of defense in 1959, supporting the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" launched by Mao in 1966, and was designated Mao's successor. The movement was directed against those "party leaders taking the capitalist road". After the 1969 China Communist Party congress, two main struggles developed. The first centred on Lin Piao and the second was between the "Cultural Revolutionaries" led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, on the one side, by the modernizers headed by Zhu Enlai. In 1971, after an abortive coup against Mao, Li Piao was killed in a plane crash, apparently fleeing to the USSR. (Photo credit should read AFP via Getty Images)