Project 571 () was the code name given to an alleged plot to execute a coup d'état against Chairman Mao Zedong in 1971 by the supporters of Lin Biao, then Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. In Chinese, the numbers "5-7-1" sound like the term 'armed uprising' (). The Chinese Communist Party initially claimed that Lin Biao himself had devised Project 571, but evidence inside and outside of China has made it more likely that Lin's son, Lin Liguo, a high-ranking officer in the People's Liberation Army Air Force, instead developed the plot. Any plots that may have been planned or attempted by Lin Biao or his family ultimately failed. Lin's family attempted to flee China for the Soviet Union, but died when their plane crashed in Mongolia on September 13, 1971. A draft copy of the Project 571 outline was discovered following Lin's death, and was publicly circulated by the Chinese government as a means of explaining the event.
Details of the plot
The outline was not written in the form of a practicable military plan, but more as a political declaration. Of the nine sections of the outline, only two deal directly with military strategy; the remaining sections either criticize the policies of the Cultural Revolution or attack the personality of Chinese leader Mao Zedong. Because the writers of the outline apparently lacked both the military knowledge and the ability to mobilize large groups of forces, Western scholars generally reject the possibility that Lin Biao could have personally planned Project 571.
Of the sections which deal with military strategy, the outline's authors mention the support of a number of disparate forces, none of which were overwhelmingly powerful. The plotters believed they were supported by the equivalent of approximately six to eight Air Force divisions: the Fourth and Fifth Air Force Corps; the Ninth, Eighteenth, and Thirty-Fourth Air Force Divisions; the Thirty-Fourth Tank Regiment; and (perhaps unusually) the Bureau of Civilian Aviation. The authors also noted that they expected the support of an "auxiliary force" composed of the Twentieth and Thirty-Eighth Armies (Lin's own elite units) and several provinces, which were only vaguely mentioned. The power of this combination of forces was not great, compared to the rest of the People's Liberation Army, and the authors of the Outline noted that "at present the preparation of our strength is still not adequate".
The military plans contained in the outline were below the standards that could have been expected from Lin, one of modern China's most successful generals. Because he was a master of maneuvering ground forces, it is unusual that he would have relied almost exclusively on the Air Force, even though his own elite forces were readily available to him. In the Chinese Civil War, Lin had become a master of delaying decisive confrontations until he knew that the chances of victory had become overwhelming, and scholars note that it would have been out of character for Lin to have staked his political career on such a poorly planned military coup, whose chances of success were slim. There is no direct evidence that suggests that either Lin or his generals were involved in the coup plot. Many scholars believe that his son, Lin Liguo, a high-ranking officer in the People's Liberation Air Force, was instead the author. Within China, the theory that Lin Liguo drafted the outline for Project 571 was corroborated by the testimony of Lin's generals in the special trials of the "Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Cliques", which were held in 1980.
History of the plot
Following Lin's death in 1971, the Chinese government initially charged him with personally planning Project 571. After the testimony of Li Weixin (the only one of the alleged plotters to have survived up to 1971), and the 1980 testimony of General Huang Yongsheng (a former military chief-of-staff whose role in the plot was implied by Li's testimony), sources within China have generally come to recognize that Lin Liguo devised the plot independently of Lin Biao. Western scholars have been critical of the Chinese government's perspective since 1971, and generally state that Lin Liguo was the author of the plot. Some Western historians question whether Lin Biao was even aware of Lin Liguo's plans at all.