Men of the Moment

Extract

In May of this year Lin Feng led a delegation to Moscow for the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany. In reporting this, a news agency described Lin as a “little known middlerank” politician. Lin is indeed little known to the outside world, but within Communist China he is a top Party leader and one who has made an impressive record despite a somewhat unorthodox path to power. Unlike most top Peking leaders, he was not born in central-south China, he did not serve in the Kiangsi Soviet, and he did not make the Long March. Rather, Lin hails from Manchuria where he was born about fifty-six years ago, thus making him one of the youngest of the senior Party leaders—although already a veteran of twenty years on the Party Central Committee. Sources vary widely on Lin's educational background; he is reported to have studied at Nankai University in Tientsin, at Peking University, in Japan at famed Waseda, as well as in Moscow. By the mid-1930s Lin was deeply involved in the Party underground in North China. He was working behind the scenes in an attempt to win over to the Communists the highly nationalistic students who were bitterly opposed to Japanese incursions into North China. Among those whom Lin won was his future wife, Kuo Ming-ch'iu who has become one of the outstanding women leaders in Communist China. At that time Kuo was a high-school girl and acting head of the Peiping Students Federation.