Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine.

Hello and welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries.

I'm Rob Atar, the editor of BBC History Magazine.

This is episode four of this series, and it finds us in Communist China in the final years of Chairman Mao.

In 1971, the likeliest successor to Mao was the Army General Lin Biao. But that September,

he inexplicably boarded a flight out of China, which crashed shortly afterwards in the Mongolian desert.

Fifty years later, numerous questions remain about the mysterious Lin Biao incident.

And to try to answer them, I spoke to Professor Rana Mitter, an expert in Chinese history at the University of Oxford.

Ranat, could you please tell us a little more about Lin Biao and his backstory?

How had he risen to become one of the leading figures in communist China?

Lin Biao's claim to legitimacy, Rob, really comes from the fact that he was probably,

maybe without exception, the finest general that the Chinese Red Army, the Communist Army,

had during the 20th century. There are other figures, Pung the Huai is one who comes to mind,

who were very close in that sense, but I think many people would argue that overall Lin Biao was

the most important. And in a sense, his life story tracks much of that bigger story

of the Chinese Communist Revolution across the 20th century. He was, for instance, present in the

1930s and 1940s alongside Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao, as he became, and other top communist leaders

in the city or town, really,

we should say, of Yan in northwest China. That was where the diehard communist revolutionaries

ended up at the end of the famous Long March of the 1930s. And Lin Biao, we know, was there living

in these cave dwellings, very much part of this little revolutionary base that became a

rather big revolutionary base and a place that was almost a thinking shop, you might say,

...