Ask Comrade Wang [2] to print and distribute to the Political Bureau comrades for study. The handling of this case may have been mistaken; at the time, I listened only to one side of the story from Lin Biao [4].

Mao Zedong
March 25, 1972

[1] On March 18, 1972, Yang Chengwu's daughter Yang Junsheng wrote a letter to Mao Zedong and others, stating that Yang Chengwu was loyal to Chairman Mao, that he had been politically framed by Lin Biao, Chen Boda, and Ye Qun, and requesting that Yang Chengwu be allowed to go to the forefront of class struggle to undergo trials.
[2] Wang refers to Wang Dongxing, who was then an alternate member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Director of the General Office of the Central Committee.
[3] Refers to the "Yang, Yu, Fu Incident."
[4] Lin Biao, formerly Vice Chairman of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission. During the "Cultural Revolution," he colluded with Chen Boda and others to form a counterrevolutionary clique, and colluded and contended with the Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary clique in a conspiracy to seize supreme power in the Party and state. After the conspiracy was exposed, he fled by plane on September 13, 1971, and died in a crash near Öndörkhaan, Mongolia. In August 1973, the CPC Central Committee adopted a resolution expelling Lin Biao from the Party. In 1981, the Special Court of the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China confirmed him as the principal culprit in the counterrevolutionary clique case.