Through the 1960s, nobody praised Mao Tse-tung more fulsomely than his minister of defence.
Lin Biao was the Chairman's most trusted follower, the compiler of the Little Red Book, the man whose public devotion set the standard everyone else was measured against.1
By 1970 Mao had come to suspect the flattery was a ruse.
Lin was plotting to be his successor.1
And what made him genuinely dangerous was structural rather than personal:
as minister of defense, he had accumulated allies in the military.1
A rival with an ideological claim is manageable. A rival with an army is a different problem, and attacking him directly means a fight whose outcome depends on which way the generals go.
Greene's account of what Mao did is short, and every element is doing a distinct job.
Move one: increase the public praise.
In public he went out of his way to support Lin, as if he, too, saw the minister as his successor.1
The function is stated plainly:
That soothed the natural wariness of the plotter.1
Lin was watching for signs that he had been detected. Mao supplied the opposite signal, which meant Lin's guard came down at precisely the moment he most needed it up.
Move two: quietly remove the base.
At the same time, however, Mao also attacked and demoted some of Lin's most important supporters in the military.1
Not Lin. The people around Lin. Each demotion is individually explicable, individually deniable, and individually small — and none of them constitutes an attack on Lin that Lin could publicly respond to without revealing what he was protecting.
Move three: get him to damage himself.
This is the surgical one.
Lin was a bit of a radical, veering left on most issues; Mao urged him to propose some of his more extreme ideas for restructuring the military, secretly knowing that these ideas would prove unpopular.1
Lin's own convictions were turned into the instrument. He was not tricked into an error; he was encouraged into his own sincerity, in a venue where sincerity would cost him.
Lin's support among the higher branches of the military slowly began to thin.1
Lin finally realized what Mao was up to, but it was too late. He had lost his power base.1
And then the last stage, which Mao did not have to arrange:
Frustrated and scared, he resorted to plotting a coup d'état, a desperate act that played straight into Mao's hands.1
In 1971 Lin died in a plane crash under suspicious circumstances.1
The isolation produced the desperation, and the desperation produced the act that justified everything.
Greene's analysis rests on a fact about political environments generally:
in political environments people depend on their connections even more than on their talents.1
Which produces a specific dynamic:
In such a world, a person whose career seems to be waning is one whom few will want to know.1
The decline is self-accelerating. Allies who see someone slipping distance themselves, which makes the slipping visible, which prompts more distancing. Nobody has to be told to abandon him.
And then the second half:
people who feel isolated will often overreact and do something desperate—which of course just makes them more isolated.1
Greene's comparison of the two available approaches:
Had he attacked Lin directly, he would have gotten bogged down in an ugly fight. Dividing the minister from his power base, and in the process making him appear to be on the decline, was much more effective.1
The rule he draws:
Before you launch an outright attack on your enemies, it is always wise first to weaken them by creating as much division in their ranks as possible.1
And the note on momentum: once your enemy begins to splinter in any way, the rupture will tend to gain momentum. Division usually leads to more division.1
Someone in your organisation is building a position against you and has support you cannot afford to fight.
The reflex is confrontation — raise it, name it, force it into the open. That is the fight Mao declined, and the reason to decline it is arithmetic: a direct challenge asks everyone watching to pick a side now, while the other person still has their allies.
So the sequence inverts.
First, keep the surface warm. Not fake warmth — visible, ordinary, public support. Its purpose is to prevent the other person from switching into defensive mode, because a defended position is much harder to erode than an undefended one. Everything that follows depends on them not knowing yet.
Second, work on the connections rather than the person. Whose backing makes them formidable? Those relationships can be affected by ordinary means with ordinary justifications — a reassignment, a reporting change, a project that takes someone elsewhere. None of it names the target. All of it is individually defensible.
Third, let their own convictions do the damage. This is the part that requires knowing them well and is far more effective than any manufactured trap. What do they genuinely believe that would not survive contact with a wider audience? Give them the platform to say it. You have not made them wrong; you have arranged for their real position to be heard by the people it will cost them.
And then two honest warnings, because this page is describing a method, not endorsing one.
Isolation produces desperation, and desperation is not controllable. Mao's outcome — a coup attempt that vindicated him — is presented as the technique working. It is equally a description of someone who had nothing left to lose acting accordingly, and the specific form that took was not chosen by Mao.
And this is indistinguishable, from inside, from normal management. Every individual step is deniable, which is what makes it effective and also what makes it available to anyone who has decided a colleague is a threat, correctly or otherwise. There is no point at which someone running this has to admit to themselves what they are doing.
The Lin Biao affair is real and the broad outline — Lin's rise as designated successor, his fall, and his death in a plane crash over Mongolia in September 1971 — is documented. Almost everything else about it is contested. [POPULAR SOURCE]
🚩 The single-source problem here is severe, and it is not Greene's fault so much as history's. The account of a coup plot rests overwhelmingly on the version released by the Chinese Communist Party after Lin's death, by the people who benefited from it. Whether Lin was plotting a coup, whether he knew about any plot attributed to his son, and whether the flight was a flight at all remain disputed. Greene narrates the official version as established fact, including Lin's motives and Mao's intentions, and a reader should hold the whole causal chain loosely.
Greene attributes intention throughout, on no stated evidence. That Mao secretly knew Lin's proposals would prove unpopular, that the public praise was designed to soothe a plotter's wariness, that the demotions were coordinated as a campaign — these are readings of an outcome, not documented decisions. The same events are compatible with a leader who grew suspicious, reduced a rival's influence over time, and was then presented with a crisis he had not scripted.
And the framing carries a cost this build keeps finding. A man died, along with everyone else on that aircraft, and the episode sits inside a period — the Cultural Revolution — in which the same techniques of isolation and manufactured decline were applied at national scale with consequences the chapter has no interest in. This vault holds Gao Jianhua and the Cultural Revolution, which is what the machinery Mao is here admired for operating did to ordinary people. Greene has now praised Mao three times across this book — the Long March, the identification of the peasantry as China's centre of gravity, and this — and never once connects the method to what it was used for.
Against Mao and the Long March, built in Cluster C, there is a continuity Greene never draws. That page shows Mao accepting house arrest without a fight, being sidelined by the 28 Bolsheviks, and using retreat to rebuild a party around himself. This page shows him, thirty-five years later, running the isolation technique from the other side — and the tell is that he does it so precisely. Someone who has been isolated out of a power base knows exactly how it works.
Against Divide and Rule and the Central Position, this is that page's method applied to a specific individual rather than maintained as a standing arrangement — and it demonstrates the failure mode. Elizabeth's court and Rome's Latin League were designed so no rival could accumulate a base. Mao had let one accumulate, which is why he had to dismantle it under cover rather than simply prevent it. Prevention is a structure; removal is a campaign.
And against Strategy 13: The Intelligence Strategy, move three is that chapter's method used offensively. Mao knew Lin's genuine convictions well enough to know which ones would cost him — the close embrace turned into a targeting system.
Behavioral Mechanics → The Self-Accelerating Decline. The mechanism Greene names — that someone whose career seems to be waning becomes someone few want to know — is a cascade. It requires an initial push and then runs on its own, because each defection is rational for the person defecting and each one makes the next more rational.
The insight the pairing produces: the attacker's real task is not to defeat a rival but to make a perception of decline legible early, because after that the rival's own allies do the work. This is why the technique is so cheap relative to a confrontation, and it also names the only effective defence, which is not fighting harder. The counter to a manufactured decline is a visible, unambiguous, unrelated win — something that resets what observers think they are seeing. Arguing that you are not in decline confirms the frame; producing evidence that the trajectory is wrong breaks it. Lin's response was a coup, which is what someone does when they have run out of time to produce a win.
Psychology → Why Isolation Produces the Act That Justifies It. Lin's coup attempt is the part of the story that reads as a plot twist and is the most predictable element in it. People who perceive themselves as trapped and running out of options do not become more cautious; they become more willing to accept high-variance outcomes, because the certain outcome has become unacceptable.
The insight neither field gives alone: isolation is a strategy that reliably produces its own retrospective justification, which makes it almost impossible to evaluate honestly from inside. Whoever ran the isolation gets to point at the desperate act as proof the threat was real, and there is no counterfactual available — you cannot observe what Lin would have done had his base stayed intact. This is the mechanism by which suspicion becomes self-confirming in organisations and in states, and it is why the technique is so dangerous even in the hands of someone acting in good faith. The manager who quietly isolates a colleague they believe is undermining them will, often enough, watch that colleague do something erratic, and will file it as vindication.
Mao never attacked Lin. He raised the praise, removed the people, and invited the man to say what he actually thought — and then the decline ran on its own, because in a political environment each ally's departure makes the next one rational. Which means the thing that destroys a position is almost never the attack on it; it's the moment other people can see which way it's going.