Project 571 - the Modernist Coup

The Modernists, now in hiding from Mao's Red Guards, managed to contact the PLA's high command in secret, and orchestrated a grand coup to oust Mao Zedong. The PLA agreed to this because the Red Guards had raided many of their armories, and had come into violent conflict with them. It was believed by its generals that, just as the PLA had purged the Kuomintang's NRA in a civil war, the Red Guards would eventually stage an armed uprising to cement the Paramount Leader's power and massacre them, creating something beyond the People's Republic of China. Liu Shaoqi had been publicly executed in Shanghai, leaving the leadership of the Modernists to Deng Xiaoping. In the 20th of March, 1965, they springed to action. Its sergeants and officers veterans of the bloody Korean War, while possessing actual military equipment and training, the PLA butchered most Red Guard cells in China within the year. Mao himself was killed fighting the 57th Armoured Battalion in the Forbidden City. When the dust settled, and most ultra-Maoists were dead, at the reins of China stood Deng Xiaping and his modernists.