Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi or Liu Shao-ch’i (1898-1969), Chinese Communist leader and one-time political heir to Mao Zedong. Mao later purged Liu from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Liu became the most prominent victim of the Cultural Revolution.

Liu was born the youngest of nine children to a wealthy rural family in Hunan province. While attending middle school in the provincial capital Changsha, he was exposed to Marxist political and social thought. In 1920 Liu became a member of the Socialist Youth Corps in Shanghai, and the following year he joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). From 1920 to 1922 he studied in Moscow at the University for the Toilers of the East, an institution created by the Soviet Union to train Asian workers in communist theory. From 1922 to 1930 Liu was a CCP labor organizer and, along with Li Lisan, led workers’ strikes throughout China. Liu was named to the CCP Central Committee in 1927.

In 1927 the Kuomintang (KMT) party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, broke its three-year alliance with the CCP and the two groups began to struggle for control of China. Chiang launched an extermination campaign against the Communists in 1934, dislodging the CCP from Jiangxi province in southeastern China. Liu took part in the 9600-km (6000-mi) Long March of the Communists as they fled north from KMT forces to Shaanxi province. At the Zunyi Conference during the Long March, Liu was a vigorous supporter of Mao Zedong’s military policy. At Yan’an, where the CCP established a new base in 1936 after the Long March ended, Liu solidified his position as Mao’s right-hand man by supporting Mao’s purge of Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu), a Soviet-trained CCP official who advocated policies contrary to Mao’s own. During this period Liu also wrote several important works, including How to Be a Good Communist, which established him as the CCP’s principal theoretician.

Liu became vice chairman of the central government when the Chinese Communists gained control of the mainland and the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. In 1956 he became a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the CCP’s highest-level ruling body, and in 1959 he succeeded Mao as head of state. In the early 1960s he made several important state visits to the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and North Korea.

Although Liu was Mao’s designated successor, tension grew between them in the early 1960s. While Mao zealously pursued a policy of agricultural collectivization (see Great Leap Forward), in which all private farmland would be brought under collective control, Liu counseled greater restraint. During the “Socialist Education Campaign” of 1964, he investigated and found corruption among rural Communist officials responsible for agricultural production levels. In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in order to purge Liu and his supporters, including Deng Xiaoping. In the chaos that ensued during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s young supporters, the Red Guards, denounced Liu as a “capitalist roader” for taking a gradual approach to economic recovery after the Great Leap failed. In 1968 Liu was expelled from the CCP and imprisoned. Weakened by physical abuse and denied medical treatment, he died in prison in 1969. In 1980 Liu was posthumously reinstated into the CCP and is now remembered as an upright, moderate leader who was unjustly persecuted.