Liu Shaoqi

Party Organiser and State Chairman

Liu Shaoqi was born on 24 November 1898 into a prosperous peasant family in Ningxiang, Hunan — the same province as Mao Zedong. He joined the Socialist Youth League in 1920 and travelled the following year to Moscow to study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, becoming a full CCP member by the end of that year. He rose through the Communist Party as an expert on party organisation and trade union work. His 1939 pamphlet "How to Be a Good Communist" became a canonical text in CCP political education. After 1949, he served as the second-ranked leader in the Party: chairman of the NPC Standing Committee from September 1954, elected Vice Chairman of the CCP Central Committee at the 8th Party Congress in 1956, and, from April 1959, Chairman of the People's Republic — a position that placed him formally above Mao in the state hierarchy, though Mao remained paramount in the Party.

Rise through the Labor Movement and Underground Party Work

After returning to China in 1922, Liu Shaoqi was sent by the Party to Hunan, where he helped lead the Changsha labour movement and a strike by workers on the Guangzhou-Hankou railway, and became especially known for leading the nationally famous Anyuan coal-and-railway workers' strike, overseeing the Anyuan labour movement for nearly three years. In 1925 he was elected vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions at the Second National Labour Congress. Following the Wayaobao Conference at the end of 1935, he was placed in charge of the labour movement in Nationalist-controlled "white areas," becoming secretary of the CCP's North China Bureau; within a little over two years he reversed the damage done to underground party organizations in North China by earlier "leftist" errors, rebuilding the Party's clandestine networks there and earning a reputation as "the representative of the correct line in white-area work." After the New Fourth Army Incident in 1941 he became the army's political commissar and secretary of the Central China Bureau, rebuilding the shattered force. In March 1943 he joined Mao Zedong and Ren Bishi to form the CCP Central Secretariat, entering the Party's innermost decision-making circle; at the 7th Party Congress in 1945 he delivered the report on revising the Party Constitution, giving the first systematic exposition of "Mao Zedong Thought," and was elected a secretary of the Secretariat and vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.

The Great Leap Reckoning

It was Liu Shaoqi who, at a 1962 Party conference at the Seven Thousand Cadres Assembly, gave the most honest official accounting of the Great Leap Forward's catastrophic failure, describing the famine as a "man-made disaster" caused by policy errors rather than natural calamity. While Mao remained present, Liu's assessment represented an implicit challenge to his authority. Together with Deng Xiaoping, Liu implemented pragmatic recovery policies — including the partial restoration of private plots and rural markets — that stabilised the economy but deepened Mao's suspicion that they were "taking the capitalist road."

Destruction in the Cultural Revolution

In 1966, Mao singled out Liu Shaoqi as the "top person in authority taking the capitalist road" and the principal target of the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards subjected Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei to public struggle sessions, humiliation, and physical abuse. In October 1968, the 12th Plenum of the 8th Central Committee passed a resolution expelling him from the Party "forever" and stripping him of all posts inside and outside the Party; suffering from diabetes and other illnesses, he was repeatedly denied medical treatment. On 17 October 1969, the gravely ill Liu was secretly transferred to Kaifeng, Henan, and confined in the basement of a heavily guarded former bank building; he died there alone at 6:45 a.m. on 12 November, just 27 days after his transfer. The following night his body was secretly cremated at a Kaifeng crematorium under the false name "Liu Weihuang," a name from his youth unknown to the outside world; the crematorium was told the deceased carried a virulent infectious disease, and the site was sealed off and guarded by soldiers — the serving head of state of China left to die without name or care, his ashes left unclaimed for years afterward in an ordinary storage niche.

Posthumous Rehabilitation

In 1980, four years after Mao's death, the Party formally rehabilitated Liu Shaoqi, declaring his persecution "totally wrong" and restoring his reputation as "a great Marxist and great proletarian revolutionary." A state funeral was held in Beijing, attended by senior Party leaders. His rehabilitation was politically necessary for Deng Xiaoping's reformist programme: it implicitly validated the pragmatic policies Liu had championed and undermined the Cultural Revolution's ideological legacy.