Liu Shaoqi

Party Organiser and State Chairman

Liu Shaoqi was born in 1898 in Hunan province, the same province as Mao Zedong. He rose through the Communist Party as an expert on party organisation and trade union work, spending years in the Soviet Union studying Leninist party structure. 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 and, from 1959, as 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.

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. Liu was stripped of all his positions, expelled from the Party in 1968, and denied medical treatment despite suffering from diabetes. He died in November 1969, alone and in secret, in a cell in Kaifeng — the serving head of state of China left to die without name or care.

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. Liu's case remains the most prominent example of the CCP's internal destruction of its own leaders.