Liu Shaoqi

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Liu Shao-ch'I 刘少奇

President of the People's Republic of China
In office 27 April 1959 – 31 October 1968
Preceded by	Mao Zedong
Succeeded by	Dong Biwu and Song Qingling

Born	24 November 1898
Died	12 November 1969
Political party	Communist Party of China

This is a Chinese name; the family name is 劉 (Liu).

Liu Shaoqi (Simplified Chinese: 刘少奇; Traditional Chinese: 劉少奇; pinyin: Liú Shàoqí; Wade-Giles: Liu Shao-ch'i) (November 24, 1898 – November 12, 1969) was a Chinese Communist leader. He was President of the People's Republic of China April 27, 1959 - October 31, 1968.

Born into a rich peasant family in Yinshan, Hunan province (near Mao's Shaoshan), Liu attended the same school as Mao Zedong in Changsha, and then went to the Soviet Union and received his university education at the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. In 1921 he joined the newly formed CCP. He went back to China in 1922, and led several railway workers' strikes. During the period of 1925 to 1926, he led many political campaigns and strikes in Hubei and Shanghai. In 1927 he was elected to the Party's Central Committee.

In 1932 Liu became the Party Secretary in Fujian Province. Two years later he joined the Long March and was one of the supporters of Mao Zedong during the Zunyi Conference. In 1936 he was Party Secretary in North China, leading the anti-Japanese movements in that area. He was elected as the CPC General Secretary in 1943 (this was a secondary position under the Party Chairman, Mao Zedong). During the Civil War, Liu was the Deputy Chairman of the Party.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Liu worked mainly in economic areas. An orthodox Soviet-style Communist, he favored state planning and the development of heavy industry. He was therefore skeptical about Mao's Great Leap Forward movement which began in 1958. Alerted by his sister to the developing famine in rural areas in 1960, he became a determined opponent of Mao's policies, while at the same time, his dedication of orthodox Soviet-style communism was significantly decreased after witnessing Mao's disastrous policy. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward's catastrophic failure he replaced Mao as Chairman of the People's Republic, and began to be seen as Mao's likely successor. His more moderate economic policies helped to lead China from the depths of the Great Leap Forward. Liu Shaoqi favored and implemented Deng Xiaoping's idea of piece work, greater wage differentials and other measures that sought to undermine collective farms and factories.

An anti-Liu Shaoqi poster, 1968. It reads, "The renegade, traitor and scab Liu Shaoqi must forever be expelled from the Party!" Note that the characters that form Liu Shaoqi's name are crossed out.

Halfway through the 1960s, however, Mao rebuilt his position in the Party and in 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution as a means of destroying his enemies in the Party. Liu and Deng Xiaoping, along with many others, were denounced as "capitalist roaders." Liu was labeled as a "traitor," "scab," and "the biggest capitalist roader in the Party." In July 1966 he was displaced as Party Deputy Chairman by Lin Biao. By 1967 Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei were under house arrest in Beijing.

Liu was removed from all his positions and expelled from the Party in October 1968 and disappeared from view. Only after Mao's death in 1976 was it revealed that Liu had been confined under terrible conditions in an isolated cell in Kaifeng, which led to his death from "medical neglect" (untreated diabetes and pneumonia) in 1969.

After Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, Liu was politically rehabilitated (in February 1980), with a belated state funeral over a decade after his death.

Liu's best known writings include How to be a Good Communist (1939), On the Party (1945), and Internationalism and Nationalism (1952).

[edit] See also

History of the People's Republic of China

[edit] References

"Fifth Plenary Session of 11th C.C.P. Central Committee," Beijing Review, No. 10 (March 10, 1980), pp. 3–10, which describes the official rehabilitation measures.

[edit] External link

The Liu Shaoqi Reference Archive

Preceded by '	Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress 1954–1959	Succeeded by '
Preceded by Mao Zedong	Chairman of the People's Republic of China 1959–1968	Succeeded by Dong Biwu and Song Qingling (Acting Chairmen)