Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi ( Liu Shao-chi) (b. 24 Nov. 1898, d. 12 Nov. 1969). President of the People's Republic of China 1959–66 Born of a wealthy peasant family near Changsha (Hunan province), he attended the same school as Mao Zedong who was five years his elder. In 1920 he went to Shanghai, where he joined the Socialist Youth League (1921). In late 1921 he went to study in the Soviet Union, and joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He returned in 1922 and became a Communist trade-union organizer in Hunan, Guangzhou (Canton), and Shanghai respectively, before becoming a member of the Central Committee of the CCP in 1927. In 1932, he arrived in Jianxi, where he resumed his friendship with Mao. He took part in the Long March, and gradually rose to become the party's chief organizer, and an important theoretician. He disagreed with, but tolerated, the development of a cult around ‘Chairman Mao’. An austere, hard-working, and incorruptible man, he published his views on How to be a Good Communist for the first time in 1939. Second in the political hierarchy only to Mao from 1945, his efficiency as party organizer stemmed from his good working relations with almost all leaders of importance. The more pragmatic Liu became President after the failure of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, when Mao Zedong was forced to ‘retire’ from this office. He stabilized the economy and society in the early 1960s, gaining increasing stature and authority in the process. He was thus the most immediate target of a threatened Mao in the Cultural Revolution. He was imprisoned on 17 October 1969, and, after being forbidden medical assistance, he died from an illness. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1980.