Person1898 – 1969

Liu Shaoqi

Also called: Liu Shao-ch’i

Chairman of the People’s Republic (1959–1968) who led economic readjustment after the Great Leap Forward, but was branded a “capitalist roader” in the Cultural Revolution, expelled from the party and died in detention

Born to a farming family at Ningxiang in Hunan, he studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow and led labour struggles such as the Anyuan miners’ strike in the 1920s. He directed underground work in Nationalist areas, and in Yan’an wrote How to Be a Good Communist, which became the party’s standard training text. At the Seventh Congress in 1945 he gave the report explaining “Mao Zedong Thought” in the party constitution. Succeeding Mao as head of state in 1959, he led the readjustment after the Great Leap Forward, but in the Cultural Revolution he was denounced as the “number one capitalist roader” and expelled from the party in 1968. He died in detention in Kaifeng, Henan, in 1969, largely without medical care, and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1980.

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4 related events

1
1937 – 1947The Yan’an Period and the Rectification Movementparticipant
After the Long March the Communist leadership made Yan’an in northern Shaanxi its capital for ten years from January 1937. There the Rectification Movement (1942–1945) bound the party to Mao Zedong, and the Seventh Party Congress of 1945 made “Mao Zedong Thought” its guiding ideology.
2
1950 – 1953Land Reform in Chinakey figure
The Agrarian Reform Law of June 1950 launched a nationwide redistribution of landlords’ land to peasants that lasted until 1952–1953. At village “struggle sessions” many landlords were publicly tried and executed.
3
1958 – 1962The Great Leap Forward and the Great Faminerelated figure
In 1958 Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, with people’s communes and backyard steel furnaces, vowing to overtake Britain within fifteen years. Grain was requisitioned on the basis of inflated harvest reports and farming was disrupted, causing the famine of 1959–1961, whose death toll is estimated by different studies at roughly 15 to 45 million.
4
1966 – 1976Cultural Revolutionrelated figure
A political movement launched by Mao Zedong in May 1966, claiming that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” had infiltrated the party. Red Guards and rebel factions attacked party organisations and fought one another, and leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were purged. Society and the economy were convulsed for ten years until the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976.

People who appear alongside

Mao Zedong1893 – 1976
Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
Jiang Qing1914 – 1991
Wife of Mao Zedong, a former Shanghai actress who married him in Yan’an, led the Central Cultural Revolution Group and was arrested in 1976 as one of the “Gang of Four”
Zhu De1886 – 1976
Commander-in-chief of the Red Army and the People’s Liberation Army; he joined Mao Zedong at Jinggangshan in 1928 (“Zhu–Mao”) and was made a marshal in 1955
Peng Dehuai1898 – 1974
PLA marshal who commanded the Chinese People’s Volunteers in the Korean War and became defence minister, but was purged after criticising the Great Leap Forward at the Lushan Conference in 1959
Lin Biao1907 – 1971
PLA marshal who led the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns and, as defence minister, spread the “Little Red Book”; named Mao’s successor in the 1969 party constitution, he died in a plane crash in Mongolia in 1971
Deng Xiaoping1904 – 1997
General Secretary of the Communist Party (1956–1966), twice purged during the Cultural Revolution, and from 1978 China’s paramount leader who launched “reform and opening up”
Zhou Enlai1898 – 1976
First premier of the People’s Republic of China (1949–1976), long in charge of diplomacy, who arranged Nixon’s 1972 visit

Themes this person appears in

From the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution1927 – 1976
From the collapse of the United Front in 1927, through rural bases, the Long March and Yan’an, to the Communists’ victory in the civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic — then land reform, the Great Leap Forward and famine, the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution, up to Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, while the Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan