Liu Shaoqi

President of the People’s Republic of China (1959-1968)

• Born: 1898
• Birthplace: Ning-hsiang district, Hunan Province, China
• Died: November 12, 1969
• Place of death: K'ai-feng, Honan Province, China

An important first-generation figure of the Chinese Communist Party, Liu was an early advocate of Mao Zedong’s leadership. After 1949, Liu’s management skills were critical to the People’s Republic of China. He served as chair of the government after 1959, as well as a top party leader.

Early Life

Liu Shaoqi (lew show-chee) was the youngest of nine children; his father was a landlord and kept a store in the family’s home village in inland central China. He received primary education in his village but went to the provincial capital, Changsha, for his middle schooling. While he was away at school, his father died, and his three elder brothers divided the family property.

While at school in Changsha, Liu joined a pre-Marxist student group, the New People Society, organized by an older student, Mao Zedong. This began a half-century of association between Liu and Mao, both of whom had been born into rural Hunan farming communities. In 1918, Liu went to Beijing intending to prepare to study in Europe but became drawn into the first Chinese Marxist student groups during the May Fourth Movement. He never went to France but was chosen to attend university in the Soviet Union in 1921. He disliked the harsh life and his studies there and asked to return to China in 1922.

Liu was a tall, thin, and serious young man. He was considered bookish and later developed into a respected Chinese Marxist ideologue, in spite of his limited formal education. Throughout his life, Liu thrived on hard work. In his fifties and sixties, Liu’s spare frame had filled out and he was distinguished by his white hair. Liu married six times. Before 1945, his fifth wife had two children who figured in their father’s disgrace during the Cultural Revolution. His last wife was Wang Guangmei, a talented and beautiful woman who came from an elite North China family. She was working as an English translator in Beijing when she joined the communists. She met Liu in Yan’an and married him in 1948. They had two daughters.

Life’s Work

From 1922 until 1930, Liu worked to organize trade unions. He also joined the cooperative efforts between the Communist and Nationalist parties from 1923 to 1927. Liu gained wide experience in the major Chinese cities as a party activist, often operating in secret or great danger in so-called white areas controlled by anticommunist warlords, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, or the foreign powers. In 1931, he headed the All China Labor Federation. Yet Liu did not agree with the regular party leadership, dominated by returned students from Moscow, about the Communists’ urban strategy. Liu believed that the party must be cautious in the face of a strong opposition, while the returned students wanted to be bold and adventurous. Liu left Shanghai and joined Mao in the rural Ruijin Soviet. There, Liu moved ideologically and organizationally toward Mao.

Liu was first elected to the Central Committee of the party in 1934. He participated in the Long March and emerged as a close ally of Mao. In March, 1936, Liu took charge of the Communist movement in North China. His responsibilities included the anti-Japanese student movement centered in Beijing. Under his guidance, the Communists captured direction of the movement and overshadowed Nationalist Party influence in the area.

In late 1937, Liu returned to Yan’an, where he advocated the Chinese Communists’ independence of Moscow. To this end, he stressed Mao’s role as an independent Marxist theoretician who had adapted Marxism-Leninism to China. This effort enhanced both the independence of the Chinese and Mao’s stature. In 1939, Liu took charge of Communist efforts in the Yangtze River Valley. His task was to bring a large Communist force, called the New Fourth Army, under the control of the party headquarters at Yan’an. In early 1941, a series of engagements with Nationalist armies broke out, during which the New Fourth Army’s leadership was killed or captured. This event greatly reduced the military importance of the New Fourth Army, but through Liu’s political skills, the surviving elements became closely integrated with Mao’s forces.

In 1942, Liu returned to Yan’an to become a leader in the Rectification movement, a sustained effort to purify and strengthen the Communists’ ranks. The movement used a combination of Marxist study and the practice of self-criticism to achieve subordination of all members to party discipline. This movement drew on ideas that Liu had advanced in speeches he made in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. The Rectification movement further consolidated Mao’s dominance in the party, while strengthening Liu’s position as Mao’s lieutenant.

During the war years, Liu formed a connection with Deng Xiaoping, who was the political commissar of the Eighth Route Army’s 129th Division. After 1949, Liu and Deng became more closely associated in the Beijing central government. In retrospect, it can be seen that both men favored hard-headed practical policies that produced tangible results. This meant that these two, and others associated with them, were important to Mao because they developed the means to implement his radical, visionary policies. Yet, on occasion, they advocated retrenchment to reduce the disruption produced by Mao’s revolutionary initiatives. The link between Liu and Deng was of little significance at the time but became a major element in Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution and again in Deng’s reform era after 1979.

At the Seventh Party Congress in May, 1945, Liu was confirmed as a top leader of the party. In the Civil War period (1946-1949), he undertook the critical tasks of implementing the land reform in North China and engineering the Communist administration of urban areas. The Chinese Communists had been almost exclusively rurally based since 1927, and the prospect of ruling China’s large cities was a true challenge. In 1949-1951, Liu formulated the Communist urban policies, which called for moderation to restore functioning of the urban economy.

After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October, 1949, Liu strengthened his position as the Chinese Communists’ number two man. He was in full accord with all the early policies of Communist rule, including the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), in which the Chinese attempted to leave behind the Soviet style of planned development in favor of Mao’s calls for a Communist society developed by means of populist creativity. In 1959, Liu was named chairman of the People’s Republic of China, while Mao continued as chairman of the Communist Party.

In the wake of the Great Leap Forward, however, a serious domestic crisis appeared in which food shortages, famine, production breakdowns, and lowered morale threatened the achievements of the Communist Revolution. Liu and his associates including a large number of the government’s top managers advocated a lessening of socialist innovation in favor of recovery. They promoted solidarity of the Chinese people rather than following Mao’s emphasis on class struggle. It is doubtful, however, if Liu imagined himself as an opponent of Mao’s leadership at the time.

The Cultural Revolution began, not as an attack on Liu, but as an effort by Mao to sustain the Chinese radical tradition by forcing the tempo of revolutionary change. It widened into an attack on anyone who opposed radical revolutionary action, and thus Liu, who was still advocating policies that would produce stability, became a target. Red Guard diatribes from the Cultural Revolution period charged Liu with betrayal of the Communist movement; such allegations warrant no credence.

Some of Liu’s former associates became Cultural Revolution targets in early 1966. Then the charges against “capital roaders” meaning those whose policies Mao believed would lead China on a road back to capitalism grew to include Liu by the late summer of 1966. By late November, both Liu and Deng had disappeared from public view. In 1966, dramatic events in the Cultural Revolution occurred on the campuses of Beijing’s universities. Liu’s wife, Wang Guangmei, and his children participated in the struggle. His wife defended Liu, but his children divided in attacking and defending their father. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, counterattacked against Wang Guangmei, thus giving the Cultural Revolution the atmosphere of a quarrel between the leaders’ wives.

Although Liu Shaoqi fell from authority in late 1966, it proved difficult to dislodge his views because so many top Chinese leaders believed that Liu’s interests were the same as their own. The Maoist radicals, supported by Defense Minister Lin Biao and championed by the so-called Gang of Four led by Jiang Qing, struggled to establish their dominance. Disorder became so rampant that even in 1969 some locations and units remained outside real central control.

Reviled as public enemies, Liu and others like him underwent humiliating struggle sessions and produced abject confessions but were never tried in the courts. Held in confinement, they were sent to rural farms for common labor or made to do menial jobs such as cleaning toilets. They lived under indefinite prisonlike terms, separated from their families and homes. Liu, in his early seventies, was denied necessary medical treatment and died alone in degrading confinement on November 12, 1969.

Significance

Many of Liu Shaoqi’s associates survived to reemerge slowly in the early 1970’s during Mao’s last years. As long as Mao was alive, the Maoist radicals had authority, but the moderates became stronger after Mao’s death in September, 1976. In December, 1978, under Deng’s leadership, they gained control of the party and government. In 1979, Deng began a truly major reform of Chinese Communist policies on all fronts. One of his early actions was to rehabilitate Liu.

Throughout the period from 1931 to 1965, Liu was a stalwart supporter of the Chinese Communist Party. Although a strong supporter of Mao’s leadership, Liu can be distinguished by his preference for moderate, practical policies and his belief in regular Communist Party leadership in contrast to Mao’s preference for radical policies and his faith in spontaneous mass action. Thus, it is difficult to assume that Liu would have supported the many departures that Deng has permitted from accepted Communist economic and political practices since 1979. Still, Deng and many others were as orthodox as Liu until the Cultural Revolution, so it is entirely possible that Liu might have joined in the post-Maoist reform had he survived.

Bibliography

Beijing Review 10 (March, 1980): 3-10. This volume of an official newsmagazine announced Liu’s rehabilitation.

Dittmer, Lowell. “Liu Shaoqi.” In Encyclopedia of Asian History, edited by Ainslie T. Embree, vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988. A brief look at Liu’s life that explores his early years, his involvement in China’s Communist Party, and his rehabilitation. Also includes a short bibliography.

Li T’ien-min. Liu Shao-ch’i: Mao’s First Heir Apparent. Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1975. A short and useful biography by a Nationalist Chinese researcher who marshals information from Chinese-, Japanese-, and English-language sources. Published before the circumstances of Liu’s death were known.

Lieberthal, Kenneth. Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform. 2d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. This history of Chinese government since the 1949 revolution includes information on Liu Shaoqi.

Liu Shaoqi. Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi. Vol. 1. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984. This first of a projected two-volume series contains documents from the period 1927 to 1949. This officially sponsored work presents Liu as a fully rehabilitated figure who “was a great Marxist and proletarian revolutionary and an outstanding leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China.”

Oxenberg, Michael. “The Political Leader.” In Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History, edited by Dick Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. An excellent analysis of Mao’s methods of leadership that helps in understanding Liu’s relationship to Mao.