Liu Shaoqi

Biography

Liu Shaoqi was born in 1898 into a farming family in Ningxiang, Hunan, and received both a classical and a modern education. Drawn to radical politics after the May Fourth period, he studied Russian in Shanghai and in 1921 went to Moscow to attend the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, joining the Chinese Communist Party there that winter.

Back in China he became a leading labour organiser, helping lead the 1922 Anyuan miners' strike and taking part in the May Thirtieth Movement. He later worked underground in Shanghai and the north-east, made the Long March, led the party in North China from 1936 and served as political commissar of the New Fourth Army. At the Seventh Party Congress in 1945 he presented the revised party constitution that enshrined Mao Zedong Thought.

After 1949 he was a vice chairman of the Central People's Government, became chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee in 1954 and first-ranking vice chairman of the party in 1956, and in 1959 succeeded Mao as Chairman of the People's Republic. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of 1962 he told delegates that the Great Leap's failures were far larger than the party had admitted, and he then led an economic readjustment, which cost him Mao's trust.

Denounced early in the Cultural Revolution as China's leading capitalist roader, he was placed under house arrest in 1967 and expelled from the party in October 1968 as a traitor. He died in custody in Kaifeng in November 1969 and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1980.