Liu Shaoqi (or Liu Shao-chi) (1898–1969)

Chinese communist politician, president 1960–65 and the most prominent victim of the 1966–69 leftist Cultural Revolution. A Moscow-trained labour organizer, he was a firm proponent of the Soviet style of government based around disciplined one-party control, the use of incentive gradings, and priority for industry over agriculture. This was opposed by Mao Zedong, but began to be implemented by Liu while he was state president 1960–65. Liu was brought down during the Cultural Revolution.

The son of a Hunan peasant farmer, Liu attended the same Changsha school as Mao Zedong. Interested in radical politics, he visited the USSR in 1920 to study communism and returned to China to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai in 1921. Liu became a trade-union organizer and, after joining Mao at his Jiangxi soviet (people's republic), participated in the ‘Long March’ of 1934–35. During the mid-1930s he was the CCP's main theoretician, with his writings better known than Mao's. After the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, he rapidly rose to become second-ranking vice chair of the CCP and in 1960 succeeded Mao as chairman (president) of the republic.

After the failure of the 1958–61 Maoist ‘Great Leap Forward’ experiment with agricultural communes, Liu, working closely with Deng Xiaoping, implemented his ideas in a recovery programme. Communes were broken up, the use of communal dormitories and mess halls ended, and rural markets and private subsidiary farming plots re-introduced. This programme was successful, but, with widening income differentials, was seen as a return to capitalism. The leftist ‘Cultural Revolution’ was directed against Liu and his ‘capitalist roader’ supporters. In October 1968 he was denounced by the CCP's Central Committee as a ‘scab, renegade, and traitor’ and, in April 1969, he was formally stripped of his post and expelled from the CCP. He was banished to Kaifeng, in Henan province, where he died of pneumonia in November 1969 after being locked in a disused bank vault.

Liu was rehabilitated posthumously in 1980, after the accession to power of Deng Xiaoping. He received eulogies from President Jiang Zemin in November 1998, on the centenary of his birth.