Background
Born into a moderately rich peasant family in Huaminglou village, Ningxiang, Hunan province,His ancestral hometown is located at Jishui County, Jiangxi.
Born into a moderately rich peasant family in Huaminglou village, Ningxiang, Hunan province,His ancestral hometown is located at Jishui County, Jiangxi.
Liu attended Ningxiang Zhusheng Middle School and was recommended to attend a class in Shanghai prepared for studying in Russia. In 1920, Liu and Ren Bishi joined a Socialist Youth Corp; and in the next year, Liu was recruited to study at the Comintern's University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow.
Liu returned home for further reading on his own. After several other attempts to join Hunan political clubs that were repressed, Liu in 1920 traveled to Shanghai, where in 1921 he became a member of the China Socialist Youth League, a forerunner of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He was selected by his Russian teacher, a Comintern agent, as one of the first Chinese to study at the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. By the winter of 1921, while in Russia, he became a member of the new CCP.
In early 1922, he returned to organize Shanghai workers under Zhang Guotao, and then to assist Mao Zedong in their native Hunan and in adjacent Jiangxi among miners at Pingxiang Coal Mine, where Liu helped to plan a strike that brought better conditions for those workers. In 1925-1926, he organized labor unions in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, and he worked as a cadre of the Northern Expedition in Wuhan. In 1927, Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek’s) attack on the First United Front sent Liu into hiding and then to Moscow for the CCP’s Sixth Congress. He soon returned to Shanghai, where he led the workers’ movement that Jiang had decimated; and by late 1932 went to Ruijin, seat of the Jiangxi Soviet guerrilla base. There Liu opposed the political claims of other students who had returned from Russia, and this stance made him a political ally of Mao. When the Nationalist government's “encirclement campaigns” finally destroyed the Jiangxi Soviet Liu joined the Long March northward and was again Mao's political ally at the Zunyi Conference in 1935.
Established at the North China guerrilla headquarters at Yan’an Liu sometimes lived in a cave next to Mao’s. He gave lectures on “How to Be a Good Communist's which appeared as a pamphlet in 1939 and became the standard manual for teaching Party discipline. When the cult of Mao grew in Yan’an Liu reportedly stressed that a Communist’s obedience was to the Party, not to any individual even though Mao5s wise policies entitled him to allegiance. In 1942, when Mao's title as Party chairman was much publicized, Liu remarked, what is a chairman? I have never heard people in the Soviet Union calling Lenin Chairman Lenin. He told a 1947 meeting,“There is no perfect leader in the world.” He trusted the cultivation of large numbers of ethical loyalists more than short-term leadership tactics as the key to Communist success. Mao and Liu nonetheless often praised each other in public, perhaps because Mao's organizing expertise was mostly rural and Liu's was mostly urban. Their abilities were mutually complementary.
Yet Liu agreed with Mao on most specific policies and largely administered several 1940s purges (rectification campaigns), even while his personal manner remained more self-effacing and detached than Mao's. He was Mao's first deputy in the party from 1945 to 1966. (See Dittmer and MacFarquhar in the references below for more on the enigmatic Liu-Mao relationship.) Liu believed that procedures and education could create an effective Party. Liu's organizational policies stressed the need to separate leftist dissident leaders from their constituencies, sending them away for correction but then restoring them to lower positions.
As the Peopled Liberation Army swept into Chinese cities during the late 1940s, Liu led meetings to teach techniques of building support for the Party among urban workers and entrepreneurs. Although Liu seldom advertised his personal opinions after collective decisions had been taken in Party councils, he was less radical than other top leaders about fast collectivization. In October 1955, he criticized himself for this reticence. Liu gave the longest speech at the Party Congress of 1956, a watershed time as the Party assumed more administrative work after the transition to socialism.
The Great Leap Forward was formally launched at a Party congress in early May 1958, with full support from both Liu and Mao. As the Leap faltered and Mao moved into quasi-retirement, Liu headed the first line of leadership. In April 1959, he presided at a National People’s Congress that elected him chairman of the Republic (and of the National Defense Committee, which met in the next month). Although Mao and other civilian leaders supported Liu’s succession as head of state Defense Minister Peng Dehuai apparently felt Marshal Zhu De deserved the job instead. After Peng was dismissed in 1959, Liu (along with Lin Biao and others) made speeches implicitly defending Mao's prestige. The Party Propaganda Department mandated that newspapers print Liu's and Mao's pictures, equal in size and side by side, on national day.
When radicals associated with Mao and Linstepped up their critique of Liu's administered revolution during the mid-1960s, Liu apparently accepted their long-term goals and was slow to perceive their interest in political confrontation. By early June 1966, Liu and Deng sent work groups to lead the Cultural Revolution in Beijing universities and middle schools.
In early August Liu was criticized at a plenum that reorganized the Party’s leading organs and demoted him from second to eighth place on public rosters. Attacks against him, often from supporters of Lin Biao, continued at a work conference in October as Red Guard posters excoriated his policies and followers. By the end of 1966, Liu's position became nearly irrelvant, as the Party he treasured was destroyed at all levels by social forces broader than his immediate followers or rivals.
On July 18, 1967, while Mao was outside Beijing, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Chen Boda organized a struggle meeting against Liu Shaoqi and his wife Wang Guangmei. Liu’s health and spirit were severely weakened by harangues throughout 1968. The Twelfth Plenum, in October, received a Criminal Investigation Report on the Renegade, Traitor, and Strike-breaker Liu Shaoqi. It passed a resolution that Mforever expelledw Liu from the Party to which he had devoted his life. Although he was severely ill, Liu was transferred to a jail in Kaifeng on October 17, 1969. He had pneumonia, as well as diabetes and open skin sores, was denied medical care, and died on November 12. Two of Liu’s sons were also hounded to death during the Cultural Revolution.
Liu's posthumous long-rumored rehabilitation was official only on February 29, 1980, when the Central Committee reinstated his name. On May 17, a memorial service was held in Beijing5s Great Hall of the People. Numerous exhibits then honored Liu, and his Selected Works were published. Some Chinese liberals also hold him in esteem, despite his administration of manipulative campaigns, simply because he was victimized by Mao. Footage of his family spreading his ashes on the sea is seen in the last episode of the famous 1988 documentary, River Elegy. In 1997, his widow attended the ceremony to start production of a China Central Television documentary about Liu. The 100th anniversary of his birth was celebrated, in November 1998, by the minting of commemorative medals and a speech from President Jiang Zemin. Liu's life manifested a deep tension between egalitarian ideals and Party discipline.
In 1922 Liu was assigned to the Secretariat of the Hunan provincial party organization as an aide to Mao Zedong. From this time onward he became increasingly more involved in the labour movement—as leader of a sympathy strike in February 1923, as vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Labour in May 1925, and as secretary general of the Third National Labour Congress in 1926.
Socialist Youth Corp , China
1920
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) , Moscow
1921
Politburo
1931
Liu married five times, including He Baozhen and Wang Guangmei. His third wife Xie Fei came from Wenchang, Hainan and was one of the few women on the 1934 Long March. His wife at the time of his death in 1969, Wang Guangmei, was thrown in prison by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution where she was subjected to the harsh conditions of solitary confinement for more than a decade.