Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi was head of state of the People's Republic, Mao's designated successor, and died on a concrete floor in a disused bank vault after being denounced as the leading capitalist roader. He was a labour organiser from Hunan trained in Moscow, and the party's foremost theorist of organisation; his How to Be a Good Communist was required reading for a generation of cadres. He became chairman of the republic in 1959 after the Great Leap Forward, and it was Liu who went back to his home province, saw the famine, and told a party conference in 1962 that the disaster was thirty per cent natural and seventy per cent man-made - a formulation Mao never forgave. With Deng Xiaoping he ran the recovery: household plots restored, free markets permitted, output targets made realistic. The Cultural Revolution was aimed at him. He was denounced in 1966, paraded and beaten by Red Guards in his own courtyard with his wife Wang Guangmei, expelled from the party in 1968, and held incommunicado while diabetes and pneumonia went untreated. He died in Kaifeng in November 1969, unnamed in the records, and was cremated under a false name. His rehabilitation in 1980 was one of the acts by which Deng's leadership settled its account with the Cultural Revolution. Wang Guangmei was imprisoned for twelve years and survived him by thirty-seven. The seventy-thirty formula he used about the Great Leap was turned around after his death and applied to Mao himself by the party's 1981 resolution, which judged his contributions primary and his errors secondary. Liu's fall is the clearest measure of what the Cultural Revolution was for: he was the head of state and the constitution protected him on paper.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history