• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969), a native of Ningxiang, Hunan Province, was a Chinese revolutionary, statesman, and theorist. He was Chairman of the People's Republic of China, China's head of state, from April 27 1959 to October 31 1968, during which time he led economic construction and policy initiatives of the country. On 24 November 1898, Liu Shaoqi was born in one of the families in Huaming Tower. That was a typical peasant family. Liu Shaoqi's former residence is a wooden structure central courtyard house. He was one of the earliest members of the CPC, joining the Party in 1921, shortly after its founding. In the following years, he served at many important positions in the Party.

He fell out of political favor and was purged during the Cultural Revolution. When the "cultural revolution" started in 1966, he was wrongly criticized and accused by the counter-revolutionary cliques of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing of being a "capitalist roader" and a renegade. He suffered physical persecution at their hands and died of illness in 1969. His reputation was posthumously rehabilitated in 1980 when he Central Committee adopted a resolution clearing his name.

He was born into a moderately rich peasant family in Huaguangtang, Nantang, Ningxiang County, Changsha, Hunan Province. He attended Ningxiang Zhusheng Middle School and Hunan First Normal School, where he may have met Mao Zedong (the two were one year apart at school). In 1917, he joined the "New People's Study Society", founded by Mao and Cai Hesen, and in 1918 was sponsored by the society to study at Yude Middle School in Baoding, Hebei. In 1920, Liu and Mao organized a Socialist Youth Corps, after which Liu was recruited to study at the Comintern's Toilers of the East University in Moscow; one of his classmates was Zhang Guotao. In 1921 he joined the newly formed CCP. He went back to China in 1922, and as secretary of the All-China Labor Syndicate, worked with Zhang to organize several railway workers' strikes in the Yangzi Valley and at Anyuan on the Jiangxi-Hunan border. His work with Anyuan coal miners was the first direct revolutionary work under Mao.

In 1925, Liu was a member of the Guangzhou-based All-China Federation of Labour Executive Committee. During the next two years, he led many political campaigns and strikes in Hubei and Shanghai. Liu worked with Li Lisan in Shanghai in 1925, capitalizing on the aftermath of the May 30 Incident. He then fled to Wuhan, was briefly arrested in Changsha and then returned to Guangzhou to help organize the 16-month long Canton-Hong Kong strike of 1925-26.

In 1927 he was elected to the Party's Central Committee, and appointed head of its Labour Department. In 1929, he worked at party headquarters in Shanghai, and was named Secretary of the Manchurian Party committee in Fengtian. In 1930 and 1931, he attended the Third and Fourth Plenums of the 6th Central Committee, and was elected to the Central Executive Committee (i.e. Politburo) of the Chinese Soviet Republic in 1931 or 1932. In that year, he went to the Jiangxi Soviet.

In 1932 Liu became the Party Secretary in Fujian Province. Two years later he accompanied the Long March at least as far as the crucial Zunyi Conference, but was then sent to the so-called "White Areas" to reorganize underground activities in North China, based out of Beiping and Tianjin. In 1936 he was Party Secretary in North China, leading the anti-Japanese movements in that area with the assistance of future leaders such as Peng Zhen, An Ziwen, Bo Yibo, Ke Qingshi, Liu Lantao and Yao Yilin. In 1939 he ran the Central Plains Bureau and in 1941 the Central China Bureau.

In 1937, Liu went to the Communist base at Yenan, and in 1941 he became political commissar of the New Fourth Army. He was elected as one of 5 CC Secretaries at the 7th National Party Congress in 1945. Liu was thus the supreme leader of the communist forces in Manchuria and North China. Liu was elected Vice Chairman of the Central People's Government in September 1949, just before the founding of New China. Later he was elected chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (1955-59). Liu worked mainly in party organizational and theoretical affairs. An orthodox Soviet-style Communist, he favored state planning and the development of heavy industry. He was the first to announce the Great Leap Forward at the Second Session of the 8th CCP National Congress in May 1958.

In April 1959, he was elected chairman of the People's Republic of China. In the 10 years from 1956 to 1966, the Party accumulated precious experience in leading socialist construction. Comrade Liu Shaoqi said that a variety of means of production could be put into circulation as commodities and that there should be a double-track system for labour as well as for education in socialist society.

In the winter of 1960, the Central Committee of the Party set about rectifying the "Left" errors in rural work and decided on the principle of "readjustment, consolidation, filling out and raising standards" for the economy as a whole. A number of correct policies and resolute measures were worked out and put into effect with Comrades Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping in charge.

The "cultural revolution, " which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic. The "capitalist-roaders" overthrown in the "cultural revolution" were leading cadres of Party and government organizations at all levels, who formed the core force of the socialist cause. The so-called bourgeois headquarters inside the Party headed by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping simply did not exist. Irrefutable facts have proved that labelling Comrade Liu Shaoqi a "renegade, hidden traitor and scab" was nothing but a frame-up by Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and their followers. The political conclusion concerning Comrade Liu Shaoqi drawn by the 12th Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Party and the disciplinary measure it meted out to him were both utterly wrong.

The Down to the Countryside Movement (literally "Up to the mountains and down to the villages") was a policy instituted in the China in late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result of the anti-bourgeois thinking prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong declared certain privileged urban youth would be sent to mountainous areas or farming villages, so that they could learn from the workers and farmers there. Mao's policy differed from Liu Shaoqi's early 1960s sending-down policy, for its political context. Liu Shaoqi instituted the first sending-down policy to redistribute excess urban population following the Three Bad Years and the Great Leap Forward. Mao's use of the policy sent-down the Red Guards who had risen up at his beck and call, sending China into chaos. Essentially, Mao used the "up to the mountains and down to the villages" to quell unrest and remove the embarrassment of the early Cultural Revolution from sight.

Severely persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1977), Liu died of illness in Kaifeng of Henan Province on Nov. 12, 1969.

An artistic performance was staged in Beijing on Nov. 24, 2008 to mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of late Chinese leader Liu Shaoqi. Li Changchun and Vice President Xi Jinping, who are members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, watched the performance together with more than 2,000 people of various walks of life in the National Center for the Performing Arts.

Liu's best known writings include How to be a Good Communist (1939), On the Party (1945), and Internationalism and Nationalism (1952).