1. The Cultural Revolution
Liu Shaoqi was one of the main leaders of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He was a great organizer and had much experience in communist politics. While he worked agreeably for 20 years with Chairman Mao Zedong in common cause for the great Chinese proletarian revolution in the 1960s, Liu certainly had potential to become Mao's successor. However, in Mao's eyes Liu Shaoqi was too passive, consistently trying to mediate conflicts, rather than fighting through them. The differences in their political thought and approaches ultimately led to Liu's fall and denunciation as a "renegade, hidden traitor, and scab." .
Mao Zedong was a proud, melodramatic man. His imagination was "vivid and original," and he was undoubtedly more popular with the mass audience. It is no wonder that the two leaders clashed, because on the other side of the spectrum stood Liu Shaoqi, a reserved and contemplative man whose politics were characterized by "tactical flexibility and strategic rigidity" (172). According to Liu Shaoqi, Mao was "illogical in his approach to problems, stubborn and lacking in self-cultivation." (172). Unlike Mao, Liu did not let personal factors interfere with his dedication to the revolution. Neither his own feelings nor his family played any part in his professional life, whereas Mao's "have often affected his decisions in matters of policy, causing unnecessary deviations in the implementation of governmental policy" (31). Consequently, Liu Shaoqi's political plans and goals were far more realistic than those of Mao Zedong's.
Mao's philosophy of ideological purity, or "redness," was what led him to the disastrous Great Leap Forward Plan of 1958. In 1957, a vast campaign began to encourage the rural communities to transform their town lives by self-initiated development. Subsequently, in mid-1958, the communes were created as an appropriate planning framework for this effort, as all-purpose local administrations staffed for the most part by leaders paid by the communities themselves and responsible to them.
The Chinese leadership, and most prominently Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun, and Chu Teh ("father" of the People's Liberation Army), consolidated power quickly and moved to gain the confidence of the Chinese population, particularly by solving the economic problems that had worsened during the civil war: the civil war had generated low levels of gross domestic output, high rates of inflation, and high levels of urban unemployment. ...
The 1959-1961 famine in China, impelled by its collectivization plan--the Great Leap Forward, was an unthinkable and indisputable man-made horror in 20th century. When I face the number of death as large as 30,000,000, when I think of the countryside littered with the bodies of peasants who had star...
After World War II, China was in a deep state of hardship, which certainly left space for improvement. Mao Zedong was a Chinese Communist revolutionary and the founding father of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese depression enabled Mao Zedong, along with the Communist Party to gain power, ...
Mao Tse-Tung was a principal Chinese Marxist theorist, a soldier and a statesman who commanded China's communist revolution. He was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1935; he was chairman of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death on 1959. Mao was born in a farming comm...
Karl Marx once said: "History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches. It does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this."1 As one of the most influential thinkers in the nineteenth century, Marx has had a direct, deliberate and powerful influence upon mankind both during and after his lifetime. Upon his moral links with his followers, the strength of which was unique even in that golden age of democratic nationalism, he has also influenced various great leaders in the 21st century, such as Mao. ...
The Cultural Revolution served Mao's intention on purging Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, but the outcomes of this revolution, as Harry Harding argued, was "unrelenting intrigue, betrayal, and violence at the highest level of leadership." ... Mao had also uttered his view toward intelligentsia to Doctor Li, which explained why Mao used the Cultural Revolution for not only removal Liu and Deng, but also the irritating intellectuals, just liked the bourgeois. ...
