Inside Liu Shaoqi's Final Years: Mao's Purge of China's President - Vision Times
In the autumn of 1967 Liu Shaoqi was head of state of the People’s Republic of China and a prisoner inside his own compound. In China the Communist Party outranks the state, and Mao Zedong ran the Party. The. . .
In the autumn of 1967 Liu Shaoqi was head of state of the People’s Republic of China and a prisoner inside his own compound. In China the Communist Party outranks the state, and Mao Zedong ran the Party. The only relative allowed through the cordon was his youngest son, Liu Yuan, then 16, who had served as a soldier and was known to the sentries from childhood. He brought the meals in, washed the dishes, and swept. Liu Yuan has told the story in interviews and ina memoir of his father’s military career, published in Beijing in 2018. The spring and summer of 1967 were the longest stretch the two ever had. Until then his father had been a working official who was hardly ever home. By September the guard had tightened and Liu Yuan could no longer go near him. He worked from the room next door, washing bowls and socks, close enough to hear his father and forbidden to speak. One evening a soldier carried the meal into the small dining room. Liu Yuan was rinsing a towel in a basin outside when his father came out and asked where his mother was. He was frightened, because the standing order was that he was not to talk. “Mom is in the room right behind you,” he answered, keeping his voice down. “They won’t let me speak to you. ” His father looked as though he had a second question. He did not ask it. He stood there about two minutes, turned, and walked off. SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE NEWSLETTERFor the best of our weekly content！There is something wrong, please try again laterSuccessYou are now signed up for our newsletterSuccessCheck your email to complete sign upThey never saw each other again. Liu Yuan has said he never stopped regretting it, that he felt he had failed his father, and that had he spoken there was little the guards could have done to him. Liu Shaoqi’s family learned of his death years laterLiu Shaoqi died on Nov. 12, 1969. His children learned of it in 1972. Liu Yuan was by then farming in a Shanxi village, one of millions of city teenagers sent down to the countryside. On a trip back to Beijing he caught a rumor he could not pin down. The first to tell him outright was Wan Boao, son of the senior official Wan Li, then at an artillery academy in Zhengzhou. Wan told him his father had probably died in Kaifeng. Nobody in the family could make sense of it. There was no reason for him to be in Henan. The family wrote to Mao in July 1972. His reply ran to eight characters: the father is dead, go and see the mother. Two officials came the same day to confirm it, then went on to the prison holding Wang Guangmei, Liu Shaoqi’s wife, and told her where and when her husband had died. When the children asked why Kaifeng, they stopped talking. The family saw her around August 1972. Mao moved against a colleague the Party rated above himLiu Shaoqi had run the Party’s underground and military work across northern and central China through the war with Japan, and in 1945 he stood in as acting Party chairman while Mao was away negotiating with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. He became head of state in 1959 and ranked second in the Party behind Mao. His 1939 pamphlet on how to be a good Communist came back into fashion among cadres before the Cultural Revolution, at a point when his standing in the Party ran ahead of Mao’s. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to finish him. In August 1966 Mao published a wall poster, “Bombard the Headquarters,” calling Liu a careerist sleeping at his side, a Chinese Khrushchev. Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin three years after Stalin died. The comparison said Liu would do the same to Mao. Lin Biao took over as the Party’s number two. Liu was named the Party’s leading enemy within and brought down. Between 1963 and 1966 Liu had traveled as head of state with Wang Guangmei on state visits across Asia. Wang came from a wealthy family, wore a fitted Chinese dress and pearls, and drew favorable notice in the foreign press. That became the principal charge against her. Accounts circulated among Party historians, documented nowhere in the archives, hold that Mao invited Wang to swim with him repeatedly and that Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, was consumed with jealousy. Liu Shaoqi was tortured to death. (Image: Internet)Tied to the bed board, then flown out of BeijingBy the spring of 1968, after repeated struggle sessions, the Cultural Revolution ritual in which a victim was made to stand bent before a shouting crowd, Liu Shaoqi could not get out of bed. Accounts in the overseas Chinese press, sourced to unnamed people who were in the compound, hold that Wang Dongxing, Mao’s chief of security, gave the order that Liu was to be worn down until he died, and that a central investigator had the bedridden head of state tied to his bed board by both legs. Bedsores opened on the back of his head, his back, his buttocks, and his heels, and began to suppurate. Medicine was withheld through his fevers, and nurses who showed him any decency were transferred out. His hands were the only part of him that still moved, and they grabbed at the air the way a drowning man’s do. Guards pushed a hard plastic bottle into each fist. He held them until he died, and crushed them out of shape. At 7 p. m. on Oct. 17, 1969, on Wang Dongxing’s instruction, soldiers stripped him and rolled him in a quilt. They carried him out on a stretcher to a military van, and an armed escort drove him to an airfield in western Beijing. He was flown 400 miles southwest to Kaifeng and locked in the former premises of a bank inside the city’s revolutionary committee compound. Henan was chosen off his own file: he had run a Party base area on its edge in the 1930s and visited its capital ten times. Sending him out of Beijing kept the death of China’s head of state away from the capital’s rumor mill. He lasted 25 days. The same accounts describe a room with no glass in the windows, autumn wind on a body worn down to bone, and feeding through a nasal tube. Guards ran a struggle session before each examination, shouting for the downfall of China’s Khrushchev. A doctor knocked on his chest wall with a stethoscope hard enough to raise large hematomas. A nurse jabbed at his veins until none was left usable. He had seven teeth. He lay with his eyes shut and breathed too faintly to hear without leaning in, and by those accounts he seemed determined to stay alive. He died on Nov. 12, 1969, in a bare room, aged 70. His white hair had grown to about two feet. The body went to the crematorium within two days. Staff were told a patient with a virulent infectious disease was coming in and only two operators could stay. The name on the ash storage certificate was Liu Weihuang, one of the aliases he had used as a boy. The occupation field read: unemployed. Somebody signed for the ashes as Liu Yuan. By Xiao Liangliang