In modern Chinese history, there is a highly ironic scene to be discussed.
In the summer of 1967, amidst the political turmoil in Zhongnanhai, a group of rebels stormed into Liu Shaoqi’s office, intending to drag the then President away for public criticism. Panicked, Liu Shaoqi grabbed a copy of the Constitution and protested loudly, “I am still the President of the People’s Republic of China! You can insult me personally, but you cannot insult the nation! The Constitution protects the rights of every citizen, by undermining the Constitution, you will face legal consequences!”
The result? The rebels did not hesitate for a moment, continuing their fervent denunciation, leaving him humiliated.
Why couldn’t the Constitution protect Liu Shaoqi? Why was the Constitution worth less than a piece of scrap paper during the Cultural Revolution?
The irony lies in the fact that the Constitution in question was actually co-authored by Liu Shaoqi himself.
More than a year after the initial incident, in October 1968, during the Eighth Central Committee, Twelfth Plenary Session of the Communist Party of China, Liu Shaoqi was officially denounced as a “traitor, enemy agent, and capitalist roader.” His Party membership was permanently revoked, all positions were stripped, and the purge continued.
He was later placed under solitary confinement in Fulu House within Zhongnanhai. Due to deteriorating mental and physical health, and inadequate medical treatment, Liu Shaoqi’s condition worsened, rendering him incapable of self-care.
In October 1969, with his days numbered, Liu Shaoqi was sent to Kaifeng in Henan Province, and a month later, he passed away.
This former number two figure of the Communist Party, the President of the country, ultimately died in a shabby little cottage, with even the news of his passing not allowed to be made public. His death certificate bore the pseudonym “Liu Weihuang,” with members of a special team posing as his son Liu Yuan to arrange for his cremation.
However, the bitter irony lies in the fact that all of this was not by chance, but by design. Because Liu Shaoqi himself was once the architect and executor of this political logic.
Liu Shaoqi’s tragedy can be traced back to the Yan’an Rectification Movement in the 1940s. At that time, Mao Zedong aimed to establish absolute authority within the Party, and Liu Shaoqi was his most loyal and diligent assistant.
During the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1945, Liu Shaoqi delivered a report on amending the Party Constitution, mentioning Mao’s name a total of 105 times, elevating Mao Zedong Thought as the “sole correct guiding ideology.” Through Liu’s efforts, Mao Zedong was placed on the pedestal of a “great leader.”
By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s cult of personality had reached its peak, with slogans across the nation proclaiming, “We have father and mother, but Chairman Mao is closer,” and Mao’s words being treated as equivalent to “ten thousand words in one.”
When an individual is deified as a “god,” they become the law, they become the Constitution. If Mao wanted Liu Shaoqi out, who would dare to stand in his way?
Mao Zedong once said, “We cannot rely on the law to govern the majority of the people; we must rely on resolutions and meetings.” He even declared openly, “We need rule by man, not rule of law. A People’s Daily editorial is to be upheld nationwide.”
Liu Shaoqi wholeheartedly agreed, stating, “The law can only serve as a reference, Party resolutions are the law.”
This meant that from the day of its inception, the Constitution was destined to be a mere decoration. In the minds of Mao and Liu, the only strict rule was this: Party supremacy above all.
The Party is not an abstraction; it relies on individuals for execution. By the time of the ten-year turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, with Mao’s deification, “Party governance” gradually transformed into Mao’s unilateral decision-making, or “Mao’s governance,” where Mao could overthrow anyone he pleased. Mao’s word was law, and whoever disobeyed would meet a fate even worse than Liu’s.
In such a setup, raising the Constitution as a plea for help was nothing short of slapping oneself in the face.
The so-called “struggle as the primary task” meant using policy and law as tools for class struggle. Although the Constitution stipulates that citizens are “equal before the law” and have certain rights, once a citizen is labeled as a “class enemy,” they become fair game for the Party’s arbitrary attacks.
During his time in power, Liu Shaoqi was responsible for overseeing legal and political affairs as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. In 1955, he stated, “Our laws are not meant to restrain ourselves, but to restrain our enemies, to combat and eliminate our enemies.” He further added, “If any law restricts our actions, we should consider abolishing that law.”
In other words, the law was a tool for struggle, not a bottom line to be obeyed.
In the power struggles instigated by Mao Zedong, Mao always considered himself the supreme commander of the “proletarian headquarters,” while his political opponents were vilified as “bourgeois” agents. From Gao Gang and Rao Shushi to Peng Dehuai, Huang Kecheng, Zhang Wentian, Zhou Xiaozhou, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping, the story was the same.
When Liu Shaoqi assisted Mao in carrying out the “anti-rightist” campaigns, targeting Peng Dehuai, he employed the logic of “class struggle.” Now, this same logic had become his own noose.
Shortly after the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao labeled Liu Shaoqi as the head of the “bourgeois headquarters.” How could the Constitution protect the head of the “class enemy”?
In 1955, the then Supreme Prosecutor General Zhang Dingcheng reported that prosecutors should blindly approve Party decisions without question. Liu Shaoqi endorsed this by stating, “If a decision is made by the Party to arrest someone, the Prosecutor’s Office should stamp it without hesitation. This might have its drawbacks, which can be discussed within the Party, but externally, it should fall to the Prosecution Office… If the Prosecution does not serve as the Party’s shield, democratic individuals might use this against the Party, and it will be seen as the Prosecution opposing the Party.”
Liu even warned, “The Prosecution must act as the Party’s shield… otherwise, it would violate Party discipline and face Party sanctions.”
Consequently, the political and legal institutions turned into mere tools for repression.
As soon as the Cultural Revolution began, with a mere command from Mao Zedong, this repression was unleashed upon Liu’s head. The rebels’ denunciations, the detention by the Public Security Bureau, and the silence from the Prosecution Office followed suit.
In such circumstances, the Constitution was worth less than nothing!
In the numerous political witch hunts instigated by Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi was almost always at the forefront.
In 1955, Mao fabricated the “Gao Gang and Rao Shushi Anti-Party Alliance,” the “Hu Feng Counterrevolutionary Group,” and the “Pan Hannian and Yang Fan Counterrevolutionary Group,” among others. Liu was an active executor in all of these cases. During the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, and the wrongful case of Xi Zhongxun in 1962, Liu not only failed to uphold the dignity of the Constitution but even piled on the condemnation.
When these “class enemies” were brought down by Mao, Liu Shaoqi not only failed to defend the “dignity of the Constitution,” but often played a leading role in their persecution.
During the Lushan Conference, for instance, when Peng Dehuai was toppled for speaking the truth, Liu Shaoqi not only condemned Peng as “Wei Yan’s bone” but publicly stated, “Everyone can be rehabilitated, except Peng Dehuai!”
Following the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP exonerated the “anti-party clique led by Peng Dehuai.” Looking back, all of Liu Shaoqi’s criticisms of Peng Dehuai were baseless accusations.
When Liu Shaoqi aided Mao Zedong in persecuting others, he may have been acting in self-preservation. He might not have anticipated that even as the Party’s second-in-command, Mao Zedong’s word alone could topple him from his position.
Following the Seventh Plenary Session of the Seventh Party Congress in 1962, where Mao Zedong took a backseat, Liu Shaoqi oversaw the central work. During his tenure, he conducted purges of several individuals. Here are some examples.
During the Four Cleanups Campaign in 1964, Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei ‘created’ the so-called “Taoyuan Experience” in Fuxin County, Luwangzhuang Commune. After Mao’s approval, Liu and Wang traveled the nation giving speeches promoting the “Taoyuan Experience.”
One major feature of the “Taoyuan Experience” was the brutal “force, confess, believe” approach to purging individuals.
According to renowned historian Song Yongyi, in the Four Cleanups Campaign directly supervised by Liu Shaoqi and Wang Guangmei, nearly 78,000 individuals were coerced to death, and over 5.3 million urban and rural residents were victimized, the vast majority suffering from false allegations.
They dispatched task forces to universities and high schools for persecution during the initial period of the Cultural Revolution.
In May 1966, Mao Zedong launched the “May 16th Notice” of the Cultural Revolution, which was endorsed under Liu Shaoqi’s leadership. Not realizing that Mao was planning his downfall, Liu sent Wang Guangmei to “guide” the movement at Tsinghua University.
Under Wang Guangmei’s guidance, the task force at Tsinghua University labeled the university president and all vice presidents as “gangsters,” ordering all cadre members to “stand aside” and undergo criticism. Witnesses at Tsinghua described the chaotic scenes as, “a long line of parades, a large area of struggle meetings, and a huge team for labor reform.” Of the over 500 cadre members, 70% were placed in the “gangster labor reform team.”
The circumstances surrounding Liu Shaoqi’s death vividly demonstrate the brutality of the CCP’s internal strife of “life or death,” yet Liu Shaoqi, as both a victim and a co-creator of this evil history during the Cultural Revolution, stands as a testament to this vicious cycle.
In the several decades of Communist political movements, victims often turned persecutors, aiding and abetting the political movements that eventually led to their demise.
Even Liu Shaoqi’s son, Liu Yuan, admitted in 1999, “Regardless of any objective reasons, as the President of the country, he failed to prevent the nation from falling into a great disaster; as the top leader of the Party, he failed to protect the Party from great destruction; as a trusted leader of the people, he failed to shield the people from immense losses. Can this be considered a dereliction of duty? I believe this cannot be explained by ‘upholding the unity of the Party,’ or ‘compromising for the sake of the Party and the revolution.'”
Liu Shaoqi’s downfall was not due to personal conspiracies but was the inevitable outcome of the CCP’s system.
In this system, there is no law, only power; there is no security, only struggle. Because at its core, the CCP relies on one political movement after another, continuous internal strife to maintain its rule.
Therefore, today it is Liu Shaoqi who has fallen, but tomorrow, it could be anyone.
This is the gist of the production team behind “The Truth of a Century.”