Liu Shaoqi and the Cultural Revolution: The Rise and Fall of a Chosen Successor

Abstract

In the early months of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong made a speech in which he explained that the Chinese Communist élite had made arrangements for the succession at a very early stage. For seventeen years, he said, the leadership had been divided into ‘two fronts’. He himself had stood in the ‘second front’ where he ‘did not take charge of daily work’. That was in the hands of other senior leaders who constituted the ‘first front’.¹ In part this division no doubt reflected Mao’s own distaste for regular involvement in the multifarious details of governing the Chinese state. For, as one scholar has put it, Mao chose ‘at times to stand outside the political system on a high eminence where he deliberated on questions of ideology and on the grand strategy of the revolution’.² But there was another reason. Mao wanted to give his colleagues public exposure and experience so that their prestige might be cultivated. It was the original intention, he said, that ‘when he met with God, the state would not be thrown into great convulsions’. He pointed out that the ‘two fronts’ had been partly inspired, or reinforced, by Chinese perceptions of ‘the lessons in connection with Stalin in the Soviet Union’.