Word: liu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...deputy chairman and legal successor the Congress elected neither Premier Chou En-lai nor Communist Party Secretary Liu Shao-chi, the two men who are generally believed to stand next to Mao in true authority. Instead they chose 68-year-old Chu Teh, the onetime war lord who turned from a life of opium-smoking and concubine-collecting in the 1920s to serve brilliantly as a soldier for the Red cause. Chu's new post appeared, however, to be a quasi sinecure, a sort of recognition of his past services and comparative popularity...
...real No. 2 power seemed to be Liu, the party dogmatist, who was made head of "the highest organ of state power," the People's Congress Standing Committee. By constitutional definition, the all-powerful Standing Committee has the right to annul decisions of the State Council (Cabinet), which gives Liu a veto over his rival, Chou Enlai, who was reappointed Premier. Liu's name now follows Mao's on all lists, and leads the rest when Mao's does not appear. Tall, gaunt Liu Shao-chi is one of the least known of the Peking rulers...
...great achievement in the further democratization of China's political life," the Peking People's Daily proclaimed as the farce began. Delegates were carefully schooled on who was to get the most respect: after party chairman Mao Tse-tung, "his close comrades in arms. Liu Shao-chi and Chou En-lai." Delegates listened dutifully to onrushes of grey gobbledygook, in which the only interesting point was the renewed slavish dedication to Moscow. From Mao: "The people of our country should learn from Soviet Russia and be prepared [through] several five-year plans to build our country." From Moscow...
More important than what was said at Peking, however, was what was not said. Formosa, target of Red verbal fury for weeks, vanished suddenly from official tongues. Neither Mao nor Liu mentioned "liberating" Formosa, and in the first two days of the Congress scarcely anyone else did either. Subsequently, according to Peking radio, one speaker fierily demanded the "ultimate" liberation of Formosa; a few days before, however, the word had been "immediate." For whatever dark reasons, China's Red rulers were for the moment not promising quick victory. Perhaps at Quemoy they had found out what they wanted...
...Traffic. At last Mao Tse-tung himself received them in a secret rendezvous in the Forbidden City. Over fragrant tea and flanked by Chou and the party's chief theoretician, Liu Shao-chi, Mao-asked solicitously if they were tired from their rounds, and Franklin admitted that all of them together would not make one "Model Worker." But Mao was in a serious mood. ("He would make an outstanding labor negotiator," said Earn-shaw.) Blandly, he laid on the line his terms for coexistence. He wanted Attlee to ask the U.S. to 1) withdraw the U.S. Seventh Fleet...