Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969, Wade-Giles: Liu Shao-ch’i) was, until his denunciation during the Cultural Revolution, a significant CCP and national leader. Liu was born in Hunan province to an affluent peasant family, before studying in Shanghai and Moscow. He joined the CCP shortly after its formation and spent the mid-1920s working as a political activist and strike organiser. By the end of the decade Liu was entrenched in the hierarchy of the party. He participated in the early stages of the Long March and relocated to Yan’n, where he became an important Red Army commander. Liu was not an ideologue, an idealist or a visionary; his specialisation was in party organisation, unity and discipline. These qualities made him invaluable to Mao Zedong, who Liu supported to the hilt until 1958, when Liu publicly criticised Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In 1959 Liu replaced Mao as head of the government, however his criticisms of Mao, along with his more liberal economic policies, made him a target for radicals during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards condemned Liu as the ‘number one capitalist roader’, a ‘renegade traitor’ and ‘China’s Khrushchev’. He attempted to contain the Cultural Revolution but in 1967 was arrested and subjected to a series of public humiliations and beatings. The CCP formally expelled him in 1969 and he died soon after, following months of neglect, mistreatment and physical abuse. In 1980 the CCP rehabilitated Liu posthumously, declaring his mistreatment to be a conspiracy led by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four.