Liu Shaoqi 劉少奇 (1898-1969) was vice chairman of the CCP (1956-1966) and the president of the People’s Republic of China (1959-1968). He was labelled as a traitor in 1966, and he was officially expelled from the party in 1968. Liu Shaoqi died in November 1969 due to physical abuse and medical neglect (MacFarquahar and Shoenhals, 2006: 470). Liu Shaoqi appears in several caricature posters, often with other fallen leaders, such as Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang. The caricatures often refer to Liu Shaoqi’s writing, speeches, or theories: for instance, these images often mock his influential book “How to be a Good Communist” (修養, Xiuyang) (1939). Some cartoons laugh at Liu Shaoqi’ s scholarly pretenses, but must of the criticism is directed to his economic reforms, such as the “Three freedoms and one fixed quota” (三自一包, sanzi yibao), and the “fixing farm output quotas for individual households” (包産到戶, baochan daohu). He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1980.
Reference:
MacFarquhar Roderik and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.
