Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi came up through the labor movement in the 1920s, working underground for the CCP in Shanghai and the northeast before joining the Long March. He spent the war years organizing anti-Japanese resistance in North China and leading the New Fourth Army as political commissar after 1941. When the People's Republic was proclaimed in 1949, he climbed steadily — chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee in 1954, then president in 1959, steering economic reconstruction after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962. In 1961 Ma…