Liu Shaoqi Quotes

President Liu Shaoqi at one point frankly acknowledged this: At present there is a conflict between the amount of grain the government needs and the amount that the peasants are willing to sell, and this conflict is quite severe. The peasants’ preference is to sell the government whatever is left over after they’ve eaten their fill. If the government only took its procurement after the peasants had eaten their fill, the rest of us would not have enough to eat: the workers, teachers, scientists, and others living in the cities. If these people don’t get enough to eat, industrialization cannot be carried out and the armed forces will also have to be reduced, making our national defense construction impossible to implement.29

Outside the bubble of my subjective bliss, China was changing. Liu Shaoqi, China’s president, had been jailed. At the university, whole departments were being shuttered. Professors and public intellectuals were replaced by those who could reeducate students. At first it was the history and literature and philosophy departments—their teachers torn down, denounced, humiliated. It seemed impossible that the revolution could come to us. We were scientists, and science was necessary. And me? I wasn’t careful until it was too late.

Confronted by the severe consequences of the Great Famine, President Liu Shaoqi once said to Mao Zedong, “History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!”26 In the spring of 1962, Liu once again noted that “Deaths by starvation will be recorded in the history books.”27 Yet after more than forty years, no full account of the Great Famine has been published in mainland China. More than regrettable from a historical standpoint, it is an offense to the memories of the tens of millions of innocent victims.

Mao had to step down from the less important of his two main posts, president of the state, in favor of Liu Shaoqi. Liu became the number-two man in China, but his prestige was only a fraction of that of Mao, who kept his key post as chairman of the Party.