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Five years Mao’s junior, Liu also came from a village in Hunan, only a few kilometers away from Mao’s. He had gone to Moscow in 1921 and joined the Party there as a 23-year-old student. Enormously attractive to women, he was a very serious young man, with no hobbies except reading, and disliked idle chatter. He first met Mao when he returned to Hunan in 1922, but the two did not strike up any special relationship until the late 1930s, when Liu became Mao’s ally through sharing his cold vision of using the war with Japan to destroy Chiang Kai-shek. Mao promoted him to be his No. 2 in 1943. In 1945, when Mao had to go to Chongqing, and again in 1949–50, when he was in Moscow, he appointed Liu as his standin. Mao relied on him as his chief executive.

Liu was the most able all-round lieutenant Mao had found. He also combined total discretion with a willingness to be at Mao’s beck and call day and night. Mao slept during the day and worked at night, and Liu changed his routine to try to synchronize with Mao. But Mao was erratic, and would often summon Liu when the latter was heavily drugged from the very strong pills he, like almost all of Mao’s lieutenants, needed to sleep. One of Liu’s secretaries recalled: “Whenever Chairman Mao’s secretary rang, the message was always: ‘Come this minute.’ … As the sleeping pills were working, [Liu] would look very tired, in agony. He often didn’t even have time to take a sip of the strong tea his man-servant made him, and set off to Mao’s place at once.” Most importantly for Mao, Liu harbored no ambitions to supplant him.

But around the time the Communists took power, serious disagreements emerged between the two about whether to give priority to becoming a military superpower via a forced march, or to improving living standards. Mao constantly mocked Liu’s espousal of the latter, retorting: “ ‘Oh, peasants’ lives are so hard’—the end of the world! I have never thought so.”

While Stalin was still alive, Mao held his fire so as not to give the Master any pretext to muscle in and sabotage him. Stalin had been trying to undermine Mao by showering attention on Liu during Liu’s visits to Russia; and, not least, by taking the unprecedented step of having Pravda call Liu “the General Secretary” of the CCP.

As soon as Mao learned that Stalin was dying, at the beginning of March 1953, he leaped into action. First he sent out signals that Liu might be removed. At the time, Liu was in the hospital, having had an appendectomy in late February. Mao made sure he stayed there, even going as far as blocking the news of Stalin’s death from him. Mao went to the Soviet embassy twice in connection with Stalin’s illness and death, both times accompanied by other top leaders, but not Liu, although Liu was well enough to move around. When People’s Daily published a cable of good wishes for Stalin from the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, the message was not signed by Liu, who was president of the Association, but by a subordinate, which was extraordinary in terms of protocol. And Liu was excluded from the memorial ceremony on Tiananmen Square.

In May Mao sent Liu a sharp, indeed menacing, letter saying: “all documents and telegrams issued in the name of the Center can only be issued after I have seen them. Otherwise, they are invalid [Mao’s emphasis]. Be careful.” Another told Liu (and Chou and army chief Peng) to “check all telegrams and documents issued in the name of the Center or the Military Council … to see whether there are any … that have not been seen by me … In the past, several decisions … have been issued unauthorized, without me having seen them. This is intolerably wrong, and is a sabotage of rules …” These were very strong words indeed, and they were designed to make Liu sweat all the more.

Next came a direct and open attack on Liu to a small but crucial audience. On 15 June, when the Politburo gathered to hear Mao announce his industrialization program, Mao sharply condemned Liu, calling him “right-wing.” Even though he did not name Liu, every listener knew whom he was driving at. Mao had taken precautions for the most unlikely eventuality of Liu using the Praetorian Guard, which also guarded Liu, to fight back. He had had a hush-hush investigation conducted beforehand to gauge individual members’ relationships with Liu. On the day of the meeting, some of the guards were rounded up and transferred out of Peking.

Over the following months, Mao denounced Liu by proxy to ever larger audiences, criticizing key Liu protégés like finance minister Bo Yi-bo, who had devised a tax system that would not produce anything like the revenue that Mao’s program demanded. Then in September Mao handpicked a lower-rank official to insinuate to a Party conference that Liu and his protégés had suspect pasts, and could be enemy agents. This was a frightening accusation. Liu was in danger of losing far more than just his job.

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