Foreign News: RED CHINA’S NO. 2 MAN

Named the new chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, to succeed Mao Tse-tung (still boss of the party and China’s No. 1 man): Liu Shao-chi, who thus consolidated his place as Red China’s No. 2 man and heir apparent to Mao.

Person. Tall (almost 5 ft. 10 in.) for a Chinese, thin, with greying hair and the pallid look of an anchorite, Liu is a Communist ideologue whom strangers in a roomful of people are apt to overlook. But Liu’s voice is hard, his hand is heavy, his mind dogmatic and forceful. To Liu, the ideal Communist “bears the sorrows of the world now for the sake of later happiness; he toils now for the sake of later satisfaction; he doesn’t wrangle with others whose lot is better; in times of adversity he can straighten up and carry on; he has the greatest determination and a stature that riches cannot corrupt, poverty cannot change and terror cannot surmount.”

Career. Born in Hunan province, close by the village of Mao Tse-tung, of middle-class peasants. Not even official Chinese sources give a consistent birthdate, though he is probably 61. Mao and Liu attended the same normal school in industrial Changsha, early became Communists. By 1919 Liu had joined the staff of a Red newspaper edited by Mao Tse-tung, and been sent to the Soviet Union to study at Moscow’s Far Eastern University.

During the early 1920s, while the Reds and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang were in uneasy alliance against the anarchic Chinese warlords, Liu worked as a labor organizer, surfaced from time to time in Canton, Shanghai, Manchuria. Repeatedly jailed, he was a top underground leader in the harsh 1927 fighting in Shanghai between the Communist labor unions and Chiang Kaishek, described in André Malraux’s novel Man’s Fate. Liu’s first wife reportedly tried to commit suicide at the party’s underground headquarters, and he hired a ricksha to take her to the doctor. When criticized for not ordering a taxi in such an emergency, Liu, true to his doctrinaire code, coldly replied that it might have drawn the attention of the police and endangered the party operation.

When the Communists made the 6,000-mile “Long March” from southern Kiangsi to Yenan in 1934-35, Liu Shao-chi remained in Kuomintang territory as a Red agent. Summoned to Yenan in 1942 he began his rise to the top levels of the party reportedly as personal secretary to Mao Tse-tung, and as an expert in “indoctrination methods,” meaning brainwashing.

Character. The few non-Communist reporters who have met chain-smoking Liu, uneasily describe him as a “wan wraith in the shadows” who looks like an “underexposed snapshot.” His family life is equally shadowy: his first wife “died” in 1945; his second is described as a “handsome” woman from Tientsin. One of his four sons was executed by the Kuomintang; a daughter went to school in Moscow and married a Spanish Communist. Sharp-tongued and humorless, Liu Shao-chi has flicked a raw spot on nearly everyone around him. When Premier Chou En-lai suggested in a speech that no one could be considered faultless, he was forced to admit that “Chairman Mao and Comrade Liu Shao-chi and a few other leaders have achieved the stage of perfection.” Liu even opposed Mao Tse-tung on the “let a hundred flowers bloom” theory and—in Communist terms—was proved right. He annoys Soviet officials by telling them that Russians are not capable of understanding China, and displays the contempt of an old street agitator for the commanding generals of the Red Chinese army. A man unlovely and unloved, Liu Shao-chi resembles Stalin or Molotov more than any other top Chinese Communist.