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Criticism against Liu Shoqi (Oct, 1968-)
Preparation for Ninth Congress; removing Liu Shoqi
The Cultural Revolution Authority prepared its leadership for the Ninth Congress. Members like Lin Biao and Jiang Qing showed their intention to assume greater power by taking advantage of the Ninth Congress and excluding the old revolutionaries. The main work of preparing for the Ninth Congress was "settling the problem of Liu Shoqi". In 1966, a special group was established in secret under the guidance of members like Kang Sheng and Jiang Qing, to Judge Liu Shoqi. They invented past crimes and forced him to confess, charging him with "becoming a traitor".
Indeed, Liu was caught in 1925, but there was no fact that he had gone to the other side. This guess was just an invention made up by members like Jiang Qing. It was clear that they intended to drive Liu to death by making up false charges.
Liu was one of the main leaders in the CCP. Although all his rights were taken away, he was still a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau. So a formal procedure was needed to defeat Liu thoroughly and it had to be done by the Ninth National People's Congress. Therefore in October 1968, Mao held a congress. This congress proceeded under abnormal conditions, in that some member of the Political Bureau had been deprived of their rights to attend the congress, a few members had been freed illegal detention, and some members had been falsely criticised.
In this congress, the opinions of the special group were adopted, i.e. "To remove the name of Liu Shaoqi from the CCP permanently, and that subsequently there should be an investigation into the betrayal of the nation and the CCP by Liu and the others". Several old revolutionaries questioned the decisions, but they were shouted down. Not only Liu was damaged. The number of cases judged "anti-revolutionary" reached 26,000, and about 28,000 people were involved.
After the congress, the campaign of revolutionary criticism against "the removal of anti-revolutionary ideas in support of capitalism carried out by members like Liu in the CCP" was carried out again. It was clear that the criticism against Liu. Was being used as a propaganda vehicle for the ideas against the Cultural Revolution. The members of the Cultural Revolution Authority like Qing advertised the revolutionary criticism campaign in various ways. They used the media, expanding the distorting the facts as they liked and criticising ideas by making up history.
Such a campaign of revolutionary criticism went against the procedures and policy of the CCP, ruined the benefits which all the people had won through the leadership of the CCP and destroyed the good tradition of the CCP, bringing confusion in the fields of politics, theory, thought and so on.
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