Liu Shaoqi

In November 1938 Liu Shaoqi was appointed secretary of the CCP Central Plains Bureau and, under the pseudonym 'Hu Fu', opened up anti-Japanese work in the region between the Yellow River and the Yangtze, taking part in the New Fourth Army's military work in Anhui, Henan and Jiangsu. In November 1939, at a cadres' meeting of the New Fourth Army's Sixth Detachment in the Henan-Anhui-Jiangsu border region, he called for 'advance eastward, advance eastward, and advance further eastward' into the enemy's rear, and set out rent and interest reduction, better treatment for hired labourers, reasonable burdens, the arming of the masses and the establishment and transformation of political power as preconditions for building a base area. He then directed the creation of a base linking the four counties of Yongcheng, Xiayi, Xiaoxian and Suxian, the building of two smaller bases at Suixian-Qixian-Taikang and Shangqiu-Boxian-Luyi-Zhecheng, and preparations to move eastward along the Jinpu Railway in one or two months. In November 1939 he went to the Jiangbei Command Headquarters at Sanhuangjia, Dingyuan County, repelled attacks by the troops of Li Pinxian and Han Deqin, and established the Anti-Japanese Democratic Base Area in Huainan. When the Central China New Fourth Army Eighth Route Army General Headquarters was formed in November 1940, he became its political commissar; the Caodian campaign that followed against Han Deqin cost nearly 2,000 casualties and failed to threaten its main positions. After the Southern Anhui Incident of January 1941, in which the New Fourth Army was defeated and Chiang Kai-shek ordered its designation cancelled, Liu proposed to the Central Committee a full political counter-offensive with a temporary halt to the military one, asked for Chen Yi to be appointed acting commander, and pressed for the headquarters to be rebuilt. The Central Military Commission ordered its reconstruction on 20 January and Liu became political commissar; with Chen Yi and others he established the headquarters at Yancheng, set up the Central China Party School to strengthen Party leadership over the army, and organized a moderate rectification campaign in northern Jiangsu. When the Central Plains Bureau and the Southeast Bureau merged into the Central China Bureau in May 1941, he became its secretary, and the New Fourth Army grew from more than 90,000 men at its reconstruction to 135,000. In the same period he lectured on 'On Intra-Party Struggle' at the Central China Bureau Party School, and in 'The Spirit of Democracy and Bureaucracy' argued that bureaucracy exists not only among exploiting classes but also within the proletariat, the Communist Party and the proletarian state, becoming more serious once the Party holds power, and that raising the cultural level and democratic spirit of the masses was a principal method against it while dismissal was only a temporary remedy. On 19 March 1942 he left Danjiagang in Funing County for Yan'an via Shandong, arriving on 30 December 1942. His Yan'an lectures of 8 July 1939 became the famous 'How to Be a Good Communist'; earlier, in 1936, he had proposed releasing Communist prisoners from the Caolanzi penitentiary after they completed a simple procedure, an act that would later be turned into the 'Sixty-one Traitors' case against him during the Cultural Revolution.