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But in every other respect, gelid Liu Shao-chi is the perfect Communist—a mechanical man who comes close to realizing his own dictum: "A party member is required to sacrifice his interests to the party unconditionally." Even the public appearances intended to humanize him invariably take on a grim tone. When a small child cut its hands tending potato vines in a commune, Liu's reaction was hard advice: "Do not be scared by a little blood." And when a Communist bureaucrat, whom he was lecturing on the need for working-class experience, observed, "There are still people who regard working in the boiler room as living hell," Liu snapped back: "We need more such hells."
Required Reading. So complete is Liu's talent for fading into the woodwork that no one is even sure how old he is; he was born, probably about 1898, in Yin-shan in rice-growing Hunan province, not far from Mao Tse-tung's own village. Liu and Mao, as sons of prosperous peasant families, attended middle school in Changsha, the largest city in the province, and a hotbed of radical nationalism. Though Mao was some four years older than Liu, they worked together on a left-wing student magazine, and by his early 205 Liu was a veteran of anti-imperialist student demonstrations. In 1920 a Soviet talent scout, encountering Liu in Shanghai, picked him as one of seven promising Chinese students to attend Moscow's newly opened Far Eastern University.
During Liu's absence in Russia, where he was both bored and homesick, Mao and eleven other comrades founded the Chinese Communist Party. On his return from Russia Liu promptly joined, and for the next 20 years he worked as a Red labor organizer—a job that occasionally landed him in prison. In 1934, when Mao led the Red army in its famed, 6,000-mile Long March from southern Kiangsi to the caves of Yenan in northern China, Organizer Liu went underground, remained behind as a Communist agent in Kuomintang territory.
To have missed both the founding of the Communist Party and the Long March might have put Liu far down the list of party hopefuls. Yet when he finally reached Mao's Yenan headquarters in 1937, he quickly made up for lost time, moved nimbly through the party infighting. As a political commissar, he was assigned to investigate the army commanded by grizzled Peng Teh-huai, the Reds' No. 2 military man and later commander of Chinese "volunteers" in Korea.
Unimpressive in appearance but steely cold in personality, Liu boldly accused Peng of "bureaucratism," so overawed the burly soldier that ex-Bandit Peng went into a paroxysm of selfcriticism. Even his close association with Mao's archopponent within the party, Stalinist Li Lisan, did not halt Liu's rise. Thanks to his gift for translating Mao's sweeping ideas into explicit political handbooks, Liu's "literary" works (How to Be a Good Communist, On the Party Struggle) became must reading for all Chinese Communists.