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Mao continued to ordain idiotic agricultural experiments, but Liu and Deng sidetracked the policies. The strategy--a sort of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare--exasperated the Great Helmsman. Presented with new Deng directives on communes, Mao sputtered, "What emperor decided these?" Finally, even Mao recognized that China was famished and dying. He made a strategic retreat and allowed Liu and Deng to restore order and the food supply. But he never forgave them for showing him up. Increasingly paranoid, he accused Deng of refusing to sit next to him at meetings. In 1962 he attacked Liu and Deng, screaming, "You have put the screws on me for a very long time!... Now, for once, I am going to put a scare into you!" Mao's revenge came in 1966 with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
With big-character placards crying BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS! revolutionaries attuned to Mao took over the party and ousted Liu and Deng. Mao's wife, the ferociously radical Jiang Qing, had been biding her time to get at Deng. He had scorned some of her extreme efforts to "reform" Chinese culture, such as turning traditional opera into perfervid propaganda spectacles. "I support wholeheartedly that Beijing opera should be reformed," he said. "But I just do not feel like watching these plays." The croissant lover who had once commented that no one could be truly civilized without having dined out was despised by radicals. His feline remark became evidence against him. Along with fascism, treason and a raft of other crimes, Deng was accused by some Red Guards of promoting cat-ism.
By August 1967, with China in tumult, he and Liu were put on public trial. Liu's leg was broken in the spectacle, and he later died of pneumonia in a makeshift prison in the city of Kaifeng. At the trial Red Guards decried Deng as a "capitalist roader," a "fascist" and a "traitor" and shouted, "Cook the dog's head in boiling oil!" Confronted by such rantings for hours on end, Deng simply removed his hearing aid. What saved him from Liu's fate, evidently, was a simple thing as well. While Mao had always despised the patrician Liu, he remembered with some affection his wartime adventures with Deng. Thus Mao declared Liu "an enemy of the people" but defined the opposition of his old comrade as an antagonism that emerged "from among the ranks of the people." Deng and his wife were allowed to live under house arrest in Beijing for two years before being sent south, back to the old revolutionary base of Jiangxi. They were assigned quarters in the commandant's house at a deserted infantry school and required to work mornings at the tractor factory. Their greatest sorrows at this time were the death of Deng's younger brother, driven to suicide by Red Guards, and the crippling of their son Deng Pufang. A promising student of physics at Peking University, Pufang was hounded by radicals until he fell--or was pushed--from a fourth-story window. His spine was fractured, leaving him a paraplegic.