Liu Shaoqi in the context of "President of the People's Republic of China"

The Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held from 5 to 14 October 1952. The Congress, which had been repeatedly announced and postponed, was the first party congress after World War II and the last under Joseph Stalin's leadership. It was attended by many dignitaries from foreign Communist parties, including Liu Shaoqi from China. At this Congress, Stalin gave the last public speech of his life. The 19th Central Committee was elected at the congress.

According to Sovietologist Philip E. Mosely, the 19th congress was a pure formality, as the party had been subsumed by the state apparatus in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign.

The 1975 Constitution of the People's Republic of China was a communist state constitution promulgated by the 4th National People's Congress. The offices of Chairman and Vice-chairman were officially scrapped under the Constitution after almost 7 years of functional non-existence since the purge of Liu Shaoqi.

Bombard The Headquarters – My Big-Character Poster (Chinese: 炮打司令部——我的一张大字报; pinyin: Pào dǎ sīlìng bù——wǒ de yī zhāng dàzì bào) was a short document written by Chairman Mao Zedong on August 5, 1966, during the 11th plenary session of the 8th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and published in the Communist Party's official newspaper People's Daily a year later, on August 5, 1967.

It is commonly believed that this "big-character poster" directly targeted Chinese President Liu Shaoqi and senior leader Deng Xiaoping, who were then in charge of the Chinese government's daily affairs and who tried to cool down the mass movement which had been coming into shape in several universities in Beijing since the May 16 Notice was issued, through which Mao officially launched the Cultural Revolution.

Mao Zedong's cult of personality was a prominent part of Chairman Mao Zedong's rule over the People's Republic of China from the state's founding in 1949 until his death in 1976. Mass media, propaganda and a series of other techniques were used by the state to elevate Mao Zedong's status to that of an infallible heroic leader, who could stand up against the West, and guide China to become a beacon of communism.

Mao Zedong himself recognized a need for personality cult, blaming the fall of Khrushchev on the lack of such a cult. During the period of Cultural Revolution, Mao's personality cult soared to an unprecedented height, and he took advantage of it to mobilize the masses and attack his political opponents such as Liu Shaoqi, then Chairman of the People's Republic of China. Mao's face was firmly established on the front page of People's Daily, where a column of his quotes was also printed every day; Mao's selected works were later printed in even greater circulation; the number of Mao's portraits produced (1.2 billion) exceeded the population of China at the time, in addition to a total of 4.8 billion Chairman Mao badges that were manufactured. Every Chinese citizen was presented with the Little Red Book—a selection of quotes from Mao, which was required to be carried everywhere and be displayed at all public events, and citizens were expected to read the quotes from the book daily. However, in the 1970s, Mao also criticized others for overdoing his own personality cult.

Xiangtan (Chinese: 湘潭) is a prefecture-level city in east-central Hunan province, south-central China. The hometowns of several founding leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, including Chairman Mao Zedong, President Liu Shaoqi, and Marshal Peng Dehuai, are in Xiangtan's administration, as well as the hometowns of Qing dynasty and republic era painter Qi Baishi, scholar-general Zeng Guofan, and tennis player Peng Shuai.

Xiangtan forms a part of the Greater Changsha Metropolitan Region with Changsha as the core city along with Zhuzhou, also known as Changzhutan City Cluster, one of the core cities in Central China.

The Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement, often known simply as the Down to the Countryside Movement, was a policy instituted in the People's Republic of China between the mid-1950s and 1978. As a result of what he perceived to be pro-bourgeois thinking prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong declared certain privileged urban youth would be sent to mountainous areas or farming villages to learn from the workers and farmers there. In total, approximately 17 million youth were sent to rural areas as a result of the movement. Usually only the oldest child had to go, but younger siblings could volunteer to go instead.

Chairman Mao's policy differed from Chinese president Liu Shaoqi's early 1960s sending-down policy in its political context. President Liu Shaoqi instituted the first sending-down policy to redistribute excess urban population following the Great Chinese Famine and the Great Leap Forward. Mao's stated aim for the policy was to ensure that urban students could "develop their talents to the full" through education amongst the rural population.