He served as a communist trade union organizer in Guangzhou (Canton) and Shanghai before becoming a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927, and its chief theoretician. On the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 he was appointed chief vice‐chairman of the party. In 1959 he became chairman of the Republic, second only to Mao Zedong in official standing, but during the Cultural Revolution he was fiercely criticized by Red Guards as a ‘renegade, traitor, and scab’, and in 1968 he was stripped of office; his death was announced in 1974. In 1980 he was posthumously rehabilitated.