ABSTRACT
Deng was anything but politically insensitive. He left for a tour of his old domain of the southwest in late November 1965, ostensibly to inspect war preparations there but actually to avoid involvement with the tangled political struggle in Beijing. Deng returned to Beijing in late December 1965, only to find that, instead of having settled down, the chaotic situation had intensified and grown even more complicated. That was particularly true of the Peng Zhen issue, which could hardly be avoided by either Deng or Liu Shaoqi. The Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Congress, held in Beijing in August 1966, was perhaps the only occasion in post-1949 communist history on which Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong not only openly argued against each other but also privately lobbied the voters on their own behalf. The Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Congress, in October 1968, formally decided that both Liu and Deng should be removed from all their party and government posts.
