Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan Case

In New China's early years, some Party cadres grew complacent in peacetime, and embezzlement, waste and bureaucratism appeared. At the end of 1951 the Party Central Committee launched the Three-Anti campaign against corruption, waste and bureaucratism; in early 1952 it began the Five-Anti campaign among private industrialists and merchants. Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan were both veteran cadres who had joined the revolution many years earlier and contributed to it, and they successively served as Party secretary of the Tianjin prefecture. Using their positions, they misappropriated state disaster relief grain and funds, special river-control funds, and relief funds for cadres' families, embezzling and squandering over 17.1 billion yuan of public money (in old currency, about 1.71 million in new currency). After the case was exposed, the Hebei Provincial Party Committee proposed the death penalty for both. When some pleaded for leniency because they were veteran revolutionaries who had served, Mao Zedong said: "It is precisely because their positions were high, their merits great and their influence large that we must resolve to execute them. Only by executing them can we save 20, 200, 2,000 or 20,000 cadres who have committed errors of varying degrees." On 10 February 1952 the Hebei Provincial People's Court held a public trial in Baoding and sentenced Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan to death, with immediate execution. It was the first major anti-corruption case of New China. It showed the Party's determination to oppose corruption and govern itself strictly, and strongly advanced the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns, which largely ended in October 1952 and created conditions for planned economic construction.