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Gao Gang, a senior figure in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and former head of the State Planning Commission of China, spent the evening of August 16, 1954, in a long conversation with his wife, Li Liqun, before she went to bed. This would be the last time she saw her husband alive. The next morning, Gaos daughter found him unmoving in his bed. He had already passed away from an overdose of sleeping pills. He was a few months shy of his fiftieth birthday. The funeral, four days later, was brief and without many wails from his close family members. The tombstone on his grave was devoid of an epitaph, except his birth name, Gao Chongde. He was one of the first members of the political elite to be eliminated in a major political purge initiated by the CCP. He had also fallen victim to an almost classical type of character assassination.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137344168_13

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