Peng Zhen, Mayor of Beijing, was overthrown for opposing Mao Zedong over the course of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, Li Xuefeng replaced him as first secretary of the CCP Beijing Committee, and in August he was promoted an alternate member of the CCP Politburo. His first acts as Party chief in Beijing were to dismiss the editorial boards of several local newspapers and the CCP committee in the University of Beijing, provisionally replacing it with a "work team" charged with providing political education to the students and pushing them to join the Cultural Revolution movement. His perceived low support for the Red Guards and Mao's criticism towards the "work teams", thought to be harmful to the Cultural Revolution and the source of the students' inner fighting, led to Li's rapid downfall. In 1967, as both the Beijing Municipal Government and CCP Municipal Committee were reorganized in a Revolutionary Committee, Li was sent to Tianjin away from limelight. He resurfaced in February 1968, when he was appointed chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Hebei Province; in April 1968, he was confirmed as an alternate member of the Politburo at the Ninth Congress of the CCP. In 1971, Li's support for Chen Boda during the troublesome Second Plenary Session of the Ninth Central Committee held in Lushan in 1970 led him to be identified as a member of Lin Biao's conspiracy against Mao, who called him one of Lin's "big generals". Thus, he was sent to confinement in Anhui for eight years. The accusation of being part of Chen Boda's "anti-party clique" was confirmed in 1973 at the Party's Tenth Congress. Li Xuefeng was never expelled from the Party, and, despite his ambivalent attitude during the Cultural Revolution, he was rehabilitated in 1982. In June 1983, he was elected member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a post he had previously held from 1959 to 1965. He was also a member of the Central Advisory Committee. After having retired from political roles between the late 1980s and early 1990s, Li Xuefeng died in Beijing in 2003, aged 96. See also Politics of Beijing |- |- |- 1907 births 2003 deaths Chinese Communist Party politicians from Shanxi Delegates to the 7th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party Governors of Hebei Members of the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party Members of