Tao Zhu (1908 – 1969) was a member of the Politburo Standing
Committee of the Communist Party of China.

Born in Qiyang, Hunan, Tao Zhu was Secretary of the Guangdong
Provincial Committee and Commander of the Guangzhou Military
Region. In 1958, during the initial stages of the Great Leap
Forward, he participated enthusiastically in the "anti-hoarding
campaign" in Guangdong, believing that reported production figures
were real, and that the observed food shortage was only due to
peasants' hoarding. Within a year, he realized his mistake as
his campaign was not able to discover stored food supplies in
villages; in fact, most peasants were starving. In the 1959
Lushan Conference, he initially sympathized with Peng Dehuai in
his criticism of the Great Leap Forward. However, after a harsh
reaction from Mao Zedong, Tao Zhu switched sides and joined up
in Mao's attack on "right-leaning opportunists", submitting a
list of his own officials that he identified as "opportunists".
Nonetheless, in Guangdong, Tao's government took steps to reverse
the damage of the Great Leap Forward by expanding individual peasant
ownership of land and allowing emigration to Hong Kong.

He later became First Secretary of the Central-South region, and
in 1965 was moved to Beijing to replace Lu Dingyi as Director of
the Central Propaganda Department when Lu was purged for not
adhering strongly to the Maoist line. Tao was a Vice Premier of
the State Council and Secretary of the Central Secretariat of the
CPC, as well as an advisor to the Cultural Revolution Group.

In May 1966, Tao Zhu was promoted to No. 4 in the party, behind
Mao Zedong, Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai. That allowed his protégé,
Zhao Ziyang, to take over as head of Guangdong province. Tao and
Zhao were among the most enthusiastic of the early pro-Red Guard
CPC leaders, but quickly fell from favour because they tried to
control the excesses of the radical leftists led by Zhang Chunqiao
and Jiang Qing. Tao became a member of the Politburo Standing
Committee at the Eleventh Plenum in August 1966 at the outset of
the Cultural Revolution, but was attacked soon after, and labelled
"the proxy leader of Liu-and-Deng-roaders" and a "Khrushchev-style ambitionist" by leading radical leftists. He was placed under house
arrest in early 1967.

While under house arrest, Tao was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer,
but was initially denied medical treatment. Zhou Enlai eventually
intervened to arrange an operation, but by then Tao's cancer was
too advanced to treat successfully, and Tao died in a hospital.
Tao's family was not allowed to see him either on his deathbed or
after his death. He was posthumously exonerated in 1978, after
Deng Xiaoping rose to power. He was remembered as a man of great integrity.

Tao's daughter, Tao Siliang, became a Chinese politician in the
late 1980s, leading several government initiatives in public health
and the import of Western medical technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Zhu

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