The Private Life of Chairman Mao
By Dr. Li Zhisui
Random House, 682 pages, $30
Among the last services Dr. Li Zhisui was required to perform for Mao Tse-tung was assisting with the injection of some 22 liters of formaldehyde into the chairman’s just-expired corpse on Sept. 9, 1976. This was the first step in the process that would take Mao’s embalmed body to its current resting place in his memorial hall on Tiananmen Square. Now Dr. Li has performed a far greater service, this time voluntarily, both to his native country and to the world-and one that does a lot to undermine the first-by writing this memoir of his 22 years as the Chinese ruler’s personal physician.
Although Mao is his main character, the story Dr. Li tells is really of China itself during the decades from the 1940s to the 1970s: the founding of the People’s Republic, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, Nixon’s visit. Two threads tie it together. One is absolute power and its effects: the power that Mao craved and that corrupted him. The other is the catastrophe that power brought to China, which we see in the ruination of Dr. Li’s family and life, and in the sad irony of China’s long adoration of the chairman. For while the Chinese people joyfully proclaimed their love for him through lapel badges and vast rallies, he was steering their country toward destruction, on a course charted largely by his own pathology.
Dr. Li Zhisui came to understand this pathology only slowly. Trained in Western medicine in China, he abandoned a promising career in Australia to return in 1949 to what he hoped would be a new China. Assigned responsibility for Mao’s health in 1955, he was overwhelmed by the honor. But he also felt apprehension: Kremlin doctors had recently been accused of killing Stalin; being Mao’s doctor might prove a death sentence.
In the years that followed, Dr. Li became as well the chairman’s “personal and political confidant.” And as he observed Mao day in and day out, his original awe dissipated. Beneath the superficial charm he discovered Mao’s chilling selfishness and utter lack of human empathy. By the end, the chairman had few secrets from his thoroughly disillusioned doctor.
Those secrets, now disclosed, are of course the primary cause for the wide press attention that “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” has received. Dr. Li’s descriptions of Mao’s compulsive sexual activity, his drug addictions and his vindictive cruelty, have been splashed across front pages around the world. Often they confirm what was already suspected; their effect, nevertheless, is overwhelming. To read Dr. Li is to acquire a new perspective on the possibilities of despotism; one in which Hitler and Stalin find peers if not a rival, while lesser figures like Franco and Mussolini take on almost favorable casts.
Mao lived, as Dr. Li quickly discovered, entirely according to his own whim. He ate and slept when he wished, summoning his servitors day or night, with absolute disregard for their lives or feelings. (Dr. Li was sometimes away from his wife and children for a year at a time; in 22 years he had only one week-long vacation.) Moreover, while others starved, Mao ate rich food swimming in oil; while others died at hard labor, he “never had to raise a hand, never put on his own socks or shoes or trousers, never combed his own hair.”
Much effort went into meeting his sexual desires. Simple young women felt honored to be his consorts; given the factional fighting at the top of the Communist Party, their adoration invigorated him politically. What is more, like emperors of old, Mao believed sexual intercourse with young women could postpone death. Partners were found for him through “dance parties”; even in the Great Hall of the People, a suite, Room 118, was set aside for his indulgences.
Mao infected his women with venereal diseases (for which he refused treatment); more seriously, as Dr. Li sees it, he passed on his own moral corruption. Dr. Li’s reflection about Mao’s wife, who is usually reviled as a harridan, perhaps hits the mark: “Watching so many innocent young women become corrupted through association with Mao, I began to sense that Jiang Qing’s life had followed a similar path. Maybe she really had been kind in Yanan when she first married Mao. Maybe he had corrupted her as well.”
National politics from 1949 to 1976 were likewise marked by a corrupting insistence on, and abject deference to, Mao’s impulses. When in the late 1950s he became dissatisfied with the pace of change in China, Mao encouraged-without ever specifying exactly what was to be done-the launching of a Great Leap Forward, which was intended to vault China to European economic levels almost instantly. And when he traveled south by train, the chairman was pleased to admire the Leap’s accomplishments (in fact he observed a tableau arranged on either side of the track for his delectation): abundant crops just beyond the window, flames from village blast-furnaces in the background. The reality for China was a disastrous famine in which tens of millions died needlessly.
Anyone who remotely threatened Mao, not to mention stood up to him, paid sooner or later with his life. Dr. Li portrays Chou Enlai, who was so widely admired, as little better than Mao’s slave. “Everything he did was designed to court favor with Mao. Everything he did, he did to be loyal to Mao.” This bleak assessment is supported by Dr. Li’s account of the invitation to the American Ping-Pong team to China in 1971-often attributed to Chou’s sagacity. In fact, Dr. Li tells us, Chou had politely turned aside the initial American approach, but Mao overruled him. The key instructions were given by the chairman to his head nurse “as Mao was finishing his dinner, and after I had given him his sedatives . . . in drowsy, slurred speech.” (But Chou does get credit for administering China at a time when otherwise “only incompetents remained, and they spent most of their time in factional struggles.”)
All in all, the book is probably the most illuminating firsthand account of Mao we will ever have. Edited into an absorbing narrative and well annotated by Anne F. Thurston, it is a must for China specialists and will reward general readers.
But Dr. Li did not initially want to write it. After settling with his family in the United States (he now lives in the Chicago area), he had hoped to forget what had gone before. It was his beloved wife, Lillian Wu, who insisted. As she lay in an American hospital, dying of kidney disease, “she urged me to write this book as a record for our children, grandchildren, and the generations to follow and as a history of life in Mao’s imperial court.”
Dr. Li’s account combines the objectivity and diagnostic acuity of the Western medical tradition with a powerful Chinese sense of moral judgment. These lift the book far above the sensational journalism and so-called “pathography” with which it might be erroneously confused.
In the West we already knew something, even before Dr. Li, about Mao’s real character. But in China he is still officially revered. After his death, “his worn-out clothes, robes, and slippers were exhibited to the public as evidence that he had sacrificed luxury in order to stay in contact with the masses.” This is still widely believed.
It is part of the moral bargain that has traditionally bound government to people in China that the ruler be virtuous. Of course Mao was not virtuous, nor are his successors today. Tradition would predict grave consequences from such default; whether accurately remains to be seen. Dr. Li Zhisui has seen to one thing, however: Mao will not escape the informed judgment of history, whether in the West or (can it be doubted?) before long in his own country.
