The Private Life Of Mao

The Memoir of Mao's Personal Physical

Li Zhi sui

PREFACE

BY DR. LI ZHISUI

In 1960, China Youth magazine contacted me through Tian Jiaying, one of Mao Zedong's secretaries. Tian asked if I would write articles for the magazine.

Tian was a neighbor of mine in Zhongnanhai, and was aware of my habit of keeping a journal of my daily activities. In fact, he had read some of my writing; this is why he suggested that I select a few of my journal entries for publication.

I had started writing a journal in 1954, when I was appointed Mao's personal physician, and soon writing became a hobby. It helped while away the time, and served as a record of my experience. Initially I took notes only on major episodes, but after a while I wrote down many other things I happened to observe. Still, I had never intended to publish my writings, and I turned down the magazine's request.

By 1966, I had compiled more than forty volumes of notes. In the latter half of that year, the Red Guards began to search the houses of their political enemies. At that time I lived in a residence complex in Gongxian Lane in Beijing, where three vice-ministers of the Ministry of Public Health also lived. As victims of the Cultural Revolution, they were under constant attack by the Red Guards, and their living quarters were frequently raided by the young rebels. Sometimes the Red Guards knocked at the wrong door and entered my residence by mistake. My wife, Lillian, was alarmed, for she was afraid that they might accidentally get hold of my notes, which contained many candid observations on Mao's public and private activities.

Unable to find a safe place for these notes, we made the painful decision to burn them. But we could not do this at home because we were afraid that our neighbors might observe us and suspect that we were destroying criminal materials. Ultimately, I thought of the incinerator at Zhongnanhai that was used to burn the unneeded documents and letters of Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing.

I took my notes there and fed them into the incinerator. As I reached the last dozen or so volumes, Wang Dongxing, director of the Central Bureau of Guards, phoned and asked to see me immediately. He said that Jiang Qing's chef had reported to him that I was destroying documents in the incinerator. I promptly assured him that I was burning only my personal notes, not official documents. He asked me what was wrong with the notes. I said that they touched on Mao's activities and that it would be risky to keep them. He said that if I burned them I would be inviting trouble, and that if the chef reported the matter to Jiang Qing, it would be disastrous.

Still, I figured that since I had already burned a major portion of the notes, I might as well finish the lot. So I went back to the incinerator and burned what was left.

The next day, Wang Dongxing yelled at me, “I told you not to burn the notes, but you did it anyway. This time, the Chairman's chef has made a report to me of your activity. If this gets out of my hands, it will be a catastrophe. So stop it. If you do it again, I will have you arrested.”

I told him there was nothing left to burn. The job was finished. So much for the diaries I had kept for a dozen years.

During the Cultural Revolution, I was in constant fear for my safety and dared not make any more notes.

In 1976, after the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four, Lillian said to me with a sense of regret, “What a pity! If we had kept the notes, nothing would likely have happened. We burned them for nothing.” She urged me to write down again my experiences of those earlier years.

One day in the summer of 1977, Marshal Ye Jianying came to the 305 Hospital, of which I was the director, for a checkup. Chatting with me, he said, “You worked for the Chairman for twenty-two years. That is a long, long time. You should write your life story. It's part of history.” He told me that if I published a book, he would help promote it.

Subsequently, many newspapers and magazines requested that I contribute articles. I turned down these requests, as I had done before, for I knew what happened to writers who wrote truthfully of their experiences: They were condemned as rightists or reactionary intellectuals. And I certainly did not want to write anything to praise the powerful or to whitewash the terrible events I had witnessed.

And yet I did not want my memory of those twenty-two years to fade away without a trace. I decided to rewrite my life story. Beginning in 1977 I wrote intermittently for some time, eventually producing more than twenty volumes of notes. Because Mao's language was so colorful and vivid and deeply etched in my brain, I was able to recall verbatim much of what he had said. My survival and that of my family had always depended on Mao's words; I could not forget them. Still, I had no intention of having my recollections published; I knew that no publisher in China would print this type of work, and I did not want to get into trouble by publishing it myself. I kept the notes simply as a remembrance of the life that Lillian and I had shared in those bygone days.

In February 1988, Lillian was found to be suffering from chronic renal failure. She was hospitalized that May; by July her condition had deteriorated. My two sons, John and Erchong, and their wives, Linda and Mae, who had gone to the United States in the early 1980s, urged me to bring Lillian to this country for treatment.

In August, Lillian and I and our granddaughter, Lili, arrived in Chicago. While Lillian was undergoing treatment, I helped take care of her diet and medical needs. It was at this time that she suggested I produce a manuscript for publication based on my notes. But I hardly had the desire or the time to do so.

In December, Lillian caught a severe cold, and her condition worsened sharply. Though we had her admitted to a hospital and did everything possible to save her, she was to die on January 12, 1989.

Before she went into a coma, she urged me again and again to write down the events of the previous forty years. She said, “You must do it, for yourself, for me, for our posterity, for our grandson who will soon be born. I am sorry I cannot help you anymore.”

In March 1989, I unpacked the volumes of notes from my luggage and began work on the present book. I consider this publication a permanent tribute to Lillian.

I hope that reading these pages will give people a deeper understanding of the tumultuous life of Mao Zedong. If, by reading this book, people can value more their own ideals and cherish more their freedom, that will be a fulfillment of the fondest hope that Lillian and I shared.

In 1949, after twenty-two years of bloody war, the Communist party finally defeated the Guomindang and established the People's Republic of China.

In 1948 I had gone to work as a surgeon for the Australian Oriental Company in Sydney, where I stayed until the summer of 1949. That summer I received a letter from the vice-minister of public health of the Chinese Communist party's Military Affairs Commission, who, at the suggestion of my eldest brother, invited me to work in China. I accepted the invitation and went to Hong Kong to meet my wife, Lillian; together we went back to Beijing, my native city. I was twenty-nine years old then.

The vice-minister put me to work at Fragrant Hills Clinic, in a western suburb of Beijing, a medical facility under the jurisdiction of the General Office of the Communist party's Central Committee. Later I worked at the Zhongnanhai Clinic at Communist party headquarters.

I worked diligently at my job, winning the respect of many high-level cadres as well as others. In 1952, the General Office unanimously elected me a Grade-A model worker, and in the same year I was admitted to the Communist party of China. I was successively appointed director of the Zhongnanhai Clinic, director of the Administrative Office of the Bureau of Health, deputy secretary-general of the Medical Science Committee of the Ministry of Public Health, and president of the 305 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army.

In 1954, at the recommendation of Wang Dongxing, director of the Central Bureau of Guards, with the consent of Yang Shangkun, director of the General Office, and Luo Ruiqing, of the Ministry of Public Security, and with the approval of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, I was appointed personal physician to Mao Zedong and later director of the medical team for Mao. From then until Mao's death in 1976, for a period of twenty-two years, I was in charge of Mao's health, at his side almost constantly, whether in Beijing or elsewhere.

When I started working for Mao, I was greatly surprised by his life-style, which was much different from that of the average person. He followed no schedule at all in eating or sleeping. To him, the division of a day into twenty-four hours or the difference between day and night had little meaning. His public and private activities, including his meetings with foreign heads of state, were arranged strictly according to his preferences.

Mao liked to conduct his activities on the spur of the moment, without giving adequate advance notice. Even the people who worked closely with him could not tell what his next demand would be. In addition, the Chinese Communist party was a very tightly controlled organization, and very secretive. As Mao instructed us, “Don't talk about the things that go on around here.” As a result, his real life was shrouded in a thick mist, and he appeared all the more mysterious and powerful.

Until 1959, I revered him. Though I was physically near him at all times, a mystical, impregnable wall seemed to separate us. I could not see through this wall to know what his real life was. After 1959, I gradually penetrated this invisible barrier and was able to see Mao's real face. Like an actor, Mao appeared onstage with elaborate makeup but showed a different face backstage.

In the early 1950s, as Mao concluded the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance and advocated a “leaning-to-one-side” foreign policy, many people believed that he was very close to the Soviet Union. But they did not know that even as far back as the 1930s he had been considered a dissident by Stalin and the Soviet Communist party, a “turnip—white on the inside and red on the outside.” In his first official visit to the Soviet Union in the winter of 1949–50, he was received very coldly; he stayed there for two months, achieving nothing. It was only after he threatened to return to China that Stalin agreed to sign the friendship treaty. Mao regarded Russia as a great threat to China, determined eventually to gobble it up. But it was not until the early 1960s that the break in Sino-Soviet relations became widely known.

In the 1930s, following their visit to the Communist-base area in northern Shaanxi, Edgar Snow and other American journalists told the world about the near-miraculous existence of the Chinese Communist party. From then on Mao looked favorably upon the United States, and especially the American people. In the 1950s, when he advocated the “learning-from-the-Soviet-Union” policy, many Chinese studied Russian, considering it the most important foreign language. But Mao did not. Instead, he studied English. He said of himself, “My words and my deeds are inconsistent.”

Among his staff, a number of people were classified, to use the communist jargon, as intellectuals, all of whom, myself included, had received British and American educations. He never allowed a Soviet-educated individual to work for him.

The Korean and the Vietnam wars brought China and the United States into conflict. One of the many causes of these wars was that Americans misunderstood Mao's personal preference for the United States and allowed American political leaders hostile to Chinese communism to take charge of America's China policy, with tragic results. Beginning in the late 1960s, Mao devoted himself to the improvement of Sino-American relations and accomplished this objective before he died.

Mao regarded Chiang Kai-shek as his lifelong enemy but gave him credit for a strong sense of nationalism, not subservient to the United States. He said, “Chiang Kai-shek and I both claim there is only one China. On this point we are in complete agreement.”

The power struggles at the highest level of the Chinese Communist leadership were complicated and tangled. From the “anti-rightists” movement of 1957 to the so-called “criticizing Peng Dehuai anti-party group” campaign of 1959 to the Cultural Revolution of 1966—all these and other political upheavals seemed to arise for a variety of reasons. In reality, there was only one fundamental cause: Mao wanted to retain total power.

For example, Mao considered the anti-Stalin, anti-personality-cult campaign launched by Khrushchev and the Soviet Communist party at its Twentieth Congress in 1956 a threat to his own position as the supreme leader of the Chinese Communist party, and he responded accordingly, with a series of measures to assure his leadership. As Wang Dongxing said, “Mao considers no one in the whole Communist party indispensable to the party except himself.”

Mao led an appalling private life. Publicly, he appeared composed and dignified as well as friendly and personable, creating an image of a respected elder gentleman. But in reality he was a dedicated philanderer. As he grew older, his sexual adventures became all the more scandalous and wide-ranging. He had no other recreational activity except for these adventures, which involved an uncountable number of young women. As Wang Dongxing observed, “Is it because he feels he is going to die soon that he has to grab as many girls as he can? Otherwise, why is he this interested in [sex] and why is he this energetic?” And Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, said of him, “In the matter of political struggle, none of the Chinese and Soviet leaders can beat him. In the matter of his personal conduct, nobody can keep him in check either.”

I am not writing a biography of Mao. I am instead recording what I saw and heard during the twenty-two years when I was Mao's personal physician. This book is dedicated to the memory of my wife, Lillian, who endured with me the hardship of life with Mao. Without her unfailing support and constant encouragement when she was alive, I could not have finished this work.