1 The Death of Mao

1

“Chairman, you called for me?”

Mao struggled to open his eyes and move his lips. The oxygen mask had slipped from his face and he was struggling for breath. I leaned over. “Ahr… ah … ah …” was all I could hear. His mind was clear, but his speech was hopeless.

I was Mao's personal physician, in charge of the medical team—sixteen of China's best doctors and twenty-four excellent nurses—trying to save his life. For more than two months—since June 26, 1976, when Mao suffered his second myocardial infarction—we had been on duty around the clock. Eight nurses and three doctors were constantly by Mao's side while another two doctors monitored his electrocardiogram. The shifts changed every eight hours. I was always on call, sleeping fitfully some three or four hours a night. My office was a cubbyhole just outside Mao's sickroom.

The citizens of China had not been told their leader was ill. They had traced Mao's physical decline only through occasional photographs of his rare visits with foreign dignitaries. The last of them was the photograph of Mao meeting with Laotian leader Kaysone Phoumvihan in May 1976. The press continued to say he was healthy, but the photograph with Kaysone Phoumvihan proved that their leader had grown shockingly old. Still, hundreds of millions had begun that morning, September 8, 1976, chanting in rhythm, “Ten Thousand Years to Chairman Mao.”

But those of us on duty in Mao's sickroom that night knew the end was hours, even minutes, away. He had been failing since June. Two members of the Communist party politburo, paired by rank and political proclivity—moderate party vice-chairman Hua Guofeng with radical party vice-chairman Wang Hongwen, radical politburo member Zhang Chunqiao with moderate politburo member Wang Dongxing—also kept vigil twenty-four hours a day, rotating every twelve hours.

Hua Guofeng, in charge of the efforts to save the Chairman's life, was genuinely loyal to Mao, deeply concerned about his health and comfort, conscientiously trying to understand the doctors' explanations, trusting that we were doing all we could to save Mao. When we recommended new, and sometimes uncomfortable, medical procedures, like running a tube through Mao's nose and into his stomach for feeding, Hua Guofeng alone among the leaders had been willing to try the new procedures first on himself. I liked Hua Guofeng. His integrity and sincerity were rare amid the corruption and decay among the party elite.

I had first met Hua Guofeng in 1959, during the Great Leap Forward, when I accompanied Mao on a visit to his native village of Shaoshan, in Hunan province. Hua was the first party secretary of Xiangtan, the prefecture where Mao's village was located, and Mao had liked him enormously. Two years later, when local officials continued to pretend that food production was increasing even as the Great Leap Forward had plunged the country into economic depression, Hua Guofeng had the courage to say that “the people are losing weight, the cattle are losing weight, even the land is losing weight. How can we talk about increases in food?”

“No one else tells the truth like Hua Guofeng,” Mao said to me then.

Hua had come to his present position in April 1976, an early victor in the power struggle that was unfolding as Mao's death approached. In January 1976, Mao had appointed Hua acting premier to succeed the deceased Zhou Enlai as head of the State Council, in charge of the daily affairs of government. In early April, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn Zhou's death and protest the policies of such radical leaders as Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and her Shanghai cronies Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. The demonstrations were publicly declared “counterrevolutionary,” and Mao placated the radicals by purging the moderate Deng Xiaoping, charging him with having fomented the disturbance. Always the balancer, Mao then disappointed the radicals by appointing Hua first vice-chairman of the party. Hua Guofeng was thus confirmed both as head of government and as Mao's chosen successor to head the party. This made me very happy. I thought Mao had chosen the right person to lead the party and the government. Even Jiang Qing's chef was delighted, commenting that at last the Chairman had made a sharp decision. But the radicals had begun accusing him of leaning to the right.

As a result, Hua decided he could no longer continue. I was at the swimming pool on April 30, 1976, when he told Mao that the attacks against him made it impossible for him to serve. After the meeting, Hua had told me of their conversation and showed me the notes Mao had written. There were three of them: “With you in charge,” Mao had scrawled, “my mind is at ease”; “Act according to the decisions laid down”; “Don't be nervous; take it easy.” By then, Mao's speech was incomprehensible, and he had to communicate by pen.

Mao's scribbled blessing became the document that legitimized Hua's succession.

Shortly before midnight on September 8, 1976, the doctors had administered an intravenous injection of shengmai san, a traditional Chinese herbal concoction consisting primarily of ginseng, in an effort to stimulate Mao's heart. His blood pressure had risen from 86 over 66 to 104 over 72 and his pulse had firmed up a bit, but the improvement, I knew, would be fleeting.

Hua Guofeng pulled me aside just after we administered the injection. “Dr. Li,” he whispered as politburo members Zhang Chunqiao and Wang Dongxing strained to hear. “Is there anything else you can do?”

I said nothing. Hua knew there was no hope, and I did not know what to say. I could not yet bring myself to use the word death.

Silently, I looked at Hua Guofeng. The air was frozen. The whirring of Mao's respirator was the only sound in the room. Then I shook my head. “We have done all we can,” I whispered hoarsely.

Hua turned to Wang Dongxing, director of the Central Committee's General Office in charge of party affairs and longtime head of Mao's bodyguards. Wang had first met Mao in Yanan, and for decades he had been in charge of the Chairman's safety. Few men had a longer or closer association with Mao.

“Ask Comrade Jiang Qing and the politburo members in Beijing to come here immediately,” Hua instructed Wang, “and notify the politburo members in other parts of the country to report to Beijing.” Wang turned to go.

As Wang was leaving, a nurse rushed up to me. “Dr. Li, Zhang Yufeng says that Chairman wants to see you.” I rushed to his side.

Once a stewardess on the special train that Mao used in his travels through China and now his confidential secretary, Zhang Yufeng had long been Mao's close companion. I first saw Zhang Yufeng and Mao together at a dance he was hosting in Changsha. She was an innocent-looking eighteen-year-old girl with big round eyes and lovely white skin, and she asked the Chairman to dance. I watched as he took her openly from the dance floor to his guest house, where they spent the night together.

The relationship had sometimes been tumultuous, and Mao had had many other women in his life as well. Even now two young dancers were serving unofficially as nurses, sponging his body and feeding him. But Zhang Yufeng had been with Mao the longest, and though she had grown coarse—and fond of alcohol—she had managed to retain his trust. In 1974, after Xu Yefu, Mao's longtime confidential secretary, was hospitalized with lung cancer, Zhang took over the task of sending and receiving the voluminous documents that Mao read and commented upon each day, and when Mao's eyesight failed, she read the materials to him as well. In late 1974, she had been officially appointed Mao's confidential secretary by Wang Dongxing.

As Mao's doctor, I was allowed unimpeded access, but everyone else had to go through Zhang to get to Mao. After 1974, even Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and ranking members of the politburo had to go through Zhang Yufeng, and she treated even the highest leaders with disdain. One day in June 1976, when Hua Guofeng had come to see Mao, Zhang Yufeng had been napping and the attendants on duty were afraid to rouse her. Two hours later, when Zhang had still not gotten up, Hua, second in command only to Mao, finally left without seeing his superior. Earlier in the same year, Deng Xiaoping had been ill and under political attack, separated from his family. His youngest daughter, Deng Rong, had written to Mao for permission to stay with her father. Zhang Yufeng did not deliver the letter to Mao, and Deng Rong was never permitted to be with her father.

Much of Zhang Yufeng's power came from the fact that only she could understand his speech. She had to interpret even for me.

“Dr. Li,” she said as I went to Mao's side, “Chairman wants to know if there is any hope.” With some effort, Mao nodded and slowly extended his right arm, taking my hand. His hand felt limp as I took his pulse, and the pulse itself was weak and difficult to find. The roundness of his cheeks, so familiar to the Chinese people, was gone and his skin was ashen. His eyes stared vacantly, without their usual luster. The line on the electrocardiograph fluttered.

We had moved Mao into this room in Building 202 of Zhongnanhai six weeks previously, in the early morning hours of July 28, 1976, when Beijing, and much of that part of China, had been hit by an earthquake that completely destroyed the city of Tangshan, some one hundred miles east of Beijing. More than 250,000 people had died instantaneously. In Beijing few people had died, but there was much damage, and fears of another earthquake led millions of residents to spend the next several weeks living in makeshift tents in the streets. Mao's sickbed in his study beside the indoor swimming pool, where he had moved early in the Cultural Revolution, had been violently shaken by the quake. We had to move him to safer ground.

Building 202 was the only choice. Connected to the swimming pool by a corridor, Building 202 had been constructed especially for Mao in 1974 and was meant to withstand a major earthquake. That evening, after we had moved him, another major aftershock hit in the midst of a heavy rain, but we barely felt it in Building 202. The whole sky could have fallen in at that point and I would not have noticed, so completely was I focused on saving the Chairman's life.

Now Hua Guofeng, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Wang Dongxing walked quietly up to Mao's bed. From behind the screen I could hear others come quietly in. The room was filling in preparation for the midnight change of shift.

As I stood there holding Mao's hand and taking his pulse, with the four politburo members standing behind me, Jiang Qing suddenly stormed in, shouting, “Will someone tell me what is happening?”

Jiang Qing was Mao's fourth wife, if you count the marriage his parents arranged for him as a teenager, which Mao refused to accept. Mao had married Jiang Qing in Yanan in 1938. I am told that she had gotten along well with others in Yanan. But after 1949, bored by her life of inactivity, the wife of the country's highest leader became increasingly irascible and demanding. Not until the Cultural Revolution did she finally come into her own, seizing the opportunity to settle her personal vendettas when she was finally appointed a member of the politburo. Mao and Jiang Qing had been leading separate lives for years, but Mao had never seen fit to divorce her, for he would then have been free to marry one of his other women. This he preferred to avoid. During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing had moved to one of the huge villas in the complex of the Diaoyutai state guesthouse, but she had returned to Zhongnanhai, to the Spring Lotus Chamber, after her husband's June heart attack.

It had not been easy for Jiang Qing to accept the hold Zhang Yufeng had over Mao, but when she finally bowed to the inevitable, she began courting Zhang herself as a way of communicating with Mao. Jiang also had difficulty accepting the fact of Mao's illness and his impending death. She was torn between the fear that her own power rested finally on Mao and the hope that with his death she would be selected to rule in his place. His sickness and incontinence disgusted her.

Hua Guofeng tried to quiet her. “Comrade Jiang Qing,” he said politely, “Chairman is talking with Dr. Li right now.”

I tried to reassure Mao, even though I knew there was no hope. His health had been deteriorating for years. The turning point began shortly after September 1971, when Lin Biao, then vice-chairman of the party, vice-chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, and the man Mao had chosen as his successor, the leader all of China referred to as Mao's closest comrade in arms, had turned against Mao and conspired to unseat him. Believing that his plots had been discovered, Lin Biao had commandeered a plane and fled, heading for the Soviet Union, together with his wife and son. The plane had run out of gas and crashed near Undur Khan, in Outer Mongolia, and everyone on board was killed. The episode left Mao depressed, listless, and unable to sleep. Finally, he became ill.

He was still sick, rebelling against his doctors and refusing all medical treatment, several weeks before President Nixon's historic first visit to China, in February 1972. Only three weeks before Nixon was scheduled to arrive, Mao finally told me to begin treatment. His condition was so serious that a full recovery was out of the question. When Nixon arrived, Mao was still so weak he could hardly talk. His lung infection was not fully cured, and he was troubled by congestive heart failure. He was so bloated that he had to be fitted with a larger suit. I greeted President Nixon as his car pulled up to Mao's residence and directed him to Mao's study, retiring then to the corridor just outside the reception room, where I was able to hear their conversation clearly and was ready with mobile rescue equipment should Mao need it.

Now, at eighty-three, Mao's body was ravaged by a multitude of diseases. His lifelong addiction to cigarettes had destroyed his lungs, and for years he had faced frequent bouts of bronchitis, pneumonia, and emphysema. As the bronchial lining of his lungs lost its elasticity, convulsive coughing had torn away the walls of his left lung, leaving three large air bubbles, making it hard for Mao to breathe. He could draw air in but could not easily exhale and was comfortable only lying on his left side, the weight of his body compressing the air bubbles and allowing his healthier right lung to breathe. Often he could breathe only with the aid of an oxygen mask, and during episodic emergencies we relied on the American-made respirator that Henry Kissinger had sent in 1971 after his secret mission to China.

In 1974, Mao had been diagnosed as suffering not from Parkinson's disease, as so many in the West supposed, but from a rare, incurable, and ultimately fatal motor neuron disease—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease as it is popularly known in the West. In the ordinary progression of the illness, the motor nerve cells in the medulla and spinal column, which control the muscles of the throat, the pharynx, the tongue, and the right hand and leg, degenerate and die, leading to muscular atrophy and then paralysis of the affected parts. As the disease progresses, patients lose the ability to speak and to swallow and must be fed by a nasal tube running to the stomach. The affected muscles become useless, and breathing becomes increasingly laborious. The patient fights a continuing battle with lung infections. There is no cure and no effective treatment, and most patients die within two years of the initial diagnosis.

Mao's disease had progressed just as the specialists predicted. But it was not only the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that was killing him now. It was his heart, weakened by age and chronic lung disease. Mao had suffered his first myocardial infarction in mid-May 1976 in the midst of an argument with Zhang Yufeng, and a second one on June 26. His third heart attack was on September 2. The doctors all knew, though none dared say it, that death was imminent.

The party chairman, however, was fighting on.

“It's all right, Chairman,” I said to him, his hand still in mine. “We will be able to help you.” For an instant Mao's eyes seemed content. Slowly, pinkish patches began to appear on his cheeks. He exhaled deeply. His eyes closed. His right hand dropped lifeless from mine. The line on the electrocardiograph turned flat. I looked at my watch. It was 12:10 A.M., September 9, 1976.

I felt no sorrow at his passing. For twenty-two years I had been at Mao's side, with him every day, accompanying him to every meeting, traveling wherever he went. More than his physician, I had served for many of those years as his personal and political confidant, closer to him longer than anyone but—possibly—Wang Dongxing.

In the beginning I had adulated Mao. He was China's savior, the country's messiah. But by 1976 this had long since passed. My dream of a new China, where all men would be equal and exploitation ended, had been shattered years before. I had no faith in the Communist party, of which I was still a member. “An era has ended” was the best thought I could summon as I stared at the flat line on the electrocardiograph. “Mao's time has passed.”

The thought was fleeting. Immediately, I was filled with dread. What would happen to me? As Mao's doctor, I had lived for years in constant fear.

Looking up from Mao's inert body and into the faces of the people gathered round, I realized that everyone else in the room must also have been calculating his fate. Life within the walls of Zhongnanhai had always been precarious. I found myself staring at Jiang Qing.

“What were you people doing?” she snapped at me. “You will be held responsible.”

Her accusation was no surprise. Jiang Qing found plots and conspiracies in the most innocent acts. The difficulties in our relationship had begun twenty years before, and four years earlier, in 1972, she had accused me of being a spy.

Hua Guofeng intervened, walking slowly toward her. “We've been here all along,” he said gently. “The comrades on the medical team—all of them—have done their best.”

Wang Hongwen confirmed Hua's statement. “Yes, the four of us have been here all this time,” he began, his face turning red. Wang Hongwen was the youngest member of the politburo and was often referred to sardonically as the “rocket”—a reference to his meteoric rise to power from a minor security cadre in a Shanghai factory to the highest reaches of political power. No one could understand why Mao had taken such a liking to the young man or pushed for his rapid promotions. Wang was tall and handsome and looked intelligent, but his looks were misleading. He was poorly educated—a middle-school graduate only—ignorant and not very smart. He had nothing to contribute to the leadership of China. In May, when Mao suffered a major health setback, Wang had come to me with a cure: He wanted Mao to eat ground pearls. They had already been delivered to Beijing. Wang expected me to administer them to Mao. I waffled. Mao was never given ground pearls.

As Mao lay dying and Wang was supposed to be on duty, he would often go rabbit shooting in the fields near the secret military airport at Xiyuan. He spent much of his time watching movies imported from Hong Kong. Wang, I am convinced, had never been a particularly good man, but power had corrupted him even more. “The medical team has been reporting to us on every detail,” he defended himself to Jiang Qing. “We knew clearly—”

“Then why didn't you let me know the situation earlier?” Jiang Qing interrupted.

But Jiang Qing had been repeatedly informed of Mao's condition. Her response had usually been to accuse the doctors of exaggerating his illness. She would say that we were bourgeois and that only a third of our advice should be heeded. On August 28, after she was formally told how serious Mao's condition was, she defied us all by leaving Beijing for an “inspection trip” to Dazhai, the nationwide model agricultural brigade of which she was a particular supporter. Hua Guofeng called her back on September 5. She had not even troubled to ask about Mao's condition when she returned. She was tired, she said.

On September 7, when Mao's condition turned critical and we thought his death was imminent, Jiang Qing had come to meet with the medical team. She went around the room shaking hands with each of the doctors and nurses in turn, repeating to each of them, “You should be very happy now; you should be very happy now.” She seemed to have convinced herself that she would take control when Mao died and believed we would be pleased with her leadership.

The other doctors, meeting her for the first time, were stunned by her callousness. “There's nothing strange about it,” Wang Dongxing told me. “Jiang Qing believes that the Chairman is the only thing keeping her from ultimate power.” She was waiting for him to die. The power struggle gained momentum even as Mao lay dying and intensified before his body turned cold.

Jiang Qing was the leader of the radical faction, supported by Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, Yao Wenyuan, and Mao's nephew Mao Yuanxin. Zhang Chunqiao was a Shanghai-based leftist theoretician and a leading exponent of the Cultural Revolution. “Socialist weeds are better than capitalist wheat,” he used to say. Now, with Jiang Qing's outburst, he began pacing the floor, his hands clasped behind his back, eyes on the ground.

Mao's nephew began wandering glumly around the room as though looking for something. Mao Yuanxin was the son of Mao's younger brother, Mao Zemin, who had been executed by the governor of Xinjiang province, in China's far northwest, during the Second World War. The governor—Sheng Shicai—had first welcomed Mao Zemin to his fold but switched his political allegiance from the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist party to Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Mao Zemin's wife was arrested then, too, and Yuanxin was born in jail. When Yuanxin's mother remarried, Mao took responsibility for rearing his nephew, bringing him to Zhongnanhai after 1949, though he rarely saw him.

I had watched Yuanxin grow up. As a child he had not gotten along well with Jiang Qing, but Yuanxin was in his mid-twenties when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966 and joined the rebel side. He wrote to Mao apologizing for his earlier relations with Jiang and announcing that he was joining her. Now only in his mid-thirties, Mao Yuanxin had been appointed political commissar of the Shenyang Military Region, in China's northeast, and late in 1975, after Mao became too ill to attend politburo meetings, Yuanxin had started attending for him, serving as the liaison between Mao and the highest leadership of the party. He had considerable power. Jiang Qing trusted him.

As the physicians and nurses stood with heads bowed in terror at Jiang Qing's outburst, Wang Dongxing was engrossed in a conversation with his subordinate, Zhang Yaoci, the commander of the Central Garrison Corps. The enmity between Wang Dongxing and Jiang Qing was also longstanding. Wang had nothing to fear from Jiang Qing and ignored her outburst. He had amassed remarkable power and held many positions. He was not only the head of the Communist party's General Office but had served for years as director of the Central Bureau of Guards, and was party secretary of the Central Garrison Corps charged with protecting the party leadership and providing security at their residences and offices. Until the Cultural Revolution, he had been vice-minister of China's Ministry of Public Security, too.

Zhang Yaoci, like Wang Dongxing, was a veteran party member and participant in the Long March, and they both came from Jiangxi province. The two security officials had much to plan. Mao's body would lie in state at the Great Hall of the People. With tens of thousands of people filing past to pay their respects, security would have to be tight.

Suddenly, Jiang Qing's expression relaxed. She turned pleasant. Perhaps she had just concluded that her greatest obstacle to power was gone, that she would soon assume leadership over China. “All right,” she said. “You all have really had a hard time. Thank you very much.” Turning to her nurse, she ordered her to have the black silk dress already made for the occasion of her husband's death ironed. She was ready to mourn.

Hua Guofeng turned to Wang Dongxing. The two had become close only recently. “Call a meeting of the politburo right away,” he instructed.

Most of us were turning to leave the room when Zhang Yufeng suddenly wailed. “The Chairman is gone,” she cried. “What will happen to me?” Jiang Qing walked over to her, put her arm around Zhang's shoulder solicitously, and smiled, urging her not to cry. “You can work for me now,” she said. Zhang's tears stopped immediately, and she burst into a smile. “Comrade Jiang Qing, thank you so much.”

“From now on, don't allow anyone else into Chairman's bedroom or living room,” I heard Jiang Qing whisper to her. “Collect all the Chairman's documents, keep them in order, and deliver them to me.” She headed toward the conference room, two doors down from Mao's sickroom, where the politburo meeting would soon begin. Zhang Yufeng trailed behind, promising to follow Jiang Qing's orders.

Zhang Yaoci, the commander of the Central Garrison Corps, came to me from Mao's bedroom, obviously worried. He wanted to know if any of the medical staff had seen Mao's watch.

“What watch?” I inquired.

“The one Guo Moruo gave the Chairman during the Chongqing negotiations.” Mao had never been in the habit of wearing a watch—he ran on his own time—but the Swiss Omega given to him in August 1945 by Guo Moruo—writer, calligrapher, multifaceted scholar, head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences until his death in 1978, good friend and, finally, sycophant of Mao—had great historic value. The Americans had used the Chongqing negotiations to encourage the Guomindang and the communists to work out their differences and form a coalition government. The collapse of the negotiations had marked the inevitability of civil war and the end of the cooperation between the Communist party and the United States.

“We were all busy trying to save Chairman's life,” I answered. “Nobody was paying attention to a watch. Why don't you ask Zhang Yufeng?”

“I saw Mao Yuanxin scurrying around, touching this and that,” Zhang Yaoci replied. “He must have taken it.”

“No one on the medical team would have dared to take it,” I repeated. Zhang Yaoci rushed back into Mao's sickroom.

A moment later, Wang Dongxing walked out of the room where the politburo had begun to gather and called me privately into an adjoining room. The politburo had just decided that Mao's body would have to be preserved for two weeks in order for people to pay their respects. Beijing is still hot in September, and they wanted us to begin immediately, to prevent Mao's body from deteriorating. Wang told me to hurry.

None of us had dared raise the question of Mao's funeral arrangements while the Chairman was alive, but the request to preserve Mao's body for a few weeks came as no surprise and would cause us no problems.

As I went on my way to begin the arrangements, a captain in Zhang Yaoci's Central Garrison Corps stopped me. “Dr. Li, you'd better prepare yourself,” he said ominously. “The politburo is meeting now, and I suspect the news for you won't be good. If anything goes wrong, you won't be able to run away.” A moment before, I had been filled with a sense of my impending doom. I was surprised at the utter calm that descended upon me with the officer's remark.

I fully expected to be charged with Mao's murder.

I come from a long line, at least five generations, of doctors. Late in the Qing dynasty, during the reign of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), my great-grandfather had been so respected that he was summoned from Anhui province to serve as physician to the imperial court. One of my ancestors took care of the Tongzhi emperor (1856–74) and continued later to serve as physician to him and the imperial household.

Folklore has it that the Tongzhi emperor was fond of slipping out of the imperial palace, disguised as a commoner, to visit the brothels that dotted the narrow alleys crisscrossing Beijing just south of the Forbidden City. According to my family history, my great-grandfather diagnosed the Tongzhi emperor as suffering from syphilis. The Empress Dowager Cixi was furious with the judgment. She snatched a jade pin from her hair and threw it on the ground in displeasure, refusing to permit the treatment my great-grandfather prescribed, and insisted that the Tongzhi emperor be treated for smallpox instead. The emperor died, and my great-grandfather was “de-hatted,” losing his noble rank, though he continued to serve in the imperial hospital. He died without being exonerated, so the hat that designated his noble status was placed in his coffin by his side rather than on his head. One part of my family tradition survived: My ancestors continued to serve as doctors. But my great-grandfather's admonition against serving in the imperial court was also faithfully handed down from generation to generation and just as faithfully observed. No ancestor since had served in the imperial court.

But one does not refuse a summons from the highest reaches of power. I had protested my appointment as Mao's physician, but the honor could not be turned down. I tried to leave several times, but Mao always called me back.

My work was secret from all but my family and closest friends. The organizations charged with Mao's security were afraid that conspirators would use his doctor to do the Chairman in. People who did know of my work had always expected my service to end badly, and they often warned me of the potentially dire consequences of serving as Mao's physician. “You have a grave responsibility,” one of my cousins admonished me in 1963. “Chairman Mao's health is a matter of great concern to the whole party and the whole nation. If any member of the Central Committee is ever dissatisfied and decides to criticize your work, you will be in serious trouble.”

Other friends refused to visit my home, even after my family moved out of Zhongnanhai and visits were permitted. One friend from Kunming, in Yunnan province, had been a close friend of Tan Furen, the onetime commissar of the Kunming Military Region who had been assassinated by one of his own bodyguards during the Cultural Revolution. “After his assassination, everybody who had ever set foot in Tan's house was intensely interrogated—in isolation,” she told me. “Fortunately, I had never been to his home.” She would not visit me, either.

The allegations that Stalin's doctors had conspired to murder the Soviet leader had always weighed heavily on my mind. I fully expected similar allegations against me and my medical team. As Mao's death grew near, I had begun to prepare for my arrest. At the beginning of September, just after his third heart attack, I returned home briefly, for the first time in months, to pack a small bundle of clothes—my quilted cotton jacket and trousers and an overcoat. I expected to be held in an unheated jail. I visited each room in our apartment, silently saying goodbye, fearing I would never return. My wife was at work and my children were at school. My wife told me later that our housemaid told her that I came back home in a great hurry and seemed worried. The maid added that she thought something bad might have happened.

So when I heard the captain's warning only minutes after Mao's death, I prepared for whatever might come. Mao liked to say that “a dead pig is not afraid of boiling water.” I felt like a dead pig, numb.

It was still dark when I phoned the minister of public health, Liu Xiangping, at her home and asked to see her immediately. I refused to explain why and told her only that we must meet in person. Liu Xiangping was the widow of the late minister of public security Xie Fuzhi. They had both been leftists and devoted to Jiang Qing. I assumed that her appointment as minister of public health in the midst of the Cultural Revolution had been recommended by Jiang Qing, since Liu Xiangping had no qualifications for the position.

She still lived on the grounds of the Ministry of Public Security just off Changan Avenue, north of the old legation area, in an elegant old Western-style house that had once been a foreign embassy. She was waiting for me in an anteroom and not yet fully awake.

“Chairman Mao passed away at ten minutes past midnight,” I began. She screamed even before I finished my sentence. “We have lots to do right now and cannot waste any time,” I continued impatiently. “The central authority wants us to preserve the Chairman's body for two weeks. We must rush. They are waiting for us.”

She wiped her eyes. “What shall we do?” She was weeping.

“We have to talk with people at the Academy of Medical Sciences,” I said. “The anatomy and histology departments have specialists.”

“All right. But first we should ask Huang Shuze and Yang Chun to come here for a talk.” Liu Xiangping relied on Huang Shuze, one of the vice-ministers of public health and a doctor himself, when she needed medical advice. Yang Chun was party secretary at the Academy of Medical Sciences.

“We'll waste a lot of time if we ask them to come here,” I said. “Let's call the specialists first and then we'll all meet in Yang Chun's office at the academy.” Liu agreed and began calling them while I drove to the academy.

Yang Chun and Huang Shuze were already waiting when I arrived. Two experts in the preservation of human bodies were there, too—Zhang Bingchang, a research associate in the department of anatomy, and Xu Jing, a fortyish-looking female assistant researcher in the department of histology. The minister of public health had not told them why they had been summoned so mysteriously in the middle of the night, and Zhang Bingchang, obviously worried, was staring out the window. I learned later that this was not the first time he had been called to the academy like this. During the Cultural Revolution, he had often been awakened to sign the death certificates of people who had been murdered or committed suicide. Since the militant young Red Guards responsible for the deaths did not want such unpleasant facts to be recorded, Zhang Bingchang was often “struggled against” and beaten. “I didn't mind being beaten,” he told me. “What I feared most was being labeled a counterrevolutionary.” Not long before, he had been called during the middle of the night to perform an autopsy on the body of former minister of public security Li Zhen, who had died from an overdose of sleeping pills. Because of his report, he had been jailed by the Ministry of Public Security for more than two months.

He relaxed visibly when I told the group of Mao's death.

The specialists agreed that Mao's body could easily be preserved for two weeks. It was only a matter of injecting two liters of formaldehyde into a leg artery. Huang Shuze and Yang Chun had no objection to the method, so Zhang and Xu fetched their syringes and medical supplies and accompanied me to Zhongnanhai. The streets were deserted. It was four o'clock in the morning and still dark. The Chinese people would not learn of their leader's death for hours.

The politburo was still meeting in the conference room. “Director Wang Dongxing has asked for you several times, and Marshal Ye Jianying was looking for you, too,” said the officer in charge of the armed guards standing watch as soon as he saw me. “The politburo has approved an announcement of the Chairman's death—‘A Message to the Whole Party, the Whole Army, and the People of All Nationalities of the Country.' It will be broadcast at four o'clock this afternoon.”

This was the announcement I had been waiting for. It would give the official verdict on the cause of Mao's death—and say whether I and the team of doctors would be blamed. “What did it say about the illness and death of the Chairman?” I asked anxiously.

He handed me a copy. “Take a look,” he said.

I grabbed the sheet of paper and quickly scanned the first paragraph. “… received excellent medical care during his illness,” I read, “nevertheless in the end his condition was beyond help. He died at ten past midnight on the morning of September 9, 1976, in Beijing.” There was no need for me to read further. I had been exonerated. Several days later, on September 13, my name would appear in the People's Daily as the director of Mao's medical team. I was safe.

Wang Dongxing came up to me as soon as I entered the room where the Beijing-based politburo members—seventeen people in all—were gathered. “Let's go somewhere else,” he said. “We need to talk.”

As we stepped into an adjoining room, he asked, “Did you see the announcement?”

“Yes, I just saw it. I only read the first paragraph,” I responded.

He grinned, then continued. “The politburo has just made a decision. The Chairman's body is to be permanently preserved. You'll have to find out how it can be done.”

I was astonished. “But you told me the body only had to be preserved for two weeks,” I objected. “Why do you want to preserve it forever? In 1956, Chairman Mao was the first person to sign the pledge to be cremated. I remember that clearly.”

“It's a decision of the politburo. We decided just a moment ago,” Wang Dongxing said.

“But it's impossible,” I protested. “How do you feel about it?”

“Premier Hua and I both support the decision,” Wang answered.

“It just can't be done,” I argued. “Even iron and steel corrode, to say nothing of the human body. How can it not deteriorate?” I was remembering my trip to Moscow with Mao in 1957 and our visit to the remains of Lenin and Stalin. The bodies had seemed shrunken and dry, and I had been told that Lenin's nose and ears had rotted away and been replaced by wax and that Stalin's mustache had fallen off. Soviet embalming techniques were far more advanced than China's. I could not imagine how we could preserve Mao's body.

“You must have some regard for our feelings,” Wang responded, blinking.

“Yes, of course,” I agreed. “But Chinese science simply isn't advanced enough for this.”

“That's why you're going to have to find people to help you. Whatever you need—equipment, facilities, anything—just let me know,” Wang assured me. “The central authority will make sure you have everything.”

The elderly Marshal Ye Jianying joined us. One of the earliest members of the Communist party, a founder of the People's Liberation Army, and one of my favorite politburo members, Marshal Ye asked what I thought about the permanent preservation of Mao's body. I reiterated my objections. After a short silence, he said, “Under the circumstances we have no choice but to accept the decision of the politburo, Dr. Li. But why don't you consult with some people you trust, some instructors at the Institute of Arts and Crafts, to see if they can make a wax dummy of Mao? Tell them to try to make it look real. Later maybe we can use the model as a substitute, if that becomes necessary.”

I was relieved. At least Ye Jianying, a vice-chairman of the Military Affairs Commission and a key member of the politburo, would not insist on the impossible.

Wang Dongxing concurred, but told me not to say a word.

To this day, I do not know how many members of the politburo were involved in that decision. It is possible that Jiang Qing herself never knew.

I returned to Mao's sickroom. His body was still there, the room still full of medical equipment. We moved him to a more spacious room adjacent to the conference room where the politburo was meeting. The temperature was 78 degrees Fahrenheit, much too high for the body. I ordered the attendants to lower the temperature to 50 degrees. “We can't do that,” they told me. “The top leaders are all here, and Comrade Jiang Qing has set stringent requirements about room temperature. You have to get their permission.” Zhongnanhai was directly connected to two of Beijing's power plants, and backup generators guaranteed heat in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer, even if power everywhere else in the city was out. But even in Building 202, built especially for Mao, there was no way to control the temperature in individual rooms. I went to the conference room and got politburo permission. The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter.

When I returned to Mao's makeshift morgue, Zhang Bingchang and Xu Jing were just finishing the injection of formaldehyde. I told them about the politburo's decision to have the body permanently preserved. They were astonished. “It's impossible,” they agreed. “We have no idea how to do it.”

I sympathized but insisted, “We just have to figure out some way to do it. Somebody has to go to the library at the Academy of Medical Sciences. Find out if there are books on the subject.”

Xu Jing went immediately to the medical library and phoned us a little more than an hour later. “There is a procedure for preserving the body for a relatively long time,” she explained. “Another large dose of formaldehyde—as much as twelve to sixteen liters, depending on the size of the body—has to be injected within four to eight hours of death. When the tips of the fingers and toes are filled with liquid, enough has been injected.” But Xu Jing was still uncertain. She had found the formula in a Western journal but had no idea whether it would work. She suggested we consult with the politburo.

I spoke with Wang Dongxing. “You people are just going to have to talk it over and decide among yourselves,” he said. “But you'd still better ask Premier Hua's opinion first.”

I found Hua Guofeng and told him about Xu Jing's proposal. He thought for a while and said, “We can't call another meeting now. Even if we were to meet, it wouldn't do any good. We politburo members know nothing about these things. Why don't you just go ahead and do it? I can't think of any other way.”

At the makeshift morgue, Zhang Bingchang and Xu Jing had been joined by two newcomers. A man named Chen, an intern with the department of anatomy at the Academy of Medical Sciences, was there to help administer the formaldehyde. A Comrade Ma from the department of pathology of the Beijing Hospital came as an expert in making up the dead. I told them to begin the injection. Altogether we injected a total of twenty-two liters, some six more than the formula called for, hoping that the extra would provide some additional guarantee. The process took hours. We did not finish until ten o'clock in the morning.

The results were shocking. Mao's face was bloated, as round as a ball, and his neck was now the width of his head. His skin was shiny, and the formaldehyde oozed from his pores like perspiration. His ears were swollen, too, sticking out from his head at right angles. The corpse was grotesque. The guards and other attendants were aghast. “What have you done to make Chairman look so terrible?” Zhang Yufeng complained. “Do you think the central authority will approve of what you have done?”

Xu Jing remained calm throughout the ordeal, but I was worried about Zhang Bingchang. He was pale and clearly anxious. “Don't worry,” I tried to reassure him. “We'll think of something.”

Somehow we had to restore Mao to his original appearance, but there was no way to remove the formaldehyde. “It's all right if his body stays bloated,” I said. “His clothes will cover it. But we had better try to fix his face and neck.”

“Maybe if we massage them we can squeeze some of the liquid back into the body,” Zhang suggested. The team started working on Mao's face with a towel and cotton balls, trying to force the liquid down into the body. When Chen pressed a little too hard, a piece of skin on Mao's right cheek broke off. Chen trembled in fright. “Don't worry,” Ma consoled him. “We can apply some makeup.” He used a cotton swab to dab some Vaseline and a flesh-colored liquid onto the spot. The makeup worked. The damage was invisible.

The four of them continued working until three o'clock in the afternoon. Finally, Mao's face looked normal. His ears no longer stuck out. The neck remained swollen, but the guards and attendants agreed that Mao looked much better—given the circumstances. When they tried to put the suit on Mao's body, though, his chest was so swollen the jacket would not button. They cut a slit in the underside of the jacket and trousers to accommodate Mao's new bulk.

Xu Shiyou, the commander of the Guangzhou Military Region, had just arrived in Beijing and came to pay his respects while we were dressing the body. Xu Shiyou was one of China's most famous generals, a party member since his youth and a survivor of the Long March. When still a child, Xu had been forced by poverty to become a Buddhist monk in Henan's Shaolin Temple, famous the world over for its martial arts. Xu's family were peasants, and he was never educated. The Red Army taught him to read. He was a coarse and ignorant man, but Wang Dongxing used to say that Xu Shiyou could take on twenty men singlehanded and beat them all. Xu had never liked Jiang Qing but was fiercely loyal to Mao.

When he saw Mao's body, Xu Shiyou bowed to it three times in the traditional Chinese manner. Then he leaned forward to look at the skin on Mao's chest. Suddenly, he turned to me and asked, “How many ga ma did the Chairman have before he died?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Everybody has twenty-four ga ma,” Xu insisted. “How many did Chairman have?”

I remained speechless.

“You are a smart physician,” Xu began baiting me. “Don't you know about ga ma ”

To this day I do not know what a ga ma is. Friends who know more about Buddhism than I say that Buddhists believe that every living body has twenty-four ga ma, but I knew nothing about such things.

Xu Shiyou circled the body twice, muttering to himself. “What the devil,” he said. “Why are there bluish bruises on his body?” He bowed deeply again three times, saluted Mao, and left.

Ma redid the makeup. Satisfied that we had done our best and that the body really did look like Mao, we finally finished dressing him, draping the body with the Communist party flag—the crossed hammer and sickle against a bright red background. At around midnight on September 9–10, some twenty-four hours after his death, we placed Mao's body in a crystal vacuum-sealed casket. Several members of the politburo had their pictures taken facing the coffin. Mao's body was then loaded into the back of an ambulance. I sat with it as we left the gates of Zhongnanhai and headed south, traveling through the darkened, deserted streets of Beijing to the Great Hall of the People, where Mao would lie in state for a week.

The intense power struggle that had begun during his illness was now centered on the custody of Mao's documents. Jiang Qing and Mao Yuanxin visited Mao's living quarters, where Zhang Yufeng was still staying, and asked her to give them Mao's papers, especially transcripts of Mao's conversations during an inspection tour in south China from August 14 to September 12, 1971, just before Lin Biao's disastrous abortive flight to the Soviet Union. Mao's talks during that trip had never been made public but were known to contain not only criticisms of Lin and several of his closest colleagues but assessments of several other top Communist party leaders, including Jiang Qing and her colleagues Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan, soon to be labeled the Gang of Four.

Wang Dongxing, responsible for safeguarding Mao's documents, was staying in the Great Hall of the People while Mao's body lay in state, for he was also in charge of the security arrangements within the Great Hall. Tens of thousands of carefully selected citizens were coming daily to pay their respects, and the country's top leadership was standing vigil. Wang knew nothing of Jiang Qing's efforts to remove Mao's documents until Zhang Yaoci, the commander of the Central Garrison Corps, informed him. Wang went immediately to Zhang Yufeng. “Your responsibility is to take care of the documents, not to give them to others,” he yelled at her. “They belong to the central authority of the party. No one has permission to take them away.”

Zhang sobbed and mumbled, “Comrade Jiang Qing is a politburo member and Chairman Mao's wife. Mao Yuanxin is his liaison to the politburo and the Chairman's nephew. What can I do to stop them?”

“All right,” Wang responded. “I'll send someone here to inspect all the documents. In the meantime, you have to ask Jiang Qing to return the papers.”

Jiang Qing refused to return the documents until Hua Guofeng insisted. “Chairman Mao's body has hardly turned cold,” she complained, “and already you people are trying to drive me out.” Wang Dongxing later told me that parts of the documents seemed to have been falsified, and implied that Jiang Qing had attempted to expunge Mao's criticisms of her.

In the meantime, I had begun to organize a special team for the permanent preservation of Mao's body, recruiting more than twenty leading specialists in anatomy, pathology, and organic chemistry from medical schools around the country.

We investigated China's ancient means of preservation. Recent archaeological finds had unearthed bodies hundreds of years old that had been astonishingly well preserved. We quickly concluded that the ancient techniques were of no use to Mao. Buried deep in the ground, the bodies had never been exposed to oxygen. They had been covered with a sort of balsam and immersed in a liquid that scientists thought was mercury. The bodies had disintegrated immediately upon being exposed to the air.

We wanted to know how Lenin's body had been preserved, but China's relations with the Soviet Union had so deteriorated that sending a research team there was out of the question. Instead, we sent two investigators to Hanoi to find out how Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) had been preserved. The trip was a failure. No one in Vietnam was willing to explain the process, and the two researchers never saw Ho Chi Minh's body. They were told confidentially that Ho's nose had already rotted away and that his beard had fallen off.

Another two researchers in England visited Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum to learn how to make wax figures. The team concluded that in this technique, at least, China was already far more advanced than England. The waxen figure of Mao made by the Institute of Arts and Crafts looked remarkably lifelike. The replicas in Madame Tussaud's were obviously wax.

Finally, from our reading of scientific journals, we concluded that the only way to preserve Mao's body was through a modification of the method we had already used. We would leave Mao's brain intact—we did not want to open his skull—but remove the viscera—the heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys, intestines, liver, pancreas, bladder, gallbladder, and spleen. These we would preserve in separate jars of formaldehyde should there ever be any question about the cause of Mao's death. The visceral cavity would then be filled with formaldehyde-saturated cotton. A tube inserted into Mao's neck would allow the team to replenish the formaldehyde at periodic intervals. The crystal coffin would be filled with helium. Work on Mao's body was scheduled to begin just after the official period of mourning and would be done in the utmost secrecy. The “May 19 underground project” was our worksite.

The May 19 underground project dated back to the border clashes between China and the Soviet Union over Zhenbao (Treasure) Island, in northernmost Heilongjiang. Sometime after the hostilities began on March 2, 1969, Mao became convinced that the Soviet Union, not the United States, was the main threat to China's security. His conviction led to the later détente with the United States, but in the meantime Chinese everywhere were called upon to “dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere, and never seek hegemony”—implying that China loved peace even as the country prepared for war. In urban areas throughout the country, citizens were mobilized to dig underground air-raid shelters as protection against Soviet attack. Beijing is still crisscrossed with these underground tunnels, and keepers of the underground maze boasted that the entire population of the city could be underground in three minutes.

While the citizens of Beijing were constructing these underground tunnels, the Chinese army's corps of engineers was secretly building the huge May 19 underground complex, named for the day in 1969 that the decision to construct it was made. Inaccessible from the citizens' air-raid shelters, the huge complex was to house the military high command in time of war. It contains a highway large enough for four trucks abreast and links Zhongnanhai, Tiananmen, the Great Hall of the People, Lin Biao's former residence of Maojiawan, and the People's Liberation Army 305 Hospital, in the heart of the city, with the military headquarters in the western hills outside, where many military officials reside. In addition to the military command center, there are offices, telephone and telegraph communications facilities, living quarters, and a modern, well-equipped hospital, for use only in case of war. This special hospital was just underneath 305 Hospital, where I served as director, and became our secret workplace.

Sometime after midnight on September 17, 1976, at the conclusion of the weeklong mourning period and as all of Beijing slept, Mao's body was removed from the Great Hall of the People and placed in the back of a mini-bus. Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing, riding in separate cars, joined the heavily guarded motorcade and so did the minister and one of the vice-ministers of public health and leading members of the medical team responsible for preserving the body. I rode in the van with Mao's body as we raced through the darkened streets of Beijing to Maojiawan, deserted since Lin Biao's death, where a pair of soldiers stood guard over the entrance to the underground complex. The soldiers waved us through, and the mini-bus descended into the bowels of the underground highway, heading for the special hospital beneath 305 Hospital, some ten to fifteen minutes away. There, Mao's body was removed and placed in one of the clinic's operating rooms, where work on its preservation would soon begin. Days later, the waxen dummy arrived and was placed nearby in another locked room, where I saw it for the first time. The skill of the artists at the Institute of Arts and Crafts was indeed impressive. The waxen figure looked uncannily like Mao Zedong.

Known only to a small handful of people, the two Maos, one preserved by formaldehyde and one a waxen effigy, remained in the underground hospital for a full year, where I continued to inspect them once a week. Even the soldiers who stood guard over the hospital had no inkling of what they were protecting. In 1977, with the completion within Tiananmen Square of the Memorial Hall, where Mao's body was to be put on public display, both Maos—and the several formaldehyde-filled jars containing his vital organs—were transferred to the huge vault beneath the public hall. An elevator raises and lowers the remains to and from the viewing area, the exposed casket resting on the elevator floor. Xu Jing, the female assistant researcher from the department of histology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, who had participated in the efforts at preservation, was put in charge both of Mao's remains and of the mausoleum where tens of thousands of ordinary Chinese and visiting foreign tourists would come each day to pay their respects to the man who had been the chairman of the Chinese Communist party for some forty years.

The memorial service for Chairman Mao was held on September 18, the day after I delivered his body to the secret underground vault. The weather was scorchingly hot, and I arrived at Tiananmen—the Gate of Heavenly Peace, once the southern entrance to the Forbidden City, where the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties had lived—at two o'clock in the afternoon, an hour before the proceedings began. Mao's portrait was still atop Tiananmen, as it had been since the communist victory, and it was flanked on both sides by revolutionary slogans proclaiming the worldwide unity of the proletariat and wishing the People's Republic of China a life of ten thousand years.

In the nearly thirty years since my return to China, I had come often to Tiananmen. I had been there on October 1, 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established, and later with Mao to review the twice-yearly parades—on the October 1 anniversaries of the founding of the People's Republic, and again for Labor Day, on May 1. Early in the tumultuous Cultural Revolution (1966–76), I had gone with him to review the millions of cheering Red Guards from the country's middle schools and universities. Today, the vast square that stretches south of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, flanked on the west by the massive Great Hall of the People, where Mao had lain in state, and on the east by the huge Museum of Revolutionary History, was filled with half a million somber mourners, specially chosen for the occasion and drawn from all walks of life.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, all of China came to a halt. For three minutes, the whistles of every factory and train in the country blasted their final tribute. An equal period of silence followed. Then, as all Chinese work units throughout the country conducted their own tributes, Wang Hongwen opened the national service. Looking out over the crowd, I was dripping with perspiration. The exhaustion I had managed to stave off for months suddenly overcame me. As Hua Guofeng began the eulogy, I tottered, and had to struggle not to fall. Since Mao's first heart attack in May, I had been on duty night and day. I had not slept more than four hours a night. My weight, normally 175 pounds, had dropped to 120. My mind was in a cloud during the service. I knew only that when it was over, at last I would get some sleep. Maybe I could return to my family.

At five-thirty in the afternoon, I went back to my office in Zhongnanhai, curled up on the cot, and fell asleep.

Minutes later, the phone awakened me. It was Wang Dongxing. The politburo had scheduled a meeting for the morning of September 22, four days from then, in the Great Hall of the People. We would be expected to present a report on Mao Zedong's illness and treatment and explain how he had died. The whole medical team was ordered to attend, and I was to read the report. “This is a very important meeting,” Wang emphasized. “You must be fully prepared.” The next day, my name appeared again in the People's Daily heading the list of Mao's doctors.

But I had not been exonerated. The relief I had felt at reading the announcement of Mao's death had been premature. That statement, praising Mao's medical care, had been a public presentation for the Chinese masses. Now, the entire politburo would meet to make its official determination of how and why Mao died. If my report was approved, the official verdict would be that Mao died of natural causes. The medical team would be cleared. If the politburo did not approve my report, the consequences would be disastrous. It was a matter of life and death for me and the entire medical staff.

I called the medical team together, and we agreed that I would draft the report and that we would reconvene to discuss it. I began immediately, spending the entire night of September 18 and all the following morning writing. The report was comprehensive, some fifty pages long. It began with our successful attempt to save Mao's life after his first congestive heart failure in January 1972 and described the progressive degeneration from his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and his three myocardial infarctions. I explained how Mao's illnesses had been diagnosed and treated and outlined the cause of his death. The medical team offered several revisions. We finally finished the report on the morning of September 20.

Wang Dongxing did not want to read the report and suggested that Hua Guofeng review it instead. After reading the report carefully, Hua was worried that many of the medical terms might not be clear to the politburo members. He also said the report did not clearly state the cause of death. He asked for revisions.

My colleagues were reluctant to change the medical terminology and thought that many of the terms would be extremely difficult to convey in lay language. They suggested that I explain these terms orally. They were also reluctant to ascribe Mao's death to a single cause. He was an old man, after all, and had suffered the cumulative effect of old age and several serious diseases. They thought I should emphasize his difficulty in breathing—the result of his series of heart attacks, his advanced emphysema, and his motor neuron disease—as the immediate cause.

I submitted the revised report to Hua Guofeng on September 21 and told him of my colleagues' opinions. “Some politburo members might raise questions at the meeting,” he warned me. “Try your best to give them a thorough explanation—one that they will understand.”

The meeting was already in session when my colleagues and I arrived at the Great Hall of the People on the morning of September 22. The politburo members were sitting on comfortable chairs placed in a casual circle around the room, with small wooden tables in front of them holding cups of tea. Several notetakers from the Bureau of Secretaries [mishu ju] were there, too, and a number of younger interns were scurrying about. I sat in an easy chair directly behind Premier Hua Guofeng and Marshal Ye Jianying, the man who had suggested making a waxen image of Mao. Chen Xilian, the commander of the Beijing Military Region, was talking. “I cannot do my job anymore,” he was saying. “I want to be relieved of my duties.”

“Relax, Comrade Xilian,” Hua Guofeng replied. “We'll discuss your problem later. Let's listen to the report from Chairman Mao's medical team now. They have worked day and night for four months trying to save the Chairman's life. Dr. Li will present the report.” I never learned why Chen Xilian wanted to resign.

Ye Jianying told me to speak loudly. Several members of the politburo were old and hard-of-hearing. I was interrupted a number of times as various members asked about some of the medical terms.

When I began to describe how Chairman Mao had turned critically ill in June 1976, General Xu Shiyou suddenly rose and walked menacingly toward me. “Why were there black-and-blue marks on the Chairman's body?” he demanded, standing directly in front of me. “What was the cause?” It is a popular folk belief in China that the body of someone who has been poisoned to death will be covered with bruises.

I tried to explain. “In the last days of his life, the Chairman could hardly breathe. He was seriously short of oxygen. That is the reason for the bruises.”

“I have fought field battles all my life and have seen lots of dead people,” Xu challenged me. “But I never saw anyone in that condition. When I saw the bruises on the Chairman's body on September 9, I asked you how many ga ma he had, but you couldn't answer the question. I believe the Chairman was poisoned. Only poison could produce bruises like that. We must interrogate the physicians and nurses to find out who poisoned the Chairman.”

An elaborate system to prevent Mao from being poisoned had been in effect since the first days of the People's Republic. I tried to explain the system to Xu. “Each medicine we used was first agreed to by the medical team,” I explained. “A prescription was then written, and each prescription was certified by two nurses and further verified by the doctors on duty. The prescription was taken to the special pharmacy that serves only our top party leaders. It was then delivered in sealed containers that could only be opened by the doctors at Mao's side.”

“This could be a plot cooked up by everyone involved,” Xu insisted. “We have to have a thorough investigation.” Xu Shiyou really did believe that Mao had been poisoned as part of an elaborate plot. He suspected Jiang Qing and her close associates were the master-minds. Unaware of how strained my relations with Jiang had been, he thought that I and the other doctors had been persuaded to go along.

When Xu Shiyou finished, the entire room was quiet. Xu was standing in front of me, his hands on his hips. He glanced in mute accusation at Zhang Chunqiao, who stared at the ground, his left hand propping up his chin. Jiang Qing, still in her black silk dress, was sitting on the sofa staring at Xu. Hua Guofeng stiffened. Wang Dongxing was pretending to read documents. Wang Hongwen, looking flushed, glanced nervously around the room.

Then Marshal Ye Jianying and General Li Desheng, commander of the Shenyang Military Region, turned to me and whispered, “Why were there bruises on Chairman Mao's body?”

“There were three large air bubbles in the Chairman's left lung,” I said, “and he had pneumonia in both lungs. He was having great difficulty breathing and was therefore seriously short of oxygen. Bruises like this—death patches, we call them—normally appear about four hours after death. When Comrade Xu Shiyou saw the body at four that afternoon, Chairman had already been dead for sixteen hours.”

At this moment, Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, rose and said, “Comrade Xu Shiyou, the medical team has been working very hard for four months. Why don't you just let them finish their report?” Wang Hongwen, as though on cue, rose too, and said, “Since Chairman turned critically ill, Guofeng, Chunqiao, Dongxing, and I were taking turns—”

Xu pushed up his sleeves and walked toward Jiang Qing. He pounded the table in front of her so hard the teacups fell to the carpet. “You aren't allowing the members of the politburo to speak at a politburo meeting,” he bellowed at her. “What kind of tricks are you people playing?”

Hua Guofeng intervened. “Comrade Shiyou, let's calm down,” he urged. He turned to me. “Dr. Li, why don't you and your people leave now. We'll take up this matter later.” The medical team, silent and despondent, returned to Zhongnanhai. I had delivered only the first ten pages of my report.

“Director Wang Dongxing says not to say a word about what happened at the politburo meeting,” Zhang Yaoci warned me. “You are just to wait for the politburo's decision.”

I expected to be summoned back at any moment.

At lunch, I repeated Zhang's warning to the medical staff. They continued to be apprehensive. None of us could eat.

I had expected to be accused of helping to kill Mao. The surprise was that the accusation came from Xu Shiyou and that Jiang Qing, who had done nothing but criticize the doctors during Mao's illness, had come to our defense. I speculated that since Jiang Qing's close colleagues Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao had helped supervise the medical team, they would also have to be held responsible for any medical errors. If the politburo concluded that there had been a plot to poison Mao, then Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao would be implicated. This is why Jiang Qing had to insist on the innocence of the medical team.

Days went by and there was no word from the politburo. I was consumed with anxiety. The members of the medical team were told to return to their medical institutions. Some of them thought the crisis was over.

But I was not so sure. I knew, better than they, that the power struggle in Zhongnanhai had just begun. In July, two months before Mao's death, Wang Dongxing had told me he was considering arresting Jiang Qing immediately, while Mao was still alive. Even as Wang Dongxing feigned indifference to her and Hua Guofeng remained unfailingly polite, I knew that the two were going to arrest her and her radical supporters. Thus, while Jiang Qing was behaving as though Mao's power would soon be hers, she must have known that she was not safe. With the power struggle still unsettled, the medical team's position would remain precarious, too. Accusations and counteraccusations about Mao's death would be part of the debate.

And even if the power struggle were temporarily settled and Jiang Qing and her colleagues removed, how long would it be before another struggle, another round of recriminations, began? After twenty-seven years in Zhongnanhai, I had learned how uncertain life there could be. Having presided for twenty-two years over Mao's health—his illnesses and, finally, his death—I knew I would never be safe again.