The Private Life of Chairman Mao

723 Pages·1996·4.62 MB·English

by  Li Zhi-Sui, Li Zhisui

Praise for The Private Life of Chairman Mao

“Dr. Li does for Mao what the physician Lord Moran’s memoir did
for Winston Churchill—turns him into a human being. Here is Mao
unveiled: eccentric, demanding, suspicious, unregretful, lascivious,
and unfailingly fascinating. Our view of Mao will never be the
same again.”

—ROSS TERRILL, author of China in Our Time

“An extraordinarily intimate portrait of Mao. [Dr. Li] portrays
[Mao’s imperial court] as a place of boundless decadence,
licentiousness, selfishness, relentless toadying and cutthroat
political intrigue.”

—RICHARD BERNSTEIN, The New York Times

“One of the most provocative books on Mao to appear since the
publication of Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China in 1938…. This
book reaches sobering conclusions about the long-term human
consequences of Mao’s dictatorship.”

—PAUL G. PICKOWICZ, The Wall Street Journal

“[A] riveting account of what went on within the inner sanctums
… of Communist Party leadership.”

—ORVILLE SCHELL, The Washington Post Book World

“Fascinating reading, with revelations of everything from the
Chinese leader’s fanatical distrust of his followers and callous
indifference to the suffering of his people to his predatory sexuality
and his refusal ever to bathe or brush his teeth.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“This work has tremendous value. It vividly brings to life the
personal character and private habits of China’s great leader. From
now on no one will be able to pretend to understand Chairman
Mao’s place in history without reference to this revealing account.”

—LUCIAN PYE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“The connection between doctors and potentates is fascinating …
for it is often the closest relationship in a tyrant’s life: Hitler and
his surgeon, Himmler and his masseur, Mao and his physician.”

—IAN BURUMA, The New Yorker

Copyright © 1994 by Dr. Li Zhisui

Map of China copyright © 1994 by David Lindroth Inc.

Map of Zhongnanhai copyright © 1994 by Anita Karl and Jim Kemp

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and

simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 1994.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Li, Zhisui.

The private life of Chairman Mao : the memoirs of Mao’s personal physician / Dr. Li Zhisui;

translated by Professor Tai Hung-chao; with the editorial assistance of Anne F. Thurston;

foreword by Professor Andrew J. Nathan.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-30779139-9

1. Mao, Zedong, 1893–1976. 2. Heads of state—China—Biography.

I. Tai, Hung-chao. II. Thurston, Anne F. III. Title.

DS778.M3L5164 1994

951.05—dc20 94–29970

v3.1

In remembrance of my

beloved wife,

Lillian Wu

FOREWORD

BY ANDREW J. NATHAN

No other leader in history held as much power over so many people for
so long as Mao Zedong, and none inflicted such a catastrophe on his
nation. Mao’s lust for control and fear of betrayal kept his court and his
country in turmoil. His vision and his intrigues drove China through the
Great Leap Forward and its terrible consequences, the great famine and
the Cultural Revolution, with deaths in the tens of millions.

Nor has any other dictator been as intimately observed as Mao is in

this memoir by the man who served as his personal physician for twenty-
two years. Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars shows the deranging
effects of absolute power in the gluttony, lechery, greed, sadism, incest,
torture, and commission of multiple murders by Tiberius, Caligula, and
Nero, but the author did not know his subjects personally. Procopius’s
Secret History is a scandalous attack on the Roman emperor Justinian and
his wife, Theodora, devoid of sympathy or understanding. Albert Speer
knew Hitler well, but their common interests were limited to public
works and war. Stalin’s daughter seldom saw her father. The diaries of
Napoleon’s and Hitler’s personal physicians are merely clinical.

Personal memoirs about great democratic leaders, like Moran’s

Churchill and Herndon’s Lincoln, tell us less about history than the
biographies of dictators do, because democratic leaders have less room
to impose their personalities on events. As for the Chinese tradition, the
“basic annals” of each reign record the rituals, portents, alliances,
memorials, and enfeoffments that made up each emperor’s performance
of his role, but they rarely reveal the personalities beneath the robes.
Even Chinese fictionalized accounts of historical rulers, like the Romance
of the Three Kingdoms, deal with types rather than characters. The
combination of access and insight makes The Private Life of Chairman
Mao unique.

The real Mao could hardly have been more different from the

benevolent sage-king portrayed in the authorized memoirs and poster

portraits that circulate in China today. To be sure, on first meeting he
could be charming, sympathetic, and casual, setting his visitor at ease to
talk freely. But he drew on psychological reserves of anger and contempt
to control his followers, manipulating his moods with frightening effect.
Relying on the Confucian unwillingness of those around him to confront
their superior, he humiliated subordinates and rivals. He undertook self-
criticism only to goad others to flatter him, surrounding himself with a
culture of abasement.

Emulating the first Tang emperor, Mao bound men and women to him

by discovering their weaknesses. Dr. Li Zhisui came from an upper-class
family, was trained at an American-sponsored school in Suzhou, and had
an early and trivial involvement with the Guomindang. These potentially
dangerous facts enslaved him to Mao. Corruption existed within Mao’s
entourage and Mao knew it, but he needed people who could cut
corners. Fish cannot live in pure water, Mao liked to say. He enjoyed
swimming in polluted water and walking through fields of night soil.

Mao’s retainers remained on permanent probation, whatever their

backgrounds. Old comrades were sent into internal exile, in some cases
to their deaths, although Mao’s role in these tragedies was indirect. In
one scene we see Mao sitting on a stage behind a curtain listening,
unseen, as two of his closest colleagues are attacked at a mass meeting.
Mao controlled his top colleagues’ medical care, denying some of them
treatment for cancer, because he was convinced that cancer could not be
cured and he wanted them to work for their remaining time. Having lost
children, a brother, and a wife to war and revolution, he seldom seemed
moved by the suffering of lovers, children, and friends any more than he
flinched from imposing misery on millions of the faceless “masses” in
pursuit of his economic and political schemes. He understood human
suffering chiefly as a way to control people. In politics and personal life
alike, he discarded those for whom he had no present use, just as coolly
calling them back when he wanted them, if they were still alive.

Dr. Li usually found Mao with a book of Chinese history in his hand.

He loved the traditional stories of strategy and deception. He was an
expert in when to wait, feint, and withdraw, and how to attack
obliquely. He liked to “lure snakes out of their holes,” encouraging
others to show their hands so he could turn against them. His closest
colleagues could seldom sense whether he agreed with them or was

waiting to pounce. Dr. Li says Mao was a marvelous actor. He could
sentence a retainer to exile with a story so convincing that the victim
backed out bowing in gratitude.

Imperial power allowed the ultimate luxury, simplicity. Mao spent

much of his time in bed or lounging by the side of a private pool, not
dressing for days at a time. He ate oily food, rinsed his mouth with tea,
and slept with country girls. During a 1958 tour of Henan, Mao’s party
was followed everywhere by a truckload of watermelons. Mao liked
cloth shoes; if he had to wear leather ones for a diplomatic function, he
let someone else break them in. He did not bathe, preferring a rubdown
with hot towels, although this made it hard for Dr. Li to stop the spread
of venereal infections among his female companions. He slept on a
specially made huge wooden bed that was carried on his private train,
set up in his villas, airlifted to Moscow.

He exercised sovereignty over clock and calendar. The court worked to

Mao’s rhythm, and many of its activities took place after midnight. It
was not unusual to be summoned to Mao’s chambers at two or three in
the morning. He traveled frequently, convening meetings of the nation’s
leaders wherever he was. He sought to triumph over death through
Daoist methods of sex. He followed no schedule except on May Day and
National Day and on the rare occasions when he received foreign
visitors. Then he had to dress, taking barbiturates to control his anxiety.

Women were served to order like food. While puritanism was

promoted in his name, Mao’s sex life was a central project of his court. A
special room was set aside in the Great Hall of the People for his
refreshment during high-level party meetings. Party and army political
departments, guardians of the nation’s morality, recruited young women
of sterling proletarian background and excellent physical appearance,
supposedly to engage in ballroom dancing with the leader, actually for
possible service in his bed. Honored by the opportunity, some of those
chosen introduced their sisters.

Each province’s party secretary built Mao a villa. He moved from

place to place partly because of security concerns, partly out of paranoia.
“It’s not good for me to stay in one place too long,” he told Dr. Li. All
rail traffic stopped and stations were closed as his special train went
through. Security officers posing as food vendors lent the stations an air
of normalcy for his benefit. During the Great Leap, peasants were

mobilized to tend transplanted crops along miles of tracks, creating the
impression of a bumper harvest when the harvest was a disaster. Mao’s
favorite villa was located on a small island in the Pearl River, where he
enjoyed privacy in the middle of the busy city of Guangzhou. Special
food grown in a labor camp near Beijing was airlifted to him and tried
by tasters before he ate it. Guards cooled his room with tubs of ice.

Absolute power affected Mao’s mental and physical health, his human

relations, and, through these, his country and the world. He spent
months in bed, ill with worry. But when the political struggle was going
his way, he might fill up with cheerful energy that kept him from
sleeping. Dr. Li dosed him constantly with barbiturates so he could rest.
Political stress sometimes made him impotent, at other times stimulated
his libido. As tens of millions starved to death during the Great Leap
Forward and the Chairman lost face before the party, he temporarily
gave up meat. But he needed more women. One of them told Dr. Li that
the Great Helmsman was great in everything, even in bed.

Politics in a dictatorship begins in the personality of the dictator. Mao

established a regime like no other, an ensemble of economic, social, and
political institutions that grew from his effort to build a unique form of
socialism in a country that was poor, backward, and vulnerable.

Facing the hostility of the West, Mao aligned with Moscow. But his

admiration for the West was one reason he chose the American-trained
Dr. Li as his physician, and was a subject of many of their conversations.
He told Dr. Li that America’s intentions toward China had always been
benign. But he held his allies the Russians in contempt. Mao aimed to
surpass the primitive Russian model with Chinese-style socialism, raise
his country to the level of the advanced Western world, and by this
achievement join the pantheon of Marxism-Leninism. The Great Leap
Forward was his effort to create a model of socialism better than that of
his northern neighbors, and the Cultural Revolution was his attempt to
sustain the experiment in the face of its failure.

In a vast, continental country with a huge and poor population, Mao

sought economic growth through mass mobilization, trying to substitute
ideological fervor for material rewards. He froze the people’s standard of
living at subsistence levels in order to build a massive, wasteful
industrial structure. In doing so, he ignored realities that contradicted

his vision. A farmer’s son from rural Hunan, he allowed himself to be
deluded by vast Potemkin fields at the start of the Great Leap Forward.
As Dr. Li says, why should Mao have doubted that the communist
paradise had arrived when he himself was living in it? He thought there
was more to learn about leadership from the pages of Chinese history
than from textbooks of modern engineering. While people starved, he
imagined that they had more than they could eat.

The ideology that bore Mao’s name promoted self-denial, defined a

person’s value in terms of political virtue, and dehumanized the class
enemy. A system of work units, class labels, household registrations, and
mass movements fixed each citizen in an organizational cage, within
which people exercised political terror over themselves and each other.
A pervading bureaucracy governed the economy, politics, ideology,
culture, people’s private lives, and even many of their private thoughts.
The apparatus led the people in singing the praises of the regime that
had expropriated them. Mao toppled the party machinery when it
proved insufficiently responsive to his fantasies of speed but rebuilt it
when he needed it to stop factional violence.

At the top, thirty to forty men made all the major decisions. Their

power was personal, fluid, and dependent on their relations with Mao.
Dr. Li describes the system of Central Committee organs, political and
confidential secretaries, bodyguards, kitchens, car pools, and clinics that
served the leaders. An underground tunnel complex allowed the leaders
to move secretly from their headquarters in Zhongnanhai to buildings
elsewhere in Beijing. Mao’s closest retainers bugged his premises, trying
to keep better records of his decisions, but found themselves cashiered
for spying on him.

Set up to serve and protect the leaders, the structures of power

isolated them, Mao more than the others. Mao’s comrades gradually
ceded to him the Forbidden City swimming pool, the dance parties, and
the best Beidaihe beach. The saga of his swim in three great rivers, over
the objections of his security men, symbolized his solitary struggle
against the bureaucracy, his fear that the revolution might bog down,
and his challenge to comrades he thought were betraying his radical
aims.

At the Eighth Party Congress in 1956, Mao’s colleagues attempted to

reign him in, taking advantage of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union to

write his guiding thought out of the party constitution, pledge the party
against the cult of personality, and criticize Mao’s attempts to force the
premature birth of communism. Mao claimed falsely to Dr. Li that he
had not been consulted about these decisions. Forces abroad also
threatened his control. The new Soviet leader, Khrushchev, wanted an
accommodation with the West. Dr. Li portrays the bitter last meeting
between the two by the side of Mao’s swimming pool, which marked the
start of an open split with the Soviets and the onset of China’s long
period of isolation.

Mao held fast to three ultimate tools of power: ideology, the army,

and his spider’s position at the center of the party’s factional web. He
summoned up the epochal Great Leap Forward with a whistle-stop farm
tour that passed a message over the heads of the economic planners to
the basic-level cadres. At the Lushan plenum in 1959, when the other
leaders tried to rein Mao in, he threatened to raise a new army and take
to the hills. The others surrendered.

After the famine began, Mao retreated to a secondary position of

power. As the other party leaders restored the economy, he brooded that
they were “zombies” and complained about their failure to consult him.
He patiently ensnared them in a debate over classic operas and
enmeshed them in confusion over the issue of rural corruption. When his
colleagues were vulnerable enough, he launched the Cultural
Revolution.

Millions of victims later, Mao stood victorious at the Ninth Party

Congress of 1969, his rivals dead or in internal exile, the nation singing
his praises and waving his red book before his ubiquitous poster. By his
side stood the abject Lin Biao, the sole survivor from the old ruling
group. Mao’s dream of development had failed, but his power was
absolute in the country he had ruined. Lin Biao’s coup attempt two years
later disappointed Mao so badly that Dr. Li traces his final decline from
then. He used his final energies to engineer the opening to the West,
which later made possible Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.

Psychological pathologies flourished in the atmosphere of court

politics. The more complete Mao’s control, the greater his fear of others’
attempts to control him. Their anxiety to please made them more
suspect. He thought his villas were poisoned and panicked when he
heard wild animals scratching inside the roof of one. Mao spied on the

other leaders by managing their secretaries through his chief secretary
and their guards through his chief of guards. Although he surrounded his
rivals with his men, he was never sure they were not spying on him
through his women.

Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, suffered from hypochondria; aversion to noise,

light, cold, and heat; and compulsive quarreling. Having driven her mad
with boredom, dependency, and enforced idleness, Mao at first tried to
spare her the knowledge of his love affairs. But when he needed her as a
political proxy, he brought her into the inner circle. Like her equally sick
colleague Lin Biao, Jiang once in power flowered into robust health,
making friends with Mao’s favorite female companion to get better
access to the source of power.

Dr. Li shows us Lin Biao in the arms of his wife, crying with pain from

a kidney stone; Hua Guofeng sitting in Mao’s anteroom for hours unable
to see the great leader because his companion and gatekeeper, Zhang
Yufeng, is napping; Zhou Enlai kneeling on the floor before Mao to trace
the route of a proposed motorcade; Jiang Qing in fury as a sick Mao
hands control over the whole country to Zhou, only to recover and
outlive him.

Of all Mao’s followers, only Zhou kept relatively aloof from the

byzantine networks that laced the court. Because he did so, Dr. Li and
the other courtiers ironically viewed him as disloyal and dangerous. For
Zhou to report information to appropriate colleagues in the formal chain
of command struck the others as a sign of weakness and treachery.

At the end, the most loved man in China was friendless. During his

long decline, his servants’ chief obsession was to avoid blame for his
demise. Only his favorite, Zhang Yufeng, had the decency to treat him
like a human being by quarreling with him, fearless of being accused of
angering him to death. But as he weakened, she found other interests,
having become indispensable because only she could decode his slurred
speech.

Dr. Li Zhisui’s frank, round, slightly smiling face stands out from the

rows of stony-faced retainers in the group photographs of Mao’s
household. His open expression, soft cheeks, and neat clothes betray him
as the one who came back from the West. His foreign tincture made him
doubly valuable, denoting both competence and dependency. For Mao

was secure to the extent that Dr. Li was vulnerable. Surviving under
Mao’s protection, he stuck to his business, maintaining the health of the
man whose acts cost the lives of millions.

Only a certain willingness to look away from evil can make a man the

ideal guardian of a dictator’s life. Dr. Li’s limits as an observer of history
were one of his qualifications for his job. But politics sometimes forced
itself on him. Mao sometimes insisted on talking about events or on
sending Dr. Li away from the court to observe and report. At court, Dr.
Li had to learn who protected and who opposed him. Aside from Mao,
his patron was Wang Dongxing, chief of bodyguards. Their alliance
provides the book’s bias, but also much of its insight into court politics.

Since he left China, Dr. Li has been all but erased from official history.

Of the countless books on Mao’s personal life published by Chinese
presses, only one or two mention him. Apparently, there has been a
central directive to treat him as a non-person. But his image survives in
unretouched film footage and photos, and reliable sources confirm his
identity. Official and semi-official works corroborate many details in his
account but differ from his in leaving out aspects of the story that would
embarrass the regime, which still rules by the soft light of Mao’s official
image. No authorized account offers a portrait of Mao that rings as true
as Dr. Li’s. It is the most revealing book ever published on Mao, perhaps
on any dictator in history.

In 1981, five years after Mao’s death, the Chinese Communist party

Central Committee adopted an official verdict on his life, “Resolution on
Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the
People’s Republic of China.” It called Mao a great revolutionary whose
contributions outweighed the costs of his mistakes. This book tells a
different story. It shows how excessive power drives its possessor into a
shadow world, where great visions become father to great crimes.

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.