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The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician is a memoir by Li. Choi, WK (2009). 'Book Reviews - Mao's Last Revolution' (pdf). Science & Society. 73 (2): 261–3. ^ Lin, Xu and Wu 1995. To Mao’s security. The Chairman did not want to be Mao. * The Private Life of Chairman Mao.
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But Dr. Li's book, even in focusing on the private side of Mao, contains numerous new details about the nature of his rule, including his associations with other major figures. Jiang Qing, Mao's third wife and later the head of the radical faction known as the Gang of Four, is portrayed as a flatterer and a hypochondriac who, by the time Dr. Li arrived on the scene, no longer had conjugal relations with Mao. Other major figures of the time are seen as reliably sycophantic toward Mao. Those very few who were not were purged as a result. Zhou, Like Others, 'Was Really a Slave'
'Mao was a man who had no friends,' Dr. Li said. 'He saw everybody as a subject, a slave. The mistake of those who got purged was to see themselves as equal to him. He wanted everybody to be subservient.'
'Zhou Enlai was really a slave of Mao,' Dr. Li said, speaking of the Chinese Prime Minister, whose reputation in the West was for sophistication and finesse. 'He was absolutely obedient. Whenever I saw him with Mao he acted like a servant with his master. A lot of people think that Zhou protected people, that he was such a good man. But actually everything he did he did under Mao's orders. Mao was on the sedan chair and Zhou was one of his bearers.'
Dr. Li, who is now 74, comes originally from Beijing but studied medicine during World War II at the West Union University Medical School in Sichuan Province in south-central China. The school was founded by American missionaries, so Dr. Li's training was mostly in English, which he speaks well.
He went to work as a ship's doctor in Australia but, when the Communists took power in China in 1949, he returned home at the behest of his older brother, also a doctor, who had been a Communist since the mid-1930's.
Through his well-connected brother, Dr. Li was assigned to be a physician at a special clinic set up to treat China's new top leaders. In 1955, he was named Mao's personal doctor. He lived with his wife, Lillian Wu, and their two sons in a home in the Zhongnanhai Compound, a closely guarded part of China's imperial-era Forbidden City where Mao and other senior leaders lived and worked.
From then until Mao's long illness and death in 1976 (after which Dr. Li presided over the efforts to preserve his body), he remained very close to Mao, according to his account. He not merely treated Mao's various illnesses, most of them very minor, but also accompanied him on his trips around the country, serving as his tutor in English and visiting him in response to his extremely frequent summonses, which often came in the early hours of the morning. How Real Is Memoir? Photos Offer a Clue
Is Dr. Li's account authentic? Can future historians rely on this memoir? One important piece of evidence that Dr. Li is indeed who he says he is comes from the numerous photographs of himself with Mao taken at various periods throughout Dr. Li's stretch of service to the Chairman. Many of the photographs are included in the book.
In fact, there may never be any rock solid corroboration for many of the details that Dr. Li gives, or for the many anecdotes that he tells. But Chinese living in this country have no doubt that Dr. Li was Mao's doctor, while American specialists on China have been impressed by the consistency between Dr. Li's accounts of events and what was already known.
Dr. Li immigrated to the United States in 1988 to seek medical treatment for his wife, who died later that year. He now lives with one of his two sons and his family in a suburb of Chicago.
'It boils down to the fact that the person who worked with him on the book did a tremendous amount of checking,' said Andrew J. Nathan, a specialist on Chinese politics at Columbia University said in an interview. Professor Nathan was referring to Anne F. Thurston, another expert on China, who worked as Dr. Li's editorial assistant.
'In helping to create the book for an American audience, she needed him to explain a lot of the material and he was able to do so in a way that checked out,' he said.
Some of the descriptions in the book, minus the numerous details on Mao's very active sex life, have appeared in other memoirs, especially those concerning Mao's imperial way of life, his residence and swimming pool in Zhongnanhai, his chronic insomnia and the very odd hours that he kept, as well as the atmosphere of sycophancy that surrounded him. But nobody before has provided anything like the full, elaborately detailed portrait that Dr. Li presents in his book.
'Here's a picture of the daily life of a man who has absolute power, and the fascinating thing is how absolute power sort of deranges the possessor of it, so that the boundary between fantasy and reality is obliterated because there's nothing to check his will,' Professor Nathan said. 'He was insulated in his own cocoon while everybody danced to his whims, and that has a lot to do with the tremendous disasters Mao wrought on the country as a whole because he was insulated from reality. His fantasies became reality.'
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Indeed, in Dr. Li's voluminous description, Mao emerges as a kind of Chinese Caligula, whose bohemian and decadent life contrasted utterly with the images of it so carefully fashioned by Chinese propaganda. In a Land of Denial, Vast Sexual Excess
The most salacious elements of Mao's career, in Dr. Li's portrait, certainly involve Mao's sexual life, which reached openly lascivious proportions in a country where sexual license was rigorously prohibited for almost everybody else.
Along the way, Dr. Li provides some medical details, including the fact that Mao had an undescended testicle and that he suffered from bouts of impotency. Mao was married three times and had several children but, Dr. Li writes, sometime in midlife, and for undetermined reasons, he became infertile.
'So, I've become a eunuch, haven't I,' Dr. Li remembers Mao saying after hearing the news.
Mao, Dr. Li says, used women for three purposes, the first and most important having to do with his pleasure. At Zhongnanhai, and wherever Mao traveled, Dr. Li writes, there were dance parties -- this at a time when ballroom dancing in China was deemed bourgeois and actively discouraged. Young women from cultural troupes or from the Communist Party secretariat, women who Dr. Li says were 'selected for their looks, their talent and their political reliability,' came to the dances and Mao commonly chose one or more of them to be entertained in his room, or in his special train, or in the guesthouses where he stayed when on one of his many 'national inspection tours.'
The second reason was political. Dr. Li reports that the husband of one of Mao's girlfriends, for example, was a subordinate of Lin Biao, and that she reported back to Mao on Lin's plot against him.
Finally, Dr. Li says, Mao believed in the Daoist lore that sexual activity leads to longevity, or, at least, the Daoist lore 'gave him an excuse to pursue sex not only for pleasure but to extend his life.'
'By the early 1960's, as his power rose to new heights, he rarely complained about impotence,' Dr. Li writes. 'At the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960's, he and Jiang Qing were sexually estranged, but Mao had no problems with the young women he brought to his bed -- their numbers increasing and their average ages declining as Mao attempted to add years to his life according to the imperial formula.'
Once, Dr. Li recalls, Mao sent him one of his sexual partners, a young woman who had come down with trichomonas vaginalis, which is sexually transmitted. Dr. Li treated her and several others who got the disease.
'The young women were proud to be infected,' he writes. 'The illness, transmitted by Mao, was a badge of honor, testimony to their close relations with the Chairman.'
Mao himself showed no symptoms of the disease, though he was clearly a carrier of it, Dr. Li said. When Dr. Li suggested that he take some antibiotic to protect his sexual partners, Mao told Dr. Li: 'If it's not hurting me, then it doesn't matter. Why are you getting so excited about it?'
Many of Mao's personal habits, as described by Dr. Li, seemed related to his godlike status. He lived virtually without regard to the clock, often sleeping during the day and, even when not sleeping, staying in his bed, remaining in his bathrobe for weeks at a time. He lived in rooms built near a swimming pool in Zhongnanhai and would often summon his closest advisers to see him well after midnight.
Mao never bathed or even washed his hands or face. Dr. Li says that during the day his bodyguards went into the room and wiped his body, his hands and his face with hot towels. He never brushed his teeth, which Dr. Li says were coated with a green patina. Mao's habit, shared by many peasants in China, was to wash his mouth in the morning with tea and then to eat the tea leaves. When, once, Dr. Li suggested to him that he should use a toothbrush, Mao's reply was, 'A tiger never brushes his teeth.'
Mao, in Dr. Li's portrait, became utterly convinced by the power of his own fantasies. If, for example, provincial party leaders transplanted rice near railroad tracks to impress Mao when he went by on his special train, he never seemed to want to notice that it was a fake. He appeared to be utterly indifferent to the immense suffering and even the death on a large scale that some of his utopian fantasies produced, whether through vast purges of intellectuals or policies like the Great Leap Forward.
'Mao never said a word about the suffering of people to me,' Dr. Li said, 'The word regret was not in his dictionary.'
How did Dr. Li survive for so long so close to Mao when so many others were purged, or killed?
'He once told me,' Dr. Li said, 'that you can play with a dragon, but you have to be very careful not to touch a single spot on the dragon's neck where it is very sensitive. If you touch it, you're done for. He told me that he is that sort of dragon.'
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'I never said anything roughly or straightforwardly,' Dr. Li continued. 'In other words, if you worked for Mao, you had to disobey your own conscience. You can never say anything as you think it. You have, first of all, to think what Mao will say.'
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Dr. Li acknowledges that for his first few years with Mao, he was held in his spell, and admired him as China's savior. As the years passed, however, Mao's cruelty and selfishness filled him with loathing.
'If I had known what I was getting myself into in 1949, I would have stayed in Australia,' Dr. Li said. 'For so many years, I did yes-man work, just to survive.'