Name: The Private Life of Chairman Mao
Rating: 4 (4 reviews)

Zhisui Li

Mao's personal physician provides a look inside the private world of the Chinese leader

The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician

The Private Life of Chairman Mao

Gavin

* 500 pages: interminable list of different named cadres looking embarrassed, scared, or nonplussed, with no characterisation or distinguishing marks given. (There's a glossary, use it.)

* 200 pages: the exact change in volume of Mao's piss. Li hiding from Jiang in a militarised textile factory for 3 months, not seeing his family / sent to Jiangxi to do hard labour for a year.

* 63 pages: invaluable historical documentation of vice, ignorance, cowardice, brutality, and goofiness. The worst of the emperors, which is saying a lot.


  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... rinsed his mouth with tea [instead of brushing], and slept with country girls... 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... 
I cautioned him that herpes was contagious and could spread through sexual contact, but he ignored my warnings. He did not think the problem was so bad... The illness, transmitted by Mao, was a badge of honor, testimony to their close relations with the chairman... "a harem of three thousand concubines"... When I told Mao about the veneration being accorded his mango, he laughed. He had no problem with the mango worship and seemed delighted by the story... 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.

[The "cultural work troupe"] provided entertainment not only for the Central Garrison Corps but also for Mao. The troupe contained a pool of young women, selected for their looks, their artistic talent, and their political reliability. Over time, the role of these dancing parties, and of some of the young women who participated in them, became too obvious for me to ignore.

[Mao's concubine] had become Mao’s gatekeeper... 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...




There's enough of Li's own resentments and grudges and worry for his family to make it feel authentic. 

  In 1958–59, the food shortage hit, causing further hardship for my mother. Lillian still ate in the dining hall at Zhongnanhai, and I joined her when I was there. There was no meat[!]

...I devoted my professional life to Mao and China, but now I am stateless and homeless, unwelcome in my own country

His great-grandfather was physician to the Chinese emperor. He died just after publishing this.


Peng Dehuai is one of the only people to come out of this looking good. Conversely, Deng mostly just keeps his mouth shut for 30 years, biding time.

What difference can really there be among "left" and "right" Maoists, who all agree that what Mao says is law? Left Maoism: "Socialist weeds are better than capitalist wheat". 

  Everyone was dressing like soldiers then, including Jiang Qing. 


One odd thing: he keeps on insisting that the psychotic Jiang Qing was out to get him / to hurt Wang's faction by getting rid of him. But the factions are constantly mixing and she retains him as her physician. (Maybe just looking for an opportunity.) 

  Jiang Qing left Mao’s room triumphant and invited us to join her to celebrate with maotai, peanuts, and roast pork. “We are victorious,” she said, offering a toast. “Bottoms up. I will become a bludgeon, ready to strike.” It was an unpleasant experience, and I was very upset.

The original Maoists are a weird bunch, not at all simple thugs. Much of their evil was routed through passive aggression, perverting evidence, falsifying testimonies: a legalistic modus operandi. The foreword suggests that cowardice is the wrong way to interpret the silence and complicity of the top cadres: Mao was instead "relying on the Confucian unwillingness of those around him to confront their superior". An amusing ideological victory for the old patriarch.

I was also surprised by some of the lifespans involved. Wang lived to 99, and the great monster managed 84 despite chain-smoking, being riddled with VD, and antiquated medicine. 1974: 
  Shortly before midnight on September 8, 1976, the doctors had administered an intravenous injection of shengmai san, a traditional Chinese herbal concoction... during episodic emergencies we relied on the American-made respirator that Henry Kissinger had sent in 1971 after his secret mission to China... I touched the gums lightly and some pus oozed out. He had never complained of discomfort, even though an infection of that sort ordinarily causes considerable pain. I suspect that Mao had a high tolerance of discomfort and so hated doctors and illness that he often endured his pain in silence


Li shows Mao as having barely a single noble impulse over twenty two years. All the same, you can see what people liked about him: in contrast to his writing and his policies, he was pretty earthy and informal and pragmatic and scruffy, and (as in his writing) he was actually idealistic and stoic. 

  when I told Mao the story of my friend’s encouragement to offer Yan a bribe, Mao laughed uproariously. “You bookworm,” he chided me. “Why are you so stingy? You don’t understand human relations. Pure water can’t support fish. What’s so strange about giving someone a present? Didn’t Guo Moruo give me a watch during the Chongqing negotiations...

Mao continued to talk excitedly about the latest production statistics. He had become curious about the works of the Soviet economist Leontief, wanting to compare economic organization in the Soviet Union with the new economic structures in China, and asked Chen Boda, Tian Jiaying, and Deng Liqun to join him in Guangzhou to study Leontief’s book on political economy.

The United States has also trained many skilled technicians for China,” Mao continued, a remark that would have been unthinkable for ordinary Chinese. The United States was still publicly reviled as China’s Enemy Number One and to praise it was counterrevolutionary. “So all of you belong to the British-American school,” Mao said. “I like people trained in England and the United States"


He is an extraordinary lesson in what happens when you operate on the level of social reality (what people think, manipulating animal spirits) and float free of reality. 
  What he learned during his visit was conclusive. High-quality steel can be produced only in huge modern factories using reliable fuel, like coal. But he gave no order to halt the backyard steel furnaces. The horrible waste of manpower and materials, the useless output from the homemade furnaces, was not his main concern. Mao still did not want to do anything to dampen the enthusiasm of the masses

I think this is one of the only laudable emotions we see:

  [They were looking for the Buddhist] shrine his mother used to visit when he was sick, where she burned incense and fed the ashes to her son, certain of their curative powers. The tiny shrine, like the tombstone, had disappeared, torn down only months before with the establishment of the commune. The bricks were needed to build the backyard steel furnaces, and the wood had been used as fuel. Mao had fallen silent on our walk. The destruction of the shrine had saddened him


It's pretty crazy how much of policy was based off unrecorded offhand remarks. The end of the Great Leap, immediately after the shrine moment:

  if you cannot produce good steel, you might as well quit.” With these words, Shaoshan probably became the first village in the country to abolish the public dining halls, halt its water conservancy project, and begin dismantling the backyard steel furnaces. Mao’s comments were never publicly released, but they spread quickly through word of mouth. Soon many areas were dismantling their projects


And of course he lost control of the Red Guards almost immediately after setting them off:

  Liu Shaoqi was being “struggled against” outside the State Council auditorium. I ran there immediately... [he and his wife were] pushed and kicked and beaten by staff members from the Bureau of Secretaries. Liu’s shirt had already been torn open, and a couple of buttons were missing, and people were jerking his head around by the hair…Finally, they forced him down and pushed his face toward the ground until it was nearly touching the dirt, kicking him and slapping him in the face... Liu Shaoqi was already an old man by then, almost seventy, and he was our head of state...

Wang was in a difficult position. He could not inform Mao directly of the violence in Zhongnanhai. To make such a report would be to oppose a decision of the increasingly powerful Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, and no one would dare risk criticizing the rising leftists... "They just don’t listen to me,” [Mao] complained when I had finished, referring to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, which included his wife





His authority evaporated completely at the moment of his death, with the factions bickering in the room with his body, and his written instructions to be cremated completely ignored - at the same time as his name became a holy relic of rectitude, still finding service today.

  	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 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. 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

Illuminating look at the personal life of a larger than man figure, the contradictory lifestyle of the man who liked to speak on the contradictions between classes.

Just the kind of book that has the stuff you'd never expect to read about a political figure.

Illuminating look at the personal life of a larger than man figure, the contradictory lifestyle of the man who liked to speak on the contradictions between classes.

Just the kind of book that has the stuff you'd never expect to read about a political figure.

Laura

Reading this book is a huge investment of time. Didn't realize how long it was before getting it from the library. Personally this book was enjoyable. Thought provoking about politics, interactions with doctors and China.

The Private Life of Chairman Mao The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician

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