The Private Life of Chairman Mao -- Book Review
The Private Life of Chairman Mao
by Zhisui Li, English Translation by Tai Hung-Chao
Random House: London. 1994
This book is probably the best biography I have ever read. It is a tour de force. It is astonishing. It is an intimate portrait of one of the most formidable and destructive leaders in human history. It is a study in how personal psychopathology in a political leader can be translated into a social nightmare for the people whom he governs. The author was Mao’s personal physician for twenty-two years until his death in 1976. But he became much more than a physician to Mao. He became a confidant and advisor, a reluctant political player in the swirling maelstrom of Communist Chinese politics through Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution. It is a very personal book. I wouldn’t say that he became Mao’s friend, because it was not clear that Mao had any “friends” in the ordinary sense of that term. Every relationship in Mao’s life had political meaning. But Dr. Li was on very close, intimate terms with Mao, and Mao trusted him as a physician despite many strains and rough spots in their relationship over the years.
This book is several biographies at once. It is a biography of Chairman Mao in his later years, and it is also an autobiography of the doctor himself and an astonishingly intimate window into Mao’s inner circle at the top of the Communist party of China. Dr. Li got his position as Mao’s physician through an offer he couldn’t refuse. And once you became part of Mao’s inner circle, you did not get out voluntarily. And you didn’t want to get out involuntarily.
Mao liked to play with girls (and boys, but mostly girls from Dr. Li’s account). He liked them naïve, simple and young. They were provided to him by the hundreds, if not thousands, and this was when he was 60+. As he got older he grew to trust his young girls more than he trusted his own staff. The girls were simple and not political players. They would fight and scrap with him and speak their minds frankly in a way that his underlings in the Communist Party never would. It was probably refreshing to him in comparison with the world of suspicion, calculation, uncertainty, and shifting loyalties that always lurked in the world of politics. One of them, Zhang Yufeng, became his personal secretary, his gatekeeper, and the closest person to him in the last few years of his life.
He believed everyone should taste a little bitterness in life, and he seemed to make sure that everyone he came in contact with tasted their fair share, from his doctor, to his women, to his subordinates, to his colleagues, to the whole nation of China. He himself had lost eight family members and countless friends and colleagues during the long wars of revolution. He seems to have become inured to suffering and death. Individual lives were not valuable. He was prepared to sacrifice the lives of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of people in order to accomplish his objectives. He carried at least two communicable venereal diseases which he refused to have treated and which he knowingly and willfully passed on to his many partners. He was evil in the sense that there was a concealed malevolence in his character whose objective and delight was to bring chaos and carnage to people’s lives. I think he wanted them to know a little bit of the pain that he had felt, the price he had paid in order to accomplish what they could enjoy. He seems to have believed that everything good comes at a great price. He exacted that price from everyone he came in contact with.
This book helped me gain an understanding of the Cultural Revolution which I never really had before, despite having read Edgar Snow’s The Long Revolution many years ago. First of all, it was not really a revolution, and second, it was not really cultural. It was essentially a civil war instigated my Mao himself against his political enemies in the Communist Party. Mao was disenchanted with the Communist Party. He had major rivals within the party and resistance to many of the policies he wanted to pursue. The perversity and stupidity of his “Great Leap Forward” was a catastrophe for China and resulted in the starvation of tens of millions of Chinese people and the devastation of the economy. But Mao was unfazed. He was prepared to sacrifice the lives of others, in the millions if necessary, in order to realize his vision of “communism.” However, competing visions for China’s future were being put forward and criticism of his policies and of Mao himself was also being voiced. Mao, despite his enormous power, lived in constant fear of his life. He never liked to stay in one place very long. He was constantly on the move. Whenever he went someplace he returned by a different route. He never retraced his steps. Even during his dance parties when he was playing with his young girls, he was paying attention to who else was there and who wasn’t. The Cultural Revolution was an attempt by Mao to purge the Communist Party by using elements in the society outside of the Communist Party. These were the Red Guards, young, inexperienced, blindly devoted followers of Mao, whose ferocity he unleashed savagely against his enemies. The doctor tells some of the story of the Cultural Revolution, but being part of Mao’s inner circle isolated him from much of its ferocity and chaos. I wish he had talked more about the politics of this, actually.
I found myself disappointed about a couple of things, although they do not detract from the overall superb quality of this book. One has to do with how the doctor presents himself. He portrays himself as a political neophyte, a reluctant outsider who is unwillingly drawn in to the political intrigue of Mao’s inner circle. This was undoubtedly true at the beginning. But as the doctor became closer to Mao, on increasingly intimate terms with him, and more involved with the other players in the political drama, the picture of him as the naïve outsider becomes less and less convincing. The doctor became a partisan. He was close to Chou en Lai, and very close to Wang DongXing, the head of Mao’s security forces. He was an enemy of Chaing Ching, Mao’s wife and leader of the so-called “Gang of Four.” He is very candid about his fears in this role, but I think he is also being less than candid about his ambition and his involvement in the intrigue itself. I also wonder at the doctor’s sexual naivete. At the beginning he was very straight and conservative, and shocked at the debauchery of Mao’s life, but he was with Mao a long time. He attended many dance parties and sex parties presided over by Mao where many attractive young women were present and available. He records that Mao encouraged his participation. He was young and very attractive – especially in relation to Mao. But he presents himself as being merely an observer to these debauches, but not a participant. I question this.
The other comment is that I think the doctor knows a lot more than he has told us, both about the political matters as well as the sexual matters. This book is about 650 pages long, but I think it should be 1500. I would like to hear a lot more detail, particularly about some of the other people involved in the drama. He could have developed some of the other characters in the story more than he did. I understand that he wanted to keep focused on Mao, but he had a lot of knowledge and a perspective that was very unique and invaluable. Some incidents were spare on depth and detail and I would like to have known more and I am sure that the doctor had knowledge. He was selective in this presentation. This is of course a necessity in a book covering twenty-two years, but his knowledge is so important and otherwise so inaccessible that I think it is regrettable than he was not even more forthcoming than he was. I also wish there had been more follow up on some of the people and their fates subsequent to the boundaries of the book, which is Mao’s death in 1976.
Dr. Li originally wrote the book in Chinese and had it translated into English. It was published in the UK by Random House in 1994. There is a Chinese edition, but it is not in print. I found some used copies for $60+. You can’t get this in China. You could probably get into trouble for even having it in China. But if you are Chinese, you should read this. Any political leader should read this. Anyone interested in philosophy of politics and society should read it. It’s a profound lesson in the dangers of concentrated political power and a somber illustration of how far things can go and how deep a descent can be.