Li Zhisui’s portrait of Mao is one of the most rewarding historical texts I have read. He details the enigma of Chairman Mao with astute political commentary, personal anecdotes, and the gradual disillusionment he felt over the course of two decades of service. We are treated to stories of the Chairman’s charm, sexual deviancy, and soulless evil. Though he attempts to absolve himself of many sins, this memoir feels sincere and genuine, and I have little reason to doubt most of what he writes.

Dr. Li is a sensible (if spoiled) man caught in a web of deceit, anti-intellectualism, and political maneuvering, and it is easy to feel sorry for him. He tends to gloss over his years of labor and “reform” in the countryside, and he seems to have endured intense physical and emotional hardship without complaint. Li sacrifices his family legacy, personal relationships, medical ambition, and his conscience in order to serve in Group One. Though he often feels trapped in his role, it seems that he ultimately enjoyed his status as Mao’s personal physician.

Along with General Volkogonov’s portrait of Stalin and Speer’s memoirs, this is one of the great biographies of the three vilest men in history. Dr. Li documents his dissatisfaction with the realities of revolution and his growing personal hatred of a complicated dictator. I have yet to encounter a clearer or more candid picture of Mao Zedong.

The memoirs of the associates of history’s most evil rulers are absolutely fascinating, but they beg the question: how can ordinary, intelligent people be drawn to (and befriend) such awful tyrants?

There is debate about the accuracy of Dr. Li's account and his alleged closeness to Mao, but there is reason for it. This is a book stunning in its portrayal of Mao - vivid, ruthless, and with an electric charisma - and in the Mexican standoff of political war games between various factions inside the palace. Believe it or not, that is your choice but you gotta read it.

This book was really good because it included many details that most books don’t have. However, it may not be 100% accurate due to the fact that the author, 李志穗 had to burn his notes when authorities mistakenly went to his house. Really well made book with photos and rare in depth details about Mao Zedong.

An other one of those books I loved reading ,learned so much from, but did not finish. I've only got 200 pages or something left, but for now I give up.

This book is huge but well written. It almost reads like a novel, including what are almost cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. I like the authors honesty. He has worked with a regime, knowing horrible details and doesn't pretend he didn't know those things. He tells us he had no choice but to work along, and from what I read in the book it really seems like he had no choice. The book shows how scary Mao's regime really was, even to people high in rank and close to him. It's a kind of exclusive behind the scenes view of Mao's life. As the title shows it's mostly about his personal life but we do learn quite a bit about his regime.

The reason I didn't finish the book is because it is so big. I kind of lost interest at some point. I might pick it up again one day because it is a good read.

It’s hard to know what exactly to rate this book, but given the incredibly rare behind-the-scenes access to observing the personality, behavior, and often perversions of one of modern history’s most divisive (as well as tyrannical) dictators, I’d have to say that this nearly 700-page recollection is invaluable.

Given the fact that there’s never been a more detailed memoir published by a figure with such an intimate relationship to any other dictatorial/totalitarian/authoritarian leader (as the foreword to the book states, Albert Speer knew Hitler well, but their common interests didn’t extend beyond public works and war. Stalin’s daughter rarely saw her father, and diaries written by Hitler’s and Napoleon’s physicians remained solely clinical) Dr. Li Zhisui was able, as author Ross Terrill puts it, to ”turn him into a human being. Here is Mao unveiled: eccentric, demanding, suspicious, unregretful, lascivious, and unfailingly fascinating.” For this intensive piece of history, five stars is well-warranted.

I have seen reviews calling Dr. Li a “reluctant memoirist”, and while this is undoubtedly true (he admits to only writing the book after promising his wife he’d do so while she was in her deathbed) I believe this actually makes his recollection of events much more believable. If someone is out to make money or to achieve prestige from book sales, they’re naturally going to want to exaggerate or embellish the parts they can, as sensationalism and sex sells.

However, you don’t find this in Dr. Li’s memoir. While some people seem to be disappointed in not getting more information on Mao’s insatiable sex life, I was grateful, honestly, that the doctor was repulsed by it and spared us the most intimate of details. I believe the information he provided was more than adequate to understand Mao, yet didn’t go so far as to border on crude.

I think this gem from p. 363-364 was more than enough to satiate my (relatively minor) appetite:
”With so much sexual activity, venereal disease was practically inevitable…once one of Mao’s partners became infected, he quickly contracted the disease as well, and soon it had spread. He sent the infected women to me for treatment.
The young women were proud to be infected. The illness, transmitted by Mao, was a badge of honor, testimony to their close relationship with the Chairman…

But treating Mao’s women did not solve the problem. Because Mao was the carrier, the epidemic could only be stopped if he received treatment himself. I wanted him to halt all sexual activities until the drugs had done their work.

The Chairman scoffed at my suggestion, saying that doctors always exaggerate things. I explained that he was a carrier of the disease, passing it on to others, even though he himself was experiencing no ill effects. ”If it’s not hurting me,” he said, “then it doesn’t matter. Why are you getting so excited about it?”

…I suggested that he should at least allow himself to be washed and cleaned. Mao still received only nightly rubdowns with hot towels. He never actually bathed. His genitals were never cleaned. But Mao refused to bathe. ”I wash myself inside the bodies of my women,” he retorted.
I was nauseated. Mao’s sexual indulgences, his Daoist delusions, his sullying of so many naive and innocent young women, were almost more than I could bear.”

Does anyone really need to hear more? We know there were orgies after “dance parties” in the great hall (really an excuse for Mao to scope out attractive young peasant women to lure back to his bedchamber). I think your imagination can fill in the rest.

Another issue people seemed to take with Dr. Li was that “in spite of claiming to resentful of petty political squabbles and inner court politics, he certainly spends a lot of time discussing the detailed conversations he either overheard or were told to him.”

Considering how quickly power changed hands in this absurd and intellectually-adversed political climate, it was imperative to know who currently held favor with the Chairman, who was at risk of being scrutinized, and who had lost favor. If one person didn’t like you for some absurd reason (or even just an imagined slight) it could result in a very bad outcome for you and your family if that person were to gain considerable power.

Therefore, considering his very survival was dependent upon this trivial matters, they weren’t so trivial once real-life consequences set in. Obviously, while this isn’t much to be concerned about in a democratic system, these matters hold a lot more significance in a government formed on the basis of absolute power in one individual.

It’s also imperative to keep in mind that he’s not, and never aspired to be, a politician. He came from a long lineage of esteemed doctors, with his great-grandfather once having served the Imperial Court. He desperately wanted to further his career as a physician, eventually working his way into neurology and neurosurgery. It’s only natural that due to his apathy for politics and after twenty-two years of forcibly serving at Mao’s side, he would be reluctant to recall these memories and relive these dismal days.

Imagine being an intelligent, driven physician, and being subjected to hearing arguments and “opinions” on factual matters seemingly coming from six-year-olds, rather than top government leaders and the Chairman himself (although, the majority of the Politburo had a primary school education at best, so I suppose the comparison is fair). I can’t imagine having to hear nonsense such as the following for over two decades:

p. 108: ”Then one day Mao called me into his room. “How many days do you think there are in a year?” he asked. It was another of his unorthodox questions. “Three hundred and sixty-five, of course.” Mao: “Well, for me there are only two hundred days, because I get so little sleep,” he said.
I was puzzled until I realized that he was talking about the number of cycles of waking and sleeping he went through in any given year. “If you count your days by your waking hours, Chairman, you have more than four hundred days in your year. If you look at it this way, your life is like the immortal described in the poem – ‘there are no sun and moon in the hills, a thousand years slip by unnoticed.’”
Mao roared with laughter. “If you are right, then insomnia would be a means to longevity!”

p. 158: ”We floated down the Pearl River for nearly two hours, covering some six or seven miles. Then we took showers and had lunch on board the well-equipped yacht, joined by Jiang Qing, who had been observing our swim from the deck.
Mao was elated as if he’d just won a war. ‘You people told me that Dr. Li said this water was too dirty,’ he said to Luo Ruiqing.
‘Yes,’ I interjected. ‘I saw human waste floating by.’
Mao laughed heartily. ‘If we tried to follow the standards of you physicians, we wouldn’t be able to live. Don’t all living things need air and water and soil? Tell me which of these things is pure? I don’t believe there is any pure air, pure water, pure soil. Everything has some impurities, some dirt. If you put a fish into distilled water, how long do you think it would live?’
I was silent. Mao was clearly not going to accept my views on sanitation.”

p. 177: ”Mao looked at me and shook his head. ‘That’s just doctor talk,’ he said. ‘When rural folk get sick, they do nothing. Even when they are seriously ill, they often don’t see a doctor. Medicine is good for curable diseases, not for incurable ones. Is your medicine really good for everything? Take cancer, for instance. Can a doctor cure cancer? I don’t think so.’
I explained that cancer could be cured in its early stages if it had not metastasized. I argued for the benefits of surgery. ‘But without a checkup, cancer in its early stages cannot be detected,’ I continued.
Mao then asked for some examples.
Most of the top communist leaders were relatively young and healthy then. None of them could serve as an example…Mao smiled. I had just proved his point.”

Also, in Mao’s “opinion”, bronchitis was treatable, pneumonia was fatal. If Mao believed he had contracted something fatal/incurable, it would be impossible to get him to agree to the necessary medications, treatments, or surgeries that really would solve his health issue. So when three physicians determined he had pneumonia, Dr. Li had to find a way around this “problem” they’d unwittingly created:

”Mao’s paranoia was in full bloom, and he suspected a plot. Lin Biao, he was convinced, wanted him dead. Mao’s understanding of medicine had not greatly improved under my tutelage, and he was convinced that pneumonia was inevitably fatal, the result of hopelessly rotten lungs. Mao thought Lin Biao was behind the three doctors who told him he had pneumonia and therefore did not believe them.

Mao did have pneumonia. The X rays left no doubt. But I could not tell him that. If I told him that he had pneumonia, I would be accused of being a member of the Lin Biao-Wang Dongxing clique. So I told him it was his old problem - acute bronchitis, nothing too serious. A few shots of antibiotics and he would be fine.

I consulted with the three doctors, explaining why we could not let Mao know he had pneumonia, trying to assure them that what was most important was to make certain he received appropriate treatment. They agreed, but the director of the Zhongnanhai Clinic was not happy… Mao, though, was delighted when I told him that the doctors now agreed that he had bronchitis rather than pneumonia. He credited me with saving his life and invited me to dinner as his honored guest.”

It was at this point in time that Mao decided he needed Dr. Li around full-time, and given Dr. Li was out in the countryside doing backbreaking manual labor to “learn from the working/poorer classes”, he escaped from that miserable routine while many other men in Mao’s inner political circle did not. He also was able to finally reunite with his wife and two children after nearly a year apart.

Mao was also quite contradictory. He’d tell Dr. Li that “he actually preferred rightists (the ones denounced during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as counterrevolutionaries) because “at least they told you how they actually felt, whereas leftists “said one thing while really meaning another.”

Yet anytime Mao would actually pretend to be interested in differing views of top Politburo members, it was merely a ploy to see which ones would criticize the Party, worse, his policies, and worst of all, Mao/any challenge to his one-man leadership status: ”In the next few days, as local leaders and newspaper editors learned of the coming counterattack, newspapers were encouraged to continue publishing criticisms of the party while allowing defenses of the party and attacks against the ‘rightists’ to be published, too.”

This was Mao’s tried and true test of loyalty among his party: ”We want to coax the snakes out of their holes. Then we will strike. My strategy is to let the poisonous weeds grow first and then destroy them one by one. Let them become fertilizer.”

The “lucky” ones whom he felt were just “a bit mixed up” yet still loyal often received job demotions, to be called back into the higher ranked positions they were fired from when he suspected yet another official(s) of plotting to oust him.

The not so lucky ones that Mao saw as irredeemably rightist, power hungry, or disloyal, would be the ones to be shipped off to backbreaking hard labor camps in the countryside. They’d either die out there under such grueling conditions, extreme heat/cold, and malnutrition, Mao’s bodyguards simply “got rid of them” for good, I’m sure.

Li wasn’t always privy to the ultimate fate of colleagues or friends, although some news would sometimes make it back to him (like his close friend committing suicide before he was to be “struggled against”). In my opinion, Li truly did suffer from essentially having served as Mao’s slave - a privileged one with an abundance of food to eat, for certain - but a slave nonetheless.

He was never free to spend a night with his wife and children as Mao kept very odd hours and would send for him at 3 AM, often just to chat about opera, history, or have Dr. Li provide him with English lessons.

However, I’m sure as he saw his colleagues being purged from the party, heard of their suicides, heard of the millions of deaths from starvation outside his sequestered world in Zhongnanhai (the huge palatial complex where Mao, his wife, concubines, and inner circle resided) he likely didn’t feel comfortable complaining about his own position in life.

I believe that and just the overall monotony of his day-to-day life is what contributes to his very detached recollection of the events, though they are still incredibly unbelievable as Mao’s complete disregard for human lives and inability to feel empathy was on display for all of those well-acquainted with him to clearly see.

A must-read if you’re looking to form your own judgment on what made Mao… well, Mao. Sorry the review is so incredibly long!

"I wash myself inside the bodies of my women."
-Mao Zedong

看完了李先生写的书，感觉还不错，还原出一个生性多疑，极其贪恋权力的大独裁者，土皇帝形象，所有处于他身边的人都战战兢兢，因为不知何时灾难就降临在自己头上，这个人也是给中国人以极其沉痛灾难的人，可以说名列千古罪人并不为过，因为很多人说他为革命作出了巨大贡献所以他还是很正面的，我认为他所谓的巨大贡献只是对于共产党人来说是巨大贡献，没有了他的共产党他的中华人民共和国，中国照样是那个伟大的国家，照样可以崛起，可以现代化，不同的是，没有了他，没有了他的共产党，中国会少死很多人，会保留很多文物，会少了很多灾难，会迎来民主与自由而不是一个极权主义的共产党，压迫着广大的中国人民。

這本書裡李醫生的文字客觀、克制.還是比較令人信服的.讀完以後感覺很不好，胸口特別鬱悶.但這就是現實，從中可以找出很多荒誕現實中國現象的原出處.

2.5

ooh boy

Given that Zhisui Li's autobiography is one of the sources for the recently released book by Jung Chang ( Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China), it corroborates many of the details she covers in the period 1949-1988. Having just finished reading Jung Chang's most recent work, I was curious to learn more about Mao's private and public life. This book fulfilled that desire. It's a long read but riveting.

I wonder how true the author's statement remains today: "Even today, the Communist party ... requires people to pledge public support for policies with which they do not agree. Survival in China, then and now, depends on constantly betraying one's conscience." p. 64

کتابی که ترجمه بخش های گزیده و مهم آن (به گفته مترجم) و تبدیل کتابی 700 صفحه ای به 240 صفحه از حیث نبود انسجام کافی تا حدودی لطمه خورده، روایت های جسته گریخته پزشک شخصی و یکی از نزدیکترین افراد به رهبر انقلاب چین که در چین انتشار نیافته و از این بابت گویا از تیغ سانسور به سلامت گذشته، اما بخش اصلی روایت کتاب به خلقیات شخصی مائو میپردازد تا اینکه نوع مناسبات هیئت حاکمه را بررسی نماید از این نظر شاید تا مقطعی جذابیت هایی نیز داشته باشد اما رفته فته کتاب اسیر نوعی نگاه سطحی میشود!