The Private Life of Chairman Mao - Background

Background

In publicising The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Li Zhisui stated that he was Mao's personal physician for twenty-two years, in which time he became a close confidant of the Chinese leader, although this has since come under criticism from those who do not agree that Li's relationship was as close to Mao as he maintains.

Li based the book's contents upon his own memories of Mao several decades after the actual event, as he had burned all of his personal diaries during the Cultural Revolution. One of Li's collaborators who was involved in the editing of the work, the western historian Anne F. Thurston, noted that because of this, his claims were "fallible" and might "be wrong". The original manuscript written by Li was translated from his native Chinese into English by Professor Tai Hung-chao, before being edited by Thurston (whom Li later accused of cutting substantial parts of his original manuscript without his knowledge), whilst the foreword to the book was written by Professor Andrew Nathan of Columbia University. Tai later commented that the English-language publisher, Random House, wanted more sensationalist elements to the book than that which Li had provided them, in particular requesting more information about Mao's sexual relationships. Despite Li's own protestations, they overruled him, and put such claims in the published text.

Along with the Random House publication, the book was also released in the Chinese language by the Chinese Times Publishing Company of Tapei. Despite its Chinese language publication, the book was banned by the government in the People's Republic of China, as have many works criticising Mao on a personal level, and they subsequently also publicly denounced both the book and a BBC documentary that used it as a basis.

Li himself was critical of the published Chinese language edition of the book, believing that it was not directly based upon his original Chinese manuscript, but that it was instead a translation based upon the English version. Q.M. DeBorja and Xu L. Dong highlighted what they saw as a variety of discrepancies in the text between the published English and Chinese versions of The Private Life of Mao, for instance, in the English edition, Li is recorded as saying "During our talk in Chengdu…" whereas in the Chinese edition, the literal translation is "Mao stated in his speech at the Chengdu meeting…"; as DeBorja and Dong note, these statements actually have different meanings. Other such alteratons to the Chinese version of the book included the removal of controversial statements about the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who was still alive and in power of the People's Republic at the time of publication.

The Private Life of Chairman Mao was presented as revealing new information about Mao, but as historian Mobo Gao noted, "For those who are familiar with the literature in Chinese, there was in fact very little that was really new in the book when it hit the Western market. For the significant figures and events described in Li's book, memoirs and biographies published previously in China and Hong Kong have revealed as much, if not more."