The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 21, 1994 by Robert Elegant

Some books are important because of what they are, others because of what they are not. The Private Life of Chairman Mao and China Wakes epitomize the two poles.

There is a natural tendency, at least when it comes to judging journalism and scholarship, to distrust the insider, and trust the outsider. As Dr. Li Zhishui, Mao's personal physician, was the ultimate insider in China, so Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn - a husband-and-wife team who were from 1988 to 1993 correspondents for the New York Times in Beijing - were the ultimate outsiders. They had studied the Chinese language for half a year or so before arriving in Beijing, but (although Miss WuDunn is a third-generation Chinese-American) they had virtually no knowledge of the Chinese past, not even the recent history of the Communist Party or the People's Republic. Nor did they possess much knowledge of contemporary Chinese society.

That lack of potentially prejudicing knowledge certainly gave their reporting from China a stimulating freshness. Indeed, they were awarded a joint Pulitzer Prize largely because of the first-hand vigor of their reporting on the Tiananmen massacre. The same qualities that made their journalism so powerful do not, unfortunately, make their book a coherent whole. China Wakes is ephemeral, its judgments the flavor of the moment. It is important for what it is not: because it demonstrates forcefully that good outsider journalism does not necessarily make a good book.

If the Kristofs' affiliation with the Times and their Pulitzer, as well as their engaging and intelligent performance on their promotion tour, did not virtually guarantee wide circulation, the deficiencies of China Wakes might well be unimportant. But their picture of China today - skewed because they still know so little of China yesterday, and also because of their boundless enthusiasm for China's bounding economic development - will be taken as gospel truth by many readers.

How is this for gospel? The Kristofs state at one point that the Communist regime brought about the death of some 30 million Chinese from 1958 to 1963."Never before," they declare, "had so many people died in one country for any reason, whether war or natural disaster." Yet in the mid nineteenth century the Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu Dynasty brought about the death of at least 30 million and probably closer to 40 million.

Lu Xun, by far the most influential Chinese author of our time, is identified in passing as an "early-twentieth-century writer." That is rather like describing William Shakespeare as a "late-sixteenth-century playwright."

Moreover, the generalizations are so sweeping as to be nearly ludicrous. No human being in history, we are told, has improved the material condition of so many people in so short a time as has China's nonagenarian paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping. If that striking observation is true, it is because at no previous time have so many people lived in one country. Nonetheless, it is a far jump from chronicling that achievement to predicting, as the authors do, that China will dominate the next century.

The book of the insider, Dr. Li Zhishui, is too rich and too evocative to allow easy characterization. This is an intimate account of the bowels, the brains, and the psychic, as well as the physical, ailments of the late Chairman Mao Zedong, and so is of the highest importance: for revealing the unseemly private face and the destructive passions of the man whom the youth of the world long venerated as the savior of mankind, and for demonstrating with a wealth of evidence that the most damning previous accounts of Mao's behavior fell lamentably short of the actual horrors Dr. Li witnessed.

This extremely detailed anatomy of the revolutionary who created the People's Republic of China and then virtually destroyed his own creation is all but unique. So might Nero's soothsayer have written or Caligula's valet, if either had survived in his position for 22 years, as did Dr. Li, and if either had been vouchsafed the personal and political confidence Mao gave his physician, whom the paranoid Chairman clearly considered so entirely his own creature that no possible harm could come from such extended indiscretion.

Dr. Li saw Mao Zedong in all moods and at all times, from the insomniac vigor of 1955 to the protracted death scene of 1976. Even if the Chairman did lie to him, whether occasionally or often, as seems likely, the reality of the Chairman's behavior was always before his eyes.

During the arduous two decades that came close to destroying his own family life, Dr.Li saw a man who professed great concern for the Chinese masses, but repeatedly sacrificed them to his visions and his whims. Mao could let millions die to further his dream of becoming an immortal by creating the "stage of pure Communism" over which Karl Marx rhapsodized.

He could also pass on his genital infections to the dozens of young women with whom he slept, in part because he hoped to absorb their youthful energy. He could not be bothered to undergo the treatment that would have cured his ailments.