The Emperor Has No Clothes: Mao's Doctor Reveals the Naked Truth

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Author Dr. Li Zhisui, with the editorial assistance of Anne F. Thurston

Publisher Random House

Year 1994

Pages 663 pp.

Price $30.00

Dr. Li Zhisui met Mao Zedong for the first time on April 25, 1955, late in the afternoon. The doctor had finished a busy day in his clinic, but Mao was just starting his day's work. On a wooden bed beside his indoor swimming pool, the chairman lounged "naked beneath an open terry-cloth robe . . . his lower body loosely covered by a towel." Dr. Li was impressed by Mao's healthy appearance: broad shoulders, a big belly, thick black hair, "skin like butter, delicate, and hairless." Dr. Li, summoned by the awesome and remote Great Leader, was nervous, but Mao soon put him at ease, while at the same time impressing him with his wisdom. Mao made it clear that Dr. Li's education in missionary schools would be no bar to his holding a position of the greatest trust under the chairman. He reminded the doctor that the great second emperor of the Tang Dynasty, Li Shimin, had made a general with a questionable background one of his closest and most trusted aides.

Li became Mao's personal physician, and there were only a few periods between that first interview and Mao's death on September 9, 1976, when he was not immediately responsible for his medical care. There were many times when Dr. Li wanted out, but escape would have labeled him a counterrevolutionary, dooming him and his family. Dr. Li has turned his 21 years of thralldom and anxiety into a book that will absorb anyone interested in China or in the total corruption of total power.

Some of the characteristics of Mao's inner circle, which Dr. Li recounts in great detail, were foreshadowed in that first interview. Mao was frequently charming when meeting someone for the first time; his willfulness and urge for total control became apparent only after the individual was irretrievably enmeshed in the inner circle. He had no use for the proprieties of dress, work hours, and leisure time observed by others. People came to Mao when he was ready to talk or work, at any hour of the day or night. These peculiarities, Mao's reference to Li Shimin, and his indoor swimming pool - an amazing luxury in 1950s China - were Dr. Li's first indications that he was dealing with someone who cast himself as a revolutionary leader but whose conduct and attitudes reminded one of China's emperors.

Dr. Li would later learn more about Mao's "imperial" attitudes and witness firsthand Mao's voracious appetite for a never-ending stream of eager young women. Dr. Li's brief testimony on this subject in a 1993 television documentary, much milder than the details in the book, produced furious condemnations from Chinese government spokesmen and such harsh pressure on Hong Kong that the program was not broadcast there. The current Chinese leadership, after all, is a product of the same basic political order that produced and sustained Mao. Its senior leaders were part of his high command and saw a great deal of him. If the Chinese people could become any more cynical about their leadership, Dr. Li's revelations might provide a push in that direction. His book is sure to arouse a good deal of controversy, with the powers that be in the People's Republic doing everything they can to impugn its authenticity and accuracy.

To be sure, this work reaches us in a way that leaves something to be desired. Dr. Li says he recorded his experiences regularly, but then destroyed his notes during the Cultural Revolution, fearing dire consequences if they were discovered. In 1977 he rewrote his notes from memory. He says his memories of Mao's words and deeds are extraordinarily vivid because his life depended on them at the time. No doubt having kept a contemporary record strengthened the memories he would later rely on. But the tendency to rewrite history grows stronger over time. There is no mention of the location or accessibility to scholars of Dr. Li's notes or his original manuscript. Still, there is no obvious reason to doubt that Dr. Li is genuine and that his book represents a reasonable effort to record his experiences. Highly reputable scholars of China, Andrew J. Nathan and Anne F. Thurston, helped edit the book; other eminent scholars have had a chance to review the English text before publication. Dr. Li is least surprising, and his information is most likely to be derivative or unreliable, on larger political events and famous struggles within the high command. For details on these, and for much about Mao's character and private life, he probably will remain our only or best source.

THE LAST EMPEROR

It is not surprising that Dr. Li thought Mao's conduct imperial: he lived in isolation, shared his bed with many young women, and traveled around the nation to luxury villas in a great cocoon of guards and private trains. Dr. Li is in general not judgmental about the endless parade of young women in Mao's bed, citing the Daoist practice of using sex for longevity. But he was shocked by Mao's lack of concern about transmitting a vaginal infection from one woman to another. Far more insight into the pathologies of the inner circle is provided by his many accounts of the flattery and servility that surrounded the chairman; his description of these traits in the widely respected Zhou Enlai will upset many in China, if they ever have a chance to read it. Especially horrifying is his picture of the vast Potemkin village of perfectly planted fields full of peasant women dressed in red and green, with village blast furnaces smoking everywhere, as the chairman's train traveled south in the first autumn of the Great Leap Forward. Dr. Li describes a leader who has lost touch with reality and confesses that he himself was caught up in the enthusiasm. As millions died in the famines brought on by the Great Leap policies, Mao acknowledged it by occasionally abstaining from eating meat.