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

Also of considerable interest in explaining the perverse twists of the Cultural Revolution are Dr. Li's descriptions of Mao's growing paranoia, especially his fear of being poisoned, and of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, a neurotic hypochondriac who was impossible to deal with, but who strikingly improved in health and attitude as she began to take a leading role in the Cultural Revolution.

Mao can be seen playing cat-and-mouse with his opponents, letting them put out documents he had not approved so that he could attack them later. Dr. Li testifies that Mao, citing the tradition of using distant foreigners against those close at hand, had begun to talk about improving relations with the United States as early as 1969, at the height of the tensions with the Soviet Union.

HISTORY BUFF OR BLUFF?

Mao's reference to Li Shimin in his first interview with Dr. Li was far from accidental. The chairman was obsessed with Chinese history. In 1936 Mao told American journalist Edgar Snow that when he was a boy he loved to hear tales of the heroes of the Three Kingdoms period from the old men of his village. Certainly Mao's penchant for bold action and heroic rhetoric could have been inspired by those great heroes. But many Chinese heroes, including Li Shimin, were admired for their ability to listen to their ministers. In their imperial lives lies another strand of the Chinese heritage: the moral glamour of the selfless, earnest minister, hoping to be given power to do what he knew was right, always ready to remonstrate fearlessly when the emperor was straying from the path of Confucian righteousness.

Mao's tolerance for independent advice, however, was limited. On one occasion the chairman became fascinated with the history of a vigorous reformer, a mid-Ming Dynasty official named Hai Rui, who was dismissed after repeatedly condemning abuses of power at the imperial court. Mao was attracted by Hai Rui's selflessness and the ideal of the honest official, but he himself was unwilling to hear any criticism. Too many people saw a parallel between the Ming emperor's dismissal of Hai Rui and Mao's dismissal of the frankly critical Marshal Peng Dehuai in 1959. So powerful was the parallel that a leading scholar in Ming history, Wu Han, became one of the first targets of the Cultural Revolution because he had written a play about Hai Rui.

The Chinese political tradition is full of warnings that Mao did not want to hear: against ruthless centralization of power, against pushing ahead with a policy when the best advisers oppose it. Since these ideals ran counter to his aim of transforming China by revolution, he ignored them. Although Mao's fascination with China's past predated his revolutionary zeal, it was subordinate to or at least distorted by it. Dr. Li offers fascinating new evidence on this point, recounting Mao's praise for Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty, Empress Wu of the Tang Dynasty (the only woman ever to sit on the Dragon Throne in her own name), the notorious first emperor of Qin, and Zhou, the last king of the Shang Dynasty. Despite the traditional negative judgments of all four, modern students would have some sympathy with Mao's views of at least three of them as important and partly effective builders and wielders of central power, but it is hard to see more in the praise of Zhou than willful reversal of a traditional verdict. The first emperor of Qin, in particular, is credited by many modern nationalists with a key contribution to what they regard as China's natural or essential condition of political unity.

One should, however, beware the tendency to explain Mao's conduct and attitudes by pointing to continuities with the emperors of the old order. Leninism has produced grotesque leader cults in societies with political heritages as diverse as those of Russia, Cuba, Cambodia, Romania, and China. Iraq, Syria, Uganda, and others have had their own share of dictators without much help from Leninism. The cultural sources of glorification and abuse of authority in the modern world are diverse indeed, and some of them are endemic and recurring pathologies of the nation-building process.

DO MEN MAKE HISTORY?

Dr. Li's vivid portrait of the corruption and hypocrisies of Mao's inner circle is an important document for every student of Chinese politics. One should be careful, however, not to rely too heavily on this highly personal portrait to explain the immense and wrenching political changes of contemporary China. Western writing on China between the 1940s and 1976 focused on "Mao's China." Few took into account the political realities not under Mao's control. In the book's introduction, Nathan writes that "no other leader in history . . . inflicted such a catastrophe on his nation." This is probably true if one counts victims, but it is not likely that the proportion of victims to the whole population was as high as that of Pol Pot or the nameless machete-wielders of Rwanda. "Politics in a dictatorship," Nathan continues, "begins in the personality of the dictator." While China was certainly shaped by Mao's personality, an approach that emphasizes the personal over the political seems to trivialize the patriotism, idealism, savagery, careerism, longing for discipline and meaning, and hope for a more comfortable life that shaped the politics of the People's Republic.

Dr. Li was an eyewitness to Mao's famous swims in China's rivers. Despite pleas from the doctor, who worried about the dangerous currents, sewage, and parasites, Mao insisted on them. In doing so, he demonstrated that he was in charge and that there was nothing to fear if one just plunged in. Once in the water his fat helped keep him afloat, while his entourage of guards and worried courtiers simply floated along with the current.