Chinese lawsuit seeks to prevent Stanford from releasing diaries of Mao’s former aide

http://bit.ly/2GJ0vLu Li Rui, a former aide to Chairman Mao, took notes. In his diaries, he documented the inner workings of the ruling Communist Party, including everything from what he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution to Mao’s swear words. The diaries are being held by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, but a lawsuit filed in China is now seeking to prevent them from seeing the light of day. Li, who died at the age of 101 in February, was a personal secretary to Mao Zedong and later a critic of the Chinese leadership, a rarity among China’s political elite. Li started keeping a diary in 1935, when he was an 18-year-old Communist activist, and only stopped in the spring of 2018, when he was hospitalized. His daughter, Li Nanyang, has given the diaries to the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank. But according to the daughter, her stepmother and Li’s second wife Zhang Yuzhen has filed a lawsuit against her at Beijing’s Xicheng district court, demanding that the writings be handed over to Zhang. The suit says Zhang is the rightful owner of the documents as the heir to Li’s estate. It also seeks to prevent his daughter or the Hoover Institution from making their contents public. Li Rui was a vocal critic of Mao and the current Communist leadership before he passed away in February. Photo: SCMP But when reached by phone on Tuesday, Zhang said: “You ask the organization department. A woman with the surname Wan. I don’t know, I’m sick now.” The Organization Department is the Communist Party’s powerful personnel agency, which Li had run in the 1980s. Zhang had told the Voice of America that the Communist Party deemed it “not suitable” that the daughter had given away the diaries. Li Nanyang, now living in California as a visiting fellow of the Hoover Institution, said she had no plan to appear at the Beijing court for the lawsuit. Parts of Li’s diaries have already been published, including his account of the 1959 Lushan Conference, where Mao purged opponents of the Great Leap Forward, which eventually led to a famine that killed an estimated 30 million people. (Li was sent to a labor camp for being one of the critics.)