Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
including the very influential The Tragedy of the Late Mao: Personal
Record of Mao’s Secretary.
Li Rui’s condemnation of Mao is influential for several reasons. One
is that he is one of the high-ranking party officials, a so-called insiders’
insider. Another is that he claims to be a Mao expert since he has
written a biography of the young Mao that had inspired many Mao
admirers. However what seems most compelling is that Li claims to be
Mao’s secretary and to be recognized as such in the field (Pei 2006: 4).
In order to question Li’s credentials, one of the e-media participants
goes to a great length to show that Li’s claim to have been one of Mao’s
secretaries is misleading (Yue 2006). According to Li himself, he was
asked by Mao to be a secretary but declined, pleading the excuse of
being too busy. Li then agreed to be Mao’s part-time secretary (jianzhi
mishu), which in fact meant that Li was, in Mao’s words, a tongxun yuan
(correspondent). During this period Li was not stationed in Beijing but
worked full time at the Hunan Provincial Propaganda Department in
Changsha. How can Li claim to be Mao’s secretary when in fact even
the role of being a correspondent lasted only 19 months, from January
1958 to August 1959? Mao wanted Li to be one of his correspondents
after listening to a debate on the pros and cons of building the Three
Gorges Dam. Mao was impressed with Li’s argument against such a
project and decided to shelve it. As Huang Yunsheng (2007) further
points out, Li’s role as a correspondent secretary was confined only to
matters of irrigation and hydropower because of that encounter.
Li Rui is accused of being economical with the truth in another
instance. During the early years of the PRC’s history China copied
the Soviet Union by conducting the May 1 Labour Day parade during
which slogans were chanted to indicate the CCP’s policy and ideology.
Li Rui claims that for the 1950 May Day parade Mao himself
inserted ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ as the last one on the list of official
slogans. 4 But Huang avers that Li is lying. First of all, Li said that
the information was given to him by Zhu De’s secretary orally, but Li
did not made such a claim until after Zhu’s secretary had safely
passed away. Second, the official list of slogans published in the
People’s Daily on 27 April 1950 did not contain the slogan ‘Long Live
Chairman Mao’. The last entry on the list was actually ‘Long Live the
Great Leader of the Chinese People, Comrade Mao Zedong’. Third,
the slogan list was first drafted by the Central Propaganda Ministry,
as always, and they did propose ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’. It was
Liu Shaoqi, not Mao, who crossed it out and changed it to ‘Long Live
the Great Leader of the Chinese People, Comrade Mao Zedong’. This
can be confirmed by the handwriting of Liu Shaoqi as seen in the first
volume of Manuscripts by Liu Shaoqi since the Establishment of the PRC
that was published in April 2005.
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