Dr. Li, doing involuntary service as Mao's personal physician, had a ringside seat for this spectacle from 1955 to 1976. Mao didn't need a round-the-clock doctor. He just wanted Dr. Li perpetually on call in order to gratify his need for control. Li himself wanted to be a real doctor, to help sick people. But had he acted on his desire to resign his post and go to work in a hospital, he might well have found himself and his wife and children thrown into Maoist concentration camps (euphemistically called reform-through-labor camps) like millions of his compatriots.
So Dr. Li bit his tongue and submitted to his bondage. He also, unbeknownst to Mao, took copious notes.
Li brings Mao up close and in person as he swims with relish in rivers floating with human excrement, as he hatches plans to make fields that had produced two tons of grain for 4000 years produce eight tons simply by digging deeper and adding more seed, as he crows over the success of backyard steel furnaces in melting down doorknobs into amorphous ingots. The account sometimes resembles a description of someone undergoing a series of hallucinations, and the hallucinations becoming public policy.
Mao, who is often given credit for industrializing China, did not have the sense to provide his workers with something so basic as a wheelbarrow. In the sole recorded instance of this champion of the laborer doing any labor, Li shows him joining workers who are equipped with baskets and shoulder poles for the building of a dam. Predictably, Mao gives his shovel to someone else after a few minutes, and retires to a tent to drink tea.
His thoughts on public health are equally advanced. Upon being told by his doctor that, as a carrier of a sexually transmitted disease, he is infecting hundreds of women and that it would be helpful if he would wash himself from time to time and perhaps go so far as to take some medicine, the great man replies that, since he has no symptoms, he sees no need to take any medicine. As for washing himself, Mao explains, "I wash myself inside the bodies of my women."
Thus, it makes no difference whether you're a health professional or a connoisseur of depravity, a peasant or a president. There's something for everyone in The Private Life Of Chairman Mao.
As I know, Li hope to be prompted by Mao as the Minister of health of PRC, but Mao ignore on Li's promption. This book is a reverenge to Mao.
In the view of Chinese moral standard, Li is a guy as....
I read this book thoroughly. I am sure, at least 1/3 of the content is false obviously. Anyway, the person outside China cannot tell the false at all. I think Mao is a person that many person hate him or like him. This is normal. But One should respect the reality.