The diaries of former Mao aide Li Rui

[Randy W]

The diaries of former Mao aide Li Rui were whisked out of China by his daughter and are now the subject of a legal fight pitting Stanford University against his widow in Beijing.

from the WSJ on Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/WSJ/posts/10161360318688128

A Former Mao Aide’s Diaries Spark a Custody Battle Over an Unofficial History of China
The papers of party insider Li Rui were whisked out of China by his daughter and given to Stanford. His widow says they were stolen.

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For 80 years, Li Rui, once a top aide to Mao Zedong, penned letters and diary notes detailing his long, topsy-turvy life near the center of the Communist Party. Before his death in 2019, Mr. Li’s daughter spirited the volumes out of China and into a California archive.

Now, “the Li materials” are the subject of a legal fight that pits Stanford University against Mr. Li’s widow in Beijing. It is a custody battle over an unofficial history of China.

In millions of handwritten Chinese characters, Mr. Li documents his early days in the party, the revolution that brought it to power and his experiences as secretary to Mao Zedong in the 1950s—plus the 20 years he spent incarcerated for maligning Mao’s economic policies.

Mr. Li kept writing after he was politically rehabilitated and continued long into his retirement. A loyal communist cadre until his death at age 101, he was known among academics and journalists as the rare insider to publicly criticize the party over its Tiananmen Square crackdown, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and, continually, the direction for China itself.

In 2010 he wrote of Mao: “Mao completely went to the opposite direction of where the human race should be heading toward.” He also writes of meeting Xi Jinping in 1984 and 2002, as well as discussing Mr. Xi’s leadership in 2018 amid China’s efforts to remove presidential term limits, referencing a foreign news report headlined “Democracy is dead.”

. . .

Mr. Li was an honest and diligent scribe who, by championing the view that the party could reform itself, maintained relations across China’s political spectrum, said Chinese academic Feng Chongyi, now at Sydney’s University of Technology, who saw Mr. Li almost annually over the past decades.

“To keep that authentic record over that period of time, it’s simply valuable,” said Mr. Feng, who distinguished Mr. Li from some Chinese officials who have produced “diaries as propaganda.”

But publicly showcasing such an individualized version of core party events clashes with President Xi’s demands for a “correct outlook on history.” Chinese censorship has always been at its most intense over Communist Party matters and even the most mundane information is classified as a state secret.

Mr. Li’s background makes his papers unique for anyone diving into his voluminous output. “Given the positions he held and the people he knew, I would expect them to be of great significance for research and helping understand the inner workings of Chinese elite politics,” said Anthony Saich, a China expert at Harvard Kennedy School, who also knew Mr. Li.

Publishing Mr. Li’s words has long been forbidden in China, Stanford argues in a court filing, so if his diaries had remained there they would “be suppressed and likely destroyed.”

Mao’s act was totally against the universal values of freedom, democracy, progress in science, and the rule of law. Mao completely went to the opposite direction of where the human race should be heading toward. The ten years of the Cultural Revolution pushed China to the edge of total collapse. Jan. 9, 2010

But, were the papers stolen from China?

That is the question facing the U.S. District Court for Northern California, where lawyers on opposite sides of the family schism are volleying claims and counterclaims asserting ownership of the records.

In seeking to prove ownership, Stanford was joined in the Oakland case by the daughter, 71-year-old Ms. Li, against Mr. Li’s second wife and widow in Beijing, 91-year-old Zhang Yuzhen.

. . .

For now, the 40 manuscript boxes and related digital files form collection No. 2019C100 in the extensive Chinese history archive at Hoover. They are open for viewing by appointment along with more than 6,000 Hoover collections from over 150 countries including World War I political posters, X-rays of Adolf Hitler’s head and decades of Afghan newspapers.

. . .

In the Li home, resistance to sending the diaries overseas had quieted as President Xi shunted aside some of the old-guard officials who had long coddled the Li family, said his daughter.

On Jan. 30, 2017, Mr. Li wrote about speaking with his wife and daughter about the diaries and said “she”—though it is unclear whom this refers to—“agrees with my way to handle things, i.e. giving the diaries to the Hoover Institution for archiving.”

A few days later, Ms. Li said, “My father said go, go, go ahead.”

She stuffed decades of his diaries into two carry-on bags and nervously headed for a United Airlines flight to San Francisco, sweating in fear that customs authorities would confiscate her father’s files. “To this day, I don’t know why they didn’t check,” she said.