Obituary

Li Rui: Mao's secretary who fell from grace

17 February 2019 - 00:00 By The Daily Telegraph

Li Rui, who has died aged 101, was Chinese leader Mao Zedong's personal secretary for one-and-a-half years before he fell out of favour. He spent many years in labour camps and prisons yet continued to see himself as part of the Communist system and later used his status as a senior party official to campaign for democratic reforms.
Li Rui was born in 1917, six years after the fall of the Qing dynasty, in the southern Chinese province of Hunan. His political career began as a teenager in Hubei, when he led school protests against warlords. In 1936 he was jailed by Chiang Kai-shek's ruling Kuomintang for possessing Marxist books.
He first met Mao in 1939 at the Communist Party stronghold of Yanan, but in 1943 he was tortured and jailed for more than a year during the so-called Rectification Movement, an internal party purge of intellectuals and others that cost some 10,000 lives.
During the 1950s, as vice-minister of water resources and electric power, Li caught Mao's eye when he voiced his opposition to the Three Gorges Dam, a hydroelectric scheme that Mao supported. Seemingly impressed by Li's courage in speaking out, Mao made him his personal secretary in 1958.
But the following year Li was one of the party critics who raised concerns about Mao's "Great Leap Forward" - a programme to transform the country from an agrarian economy into a socialist society through rapid industrialisation and collectivisation - that caused the deaths from famine of tens of millions of people.
At an angry party conference in Lushan in 1959, Mao expelled his critics from the party and sent them to prison camps. In late 1961, Li returned to Beijing and then his wife of 22 years divorced him and denounced him for having criticised Mao in private. Li was banished to a remote mountain region.
In 1966, when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, Li was sent to Qincheng prison north of Beijing, and was held in solitary confinement for most of the next nine years. He kept loneliness at bay by using iodine to write poems in the margins of the collected works of Marx and Lenin.
Li was released in 1975 but it was only after Mao died and Deng Xiaoping took power at the end of 1978 that he regained his party membership. More recently he was a lone critic in the elite of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, accusing him of promoting a cult of personality similar to that of Mao. 1917-2019..

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