The Exile and the Ghostwriter: East-West Biographical Politics and the Private Life of Chairman Mao

The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Zhisui Li, Mao Zedong's private doctor for twenty-two years, was originally published in 1994, in the United States. ¹ Li's intimate biography of Mao gives a shocking account of life behind the scenes of the top-level Communist Party inner circle from 1954 to Mao's death in 1976. As a doctor, Li was privy to Mao at his most vulnerable, and much of the drama of the book comes from the extreme contrast between Li's access to power and his abject powerlessness. He is the doctor of a man who is not only supposed to be immortal, but who also has utter command over Li's own life and death.

It is unsurprising that the book is something of a political football. While it remains officially banned in China, it has elicited a "new wave of debate about the Chairman, especially within the dissident diaspora"; small wonder then that "the Chinese version of the book is much sought after on the Mainland" (Barmé, Shades of Mao 53). In the United States, UK, and Taiwan, it has been a best seller. Moreover, it has been taken seriously by such academic sinologists as Emily MacFarquhar, Lucian Pye, David Bachman, Andrew Nathan, and Roderick MacFarquhar, and has even found its way onto undergraduate courses in Chinese history and revolutionary movements. Jasper Becker's assessment suggests why the book has attracted such attention. Li's "devastating record of everything he had witnessed" contrasts sharply with official Party documents in elucidating the nature of the court around Mao. Only such rare "testimony of participants" produced by those who have defected can provide a reliable account of how such events as the Cultural Revolution came about. And yet, while Li's biography has been hailed for telling the truth about Mao, Li has also been accused of distorting the record for personally vengeful and scurrilous motives.

In both East and West, though, the book's political implications have obscured a consideration of its aesthetic construction--of how the book works as a Biography--that tells a complex story of biographical politics across the East-West divide. In this article, I will take up a literary approach, investigating the biography as text to consider what light it throws on the form and function of political biography in the 1990s. I will consider its iconoclastic content in terms of debunking modes of biography--well established in the West since the "Stracheyan revolution" of the 1920s, but also increasingly so within China, despite political censorship and a deeper rooted tradition of biography as eulogy. Second, I will consider the implications of the book's mode of eyewitness and personal memoir, also characteristic of the twentieth century, but now taking a new turn under the influence of the postmodern deconstruction of objective history. I will argue that both Li's debunking and eyewitnessing are more coded and constructed than their apparently "confessional" stance encourages us to believe, particularly since when it first appeared, the biography was ghost-written, in English, by American sinologist Anne Thurston. As the combined product of Li's, Thurston's, and the publisher Random House's interests and perspectives, the biography represents a marketing strategy as well as an academic intervention, a popular and epic tale of corrupt power as well as an analysis of a government and leader. I will turn to Thurston's own account of working on the book to consider the implications of her assessment that Li was in fact not confessional enough. I will then conclude that when viewed in relation to biography as a genre, The Private Life of Chairman Mao tells us about as much about current uses of biography as about the history of Mao himself, with important messages about cultural perceptions of the individual in both China and in the United States.

"Unmasking...