Mao Zedong, China's "Great Helmsman" whose brilliance, the official doctrine insists, led a vast nation to restored greatness, was actually an irritable, manipulative egotist incapable of human feeling who surrounded himself with sycophants and refused even to be treated for a sexually transmitted disease, though he knew he was spreading it to the numerous young women who shared his bed. Those are among the elements of an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Mao drawn by Li Zhisui, who was his private physician from until Mao's death in at the age of Li, who has lived in the United States since , has written "The Private Life of Chairman Mao," a page memoir of the imperial court of Mao that, in absolute contrast with the official image, portrays it as a place of boundless decadence, licentiousness, selfishness, relentless toadying and cutthroat political intrigue.
Excerpts from the book, which will be published soon by Random House, will appear in the coming week's issue of U. News and World Report.
Li said in an interview at his home in suburban Chicago. Li's memoir contains very little in the way of major revelations about the political or diplomatic history of the Maoist epoch.
No new light, for example, is shed on the most mysterious event of the period, the abortive coup engineered by Mao's supposed hand-picked successor, Defense Minister Lin Biao, in , or on such matters as Mao's role in the Korean War or the diplomatic opening to the United States.
But Dr. Li's book, even in focusing on the private side of Mao, contains numerous new details about the nature of his rule, including his associations with other major figures. Jiang Qing, Mao's third wife and later the head of the radical faction known as the Gang of Four, is portrayed as a flatterer and a hypochondriac who, by the time Dr. Li arrived on the scene, no longer had conjugal relations with Mao. Other major figures of the time are seen as reliably sycophantic toward Mao.
