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BEIJING – Li Rui, one of Mao Zedong's personal secretaries in the 1950s, became a critic of the Communist Party, a revisionist historian and a standard-bearer of liberal values in China. He died Saturday in Beijing. He was 101 years old.
The cause of death was an organ failure, caused by inflammation of the lungs and cancer of the digestive tract, according to her daughter, Li Nanyang, who spoke with doctors from the hospital's hospital. Beijing where Mr. Li was under treatment.
Frank, impetuous and insightful, Mr. Li's experience embodied the hopes and disappointments of a generation. His perseverance and longevity have made him one of the most influential critics of the seven-decade government of the People's Republic of China. His work has also reshaped historians' understanding of key moments in modern Chinese history – particularly Mao's responsibility in the catastrophic Great Leap Forward disaster, in which famine has killed more than 35 million people – while his political connections allowed him to protect moderate criticism and make open calls. for freedom of expression and constitutional government.
But Mr. Li was not a dissident. He died as a member of the Communist Party, enjoying the privileges of joining the party in 1937, earlier than anyone living in China. He had a large apartment, a generous pension and lavish benefits, such as high-flying medical care. The party imprisoned him, exiled him and almost died of hunger, but even when she expelled him, he finally returned in the hope of making changes from the inside out .
"It's seen as a consciousness of the revolution and the party," said Roderick MacFarquhar, a professor of Chinese history at Harvard University. "But he had serious doubts about the system that he spent his life serving." (Mr. MacFarquhar pbaded away Sunday.)
Early on, Mr. Li was an enthusiastic party member. He was born in 1917 into a prosperous family in Hunan Province, southern China, at a time when the country was torn apart by warlords and foreign aggressors. His father was a member of Tongmenghui, a clandestine revolutionary party that helped overthrow the Qing Dynasty and establish a republic. He died in 1922, leaving Li Rui without a father but eager to follow in his footsteps of political activism.
While Mr. Li was a mechanical engineering student at Wuhan University, he participated in a student movement led by the Communists to pressure the government to resist Japan's recent annexation of Chinese territory. In 1937 he joined the Communist Party as a clandestine activist.
This put Mr. Li in the vanguard of a new generation of idealistic and educated Communist Party members, dominated by street fighters and veteran revolutionaries like Mao. The photos of him from that time show a remarkably vigorous young man with the body of an athlete and a squarish and square face framing two piercing eyes.
After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Mr. Li worked for the Ministry of Water Resources, of strategic importance. In 1958, he became deputy chief, becoming the youngest vice minister in China.
The same year, he reached the peak of his career. Mao was holding a meeting in Nanning, in the south of the country. One of the items on the agenda was the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, a mbadive flood control and hydropower project on the Yangtze River, which would create a vast interior lake and destroy villages and cultural relics on the Yangtze River. tens of kilometers upstream.
Mr. Li was a known opponent and Mao had him leave Beijing to discuss the issue in his presence. He won Mao by speaking with force and simplicity and was quickly designated as one of his personal secretaries, making him a powerful guardian for a leader who led as an emperor.
But Mr. Li's move to the summit was short-lived. In 1958, Mao embarked on the Great Leap Forward, a dream poorly designed to get Western countries through a series of reckless economic policies. Soon farmers began to starve.
Party moderates rallied around one of China's most famous generals, Peng Dehuai, who tried to slow down Mao's policies and limit famine. Gathered in 1959 at the Lushan resort in central China, Mao thwarted them – a turning point in modern Chinese history that turned famine into a worse one and helped create a personality cult around from Mao.
At a critical moment in the Lushan meeting, one of Mao's personal secretaries was accused of stating that Mao could not accept any criticism. The room was silent. Mr. Li was asked if he had heard the man formulate such a daring criticism. In an oral story of the period, Mr. Li recalled:
"I got up and I replied:[He] heard badly. These were my views. "
Mr. Li was quickly purged. He has been identified with General Peng as an anti-Mao co-conspirator. He was stripped of his party membership and sent to a prison colony near the Soviet border. General Peng remained a political prisoner until his death in 1974.
China besieged by famine, Mr. Li almost died of hunger. He was saved when friends managed to transfer him to another labor camp that had access to food.
Government inspectors quickly visited him and told him that he could recover his adherence to his party if he admitted his mistakes. But Mr. Li was disgusted with what he had seen at the top.
"I refused because of the Lushan meeting, which was attended by the highest party leaders," he is reminded. "To my great surprise, none of them had the courage to say anything right and pretty much to General Peng. I felt discouraged and hopeless. I said that I was in agreement to be expelled from the party. "
At the end of 1961, Mr. Li returned to Beijing. His daughter Li Nanyang said in an interview that he had dared to speak despite the totalitarian atmosphere in the Chinese capital. She remembers writing an essay praising the Communist Party for preventing deaths at the Great Leap Forward. Her father reproached her:
He said, "How do you know that nobody died? "
"I looked at him and told him:" How dare you say that? The newspapers and my teachers said no one was dead, so how can you say that? "
Angry at his stubbornness, his wife, aged 22, divorced by taking their three children. She then denounced him for having made private remarks against Mao. In 1962, he was banned from teaching in a remote mountainous region.
Four years later, Mao launched the cultural revolution aimed at overthrowing party moderates. As at the Lushan meeting, Mao's personal secretaries were under investigation for their insufficient radicalism.
The investigators flew for the exile from Mr. Li's mountain. He vouched for all the secretaries, except for one, Chen Boda, who was reputed to be the most left of Mao's secretaries. It was an almost suicidal act of defiance against the radical faction around Mao.
A few months later, Mr. Li was sent to the Bastille of China, the infamous Qincheng Prison north of Beijing, where he was kept in solitary confinement for most of the next nine years. He fought against loneliness by using iodine from the penitentiary clinic to write 400 poems on the sidelines of the collected works of Marx and Lenin.
"It helped me ease my pain and worry," he wrote in an essay on the occasion of his 99th birthday. "And helped me keep my sanity."
In 1975, he was released from Qincheng but sent back to his mountain exile. It was only after Mao's death and Deng Xiaoping's seizure of power at the end of 1978 that Mr. Li was reinstated in the party. He returned to Beijing to join the Ministry of Water Resources. He again opposed the project to build the Three Gorges Dam, joining the journalist and environmental activist Dai Qing to prevent the gigantic project.
He was then transferred to the party's influential organizational department, where he helped oversee the recruitment of new leaders. But his career ended abruptly in 1984 when he refused to favor the children of senior officials.
"Between choosing to tell the truth or a promising career future, he has always chosen the truth," Ms. Dai said in an interview. "It has been true all his life."
This started the most influential phase of his life: an elderly statesman with a conscience.
He lost the battle for the Three Gorges Dam, which the extremists forced in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen mbadacre and the defeat of the Communist Party reformers.
Perhaps more importantly, he became the patron saint of "Yanhuang Chunqiu" or "China Through the Ages", an uplifting journal that tackled sensitive historical issues, such as the famine of the Great Leap or the Cultural Revolution. that the Communist Party wanted to forget. .
"He was idealistic," said Wu Si, his editor-in-chief until 2016. "He did not work for political gain."
But Mr. Li's vision of a more open and democratic China has faded. In 2016, Mr. Wu was sacked at the head of the magazine, which had been taken over by uncompromising people.
"I'm afraid Li Rui can not do anything," Wu said. "It was beyond the ability of a person to protect."
Li refused to back down, writing critically about President Xi Jinping, China's most authoritarian leader since Mao. In an essay, he opposed Xi to his late father, Xi Zhongxun, known for his tolerance and opposition to the domination of strongmen.
Mr. Li wrote that in 2006, he went to Zhejiang Province, where Mr. Xi was then secretary of the party. Mr. Xi brought him to dinner and Mr. Li urged him to denounce the abuses in the system. According to Mr. Li, the future Chinese leader rejected him:
"How can I imitate you? You can hover in the margins "- the implication being that the ambitious Mr. Xi wanted to be the center of power.
Mr. Li added an overwhelming comment to the story: "In the West, it is said that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely."
For Chinese historian Zhang Lifan, Mr. Li summarized the tragedy of a generation. Initially, many saw the Communist Party as the salvation of China, turning it into a Mao-led dictatorship almost 30 years ago at the top, and then aspired for the era of reform to finally bring changes – for then see these hopes shattered by the party's inability to give up authoritarianism.
"The incident of" China through the ages "was a sign that the dream of Li Rui and his peers would never come true," Zhang said. "But I understand Li Rui: Denying the party would have been denying his own life."
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