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
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.
“Overcast to clear. Woke up a little bit past 6:30,” he begins an entry for a Sunday in October 2017 that presses glancing references to a former Chinese leader, the Cultural Revolution, a forest fire and commodity prices in between mentions of his TV watching, family photos and contact with a politically high-ranking family.
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. 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.
A Beijing court in 2019 cited Chinese inheritance law in ruling that Ms. Zhang is entitled to the material.
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