Diaries of Mao Zedong aide can stay at Stanford rather than return to China, U.S. court rules

HONG KONG — The diaries of an aide to former Chinese leader Mao Zedong can stay at Stanford University, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, ending a yearslong legal battle that had raised concern they could be censored if returned to China.

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Li Rui, a senior member of China’s ruling Communist Party, became Mao’s personal secretary in 1958. In diaries he kept for eight decades starting in 1938, Li left a rare record of Chinese history from an insider’s perspective, including a firsthand account of the military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

The diaries also included criticism of the Great Leap Forward, an industrialization program championed by Mao from 1958 to 1961 that caused a famine estimated to have killed as many as 40 million people.

According to Stanford, Li had directed that the diaries, along with correspondence, meeting minutes, photographs and other materials, be made publicly available for study at the university’s Hoover Institution for fear they might otherwise be destroyed by Chinese authorities. His daughter Li Nanyang, a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party who lives in the United States, made the donation official shortly before Li’s death in 2019 at the age of 101.

Soon after, Li’s second wife, Zhang Yuzhen, sued for the return of the original diaries, saying they contained deeply personal information about her relationship with Li and that they were rightfully hers. A Beijing court ruled in Zhang’s favor, but Stanford said it was denied the opportunity to appear in court and sued Zhang for control of the diaries in California.

In his ruling Tuesday, Judge Jon S. Tigar of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said the court was declining to enforce the Beijing ruling and that Li Nanyang’s “possession and donation of the Li Materials was lawful and in accordance with Li Rui’s wishes.”

The Hoover Institution, which has an extensive collection on modern Chinese history, welcomed the ruling.

“This decision ensures one of the most valuable firsthand accounts on the history of modern China will be freely available for study,” Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution and a former U.S. secretary of state, said in a statement.

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According to the institution, witnesses for both sides testified during the trial that if the materials were returned to China, they would at the least be censored and more likely be banned.

The court said it had determined that Zhang, who is in her 90s, did not initiate the Beijing case and that her defense in the California case was most likely being funded by the Communist Party. A lawyer for Zhang, who did not testify, did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside business hours.

“Li Rui was very clear in his diaries and conversations that he intended for his historic documents to be preserved and maintained by Hoover’s Library and Archives,” said Mark Litvack, one of Stanford’s lawyers. “We are very pleased with the court’s decision, that Mr. Li’s wishes will be honored.”