On the trail of Dr Li Zhisui’s illusive Memories – Part 4/5

December 18, 2011

Troy Parfitt says, “To say Dr. Li Zhishui was bright, not to mention perceptive and articulate, would be an understatement. I would say he was exceptionally intelligent, and probably a gifted physician…  His book is mesmerizing, deftly penned, overflowing with interesting tidbits…”

However, Li cannot be credited with the “deftly penned” English edition of the memoir since the original manuscript written by Li was translated from his native Chinese into English by Professor Tai Hung-chao, before being edited by Thurston (whom Dr. Li later accused of cutting substantial parts of his original manuscript without his knowledge).

I was also told by a friend that read the Chinese language edition of the memoir that it reads as if it were an accountant’s ledger.

In addition, Professor Tai later said the English-language publisher, Random House, wanted more sensationalist elements to the book than that which Li had provided them, in particular requesting more information about Mao’s sexual relationships.

Despite Li’s own protestations, Professor Tai said the publisher overruled him, and put such sexual claims in the published text anyway.

Then there is the Open Letter published in April 1995, a statement protesting that many of the claims made in Li’s book were false and 150 people who had personally known or worked with Mao signed the letter.

Next there is Professor Frederick Teiwes, a western academic specializing in the study of Maoist China, who was also critical of Li’s memoir of Mao, arguing in his book “The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution 1966-1971” (1996) that despite Li’s extensive claims regarding the politics behind the Cultural Revolution, he was actually “on the fringe” of the events taking place in the Chinese government.

Continued on December 18, 2011 in  On the trail of Dr. Li Zhisui’s illusive Memories – Part 5 or return to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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On the trail of Dr Li Zhisui’s illusive Memories – Part 3/4

December 17, 2011

In 1994, a year before his death, Dr. Li Zhisui published his memoir of Mao, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician.

Li based the book’s contents upon his own memories of Mao several decades after the actual events, as he had burned all of his personal diaries during the Cultural Revolution in case something he wrote about Mao might get him in trouble with the teenage Red Guard.

In 1988, Dr. Li left China for good with Lillian (his wife), who was suffering from kidney trouble, and joined their sons, Chong and Erchong, and daughter-in-law Mei, near Chicago.

His decision to set down his account of Mao’s private life was not easy since he had destroyed the 40 notebooks of his private diary during the Cultural Revolution—almost thirty years earlier.

It wouldn’t be until after Dr. Li’s wife died of kidney failure in 1989, that he would start writing the memoir. “In her last days in the hospital, before she slipped into a coma,” says Li, “she urged me to write this book…”

One of Li’s collaborators involved in editing and revisions of the memoir, the western historian Anne F. Thurston, noted that because of this, Dr. Li’s claims were “fallible” and might “be wrong”.

One of the many critics of Li’s memoir was Qi Benyu, a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China that was connected with the left wing of the Cultural Revolution Group and the red-guard power seizures of 1967.

Qi had no reason to love Mao since he was arrested and imprisoned at Mao’s order in 1968 and stayed in prison until 1986—a decade before Li wrote and published his memoir. Before prison, Qi spent several years near Mao and says he never heard any rumors of Mao having extra-marital affairs despite the fact that other senior Party members were known to have done this. Qi also said that most of the Cultural Revolution part of Li’s memoir consisted of information gleaned from newspapers, journals and other people’s writings.

Continued on December 17, 2011 in  On the trail of Dr Li Zhisui’s illusive Memories – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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On the trail of Dr Li Zhisui’s illusive Memories – Part 1/4

December 15, 2011

“Memory is imperfect. This is because we often do not see things accurately in the first place. But even if we take in a reasonably accurate picture of some experience, it does not necessarily stay perfectly intact in memory.

“Another force is at work. The memory traces can actually undergo distortion. With the passage of time, with proper motivation, with the introduction of special kinds of interfering facts, the memory traces seem sometimes to change or become transformed.

“These distortions can be quite frightening, for they can cause us to have memories of things that never happened. Even in the most intelligent among us is memory thus malleable.” — Source: Elizabeth Loftus

For an example of what professor Loftus is talking about, we learn about faulty memories from Amy Chua when she discussed the writing of her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

“The book was in many ways a family project. Rubenfeld [Chua’s husband] and their daughters read every draft and tried to reconcile their different memories. The final version reflects “four different sets of memories,” Chua said. “It was like family therapy.” Source: Stamford Advocate

During the debate with Troy Parfitt, the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas, Parfitt mentioned Dr. Li Zhisui’s memoir of Mao to support his opinions of Mao and China.

Parfitt wrote, “Mao’s personal physician, Dr. Li Zhishui (1919 – 1995), a man who knew Mao intimately and saw him nearly every day he was in power, wrote a 736-page biography about the ruler called The Private Life of Chairman Mao. In it, Li describes Mao’s thought-process as “prescientific,” adding that Mao himself was “incapable of love and devoid of human feeling.”

It may come as a surprise to those that read Dr. Li’s memoir of Mao that Li was only one of Mao’s doctors. In addition, he wasn’t with Mao every day he was in power as Parfitt claimed.

In fact, Dr. Li did not become Mao’s doctor until June 3, 1957, and Mao became the leader of China in 1949.

Then in 1965, eight years later, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Dr Li was recruited into what was called the Socialist Education Program. He and those Sent Down with him were assigned to a destitute village in Zhejiang Province. Source: Around the Bend With Mao Zedong

Another source, “Mao’s Last Revolution” by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, puts Dr Li in rural Jiangxi Province, so maybe he spent time in both provinces during the Cultural Revolution.

Continued on December 15, 2011 in On the trail of Dr Li Zhisui’s illusive Memories – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Discussion with Troy Parfitt, the author of “Why China Will Never Rule the World” – Part 1/12

November 27, 2011

Note from Blog’s host: In this discussion, Parfitt has agreed to ask me five questions and I will ask him five. After each answer, a response and then a final word will be allowed. Since each question, answer, response and final word may run 600 to a thousand words, this discussion of China and its culture will be a twelve-part series.

At times during this debate, the reader may sense that ‘Responses’ and ‘Final Words’ are clipped and often incomplete. That may be due to the fact that Parfitt and Lofthouse agreed to limit the number of words for each answer to 350 and 150 words for each ‘response’ in addition to another 150 for the ‘final word’.

In that case, readers may weigh in with comments that may request either Parfitt and/or Lofthouse to respond further. However, comments that insult and are deemed vulgar will not appear and will be “censored“.

Post 12 concludes this discussion with two 500 word ‘Closing Statements’. Each author selected the embedded videos that support his position/opinions.

Part 1 introduces the two authors showing the different paths each took to gain an understanding and education of China’s history, people and culture.

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Troy Parfitt is the author of Notes from the Other China – Adventures in Asia and Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas— From Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, Troy has a background in American history and Canadian political science, as well as accreditation in teaching English as a Second Language (ESL).

Troy lived and taught ESL in Seoul, South Korea for nearly two years and in Taipei, Taiwan for more than ten. It was in Taipei where Troy became interested in Sinology. He currently resides in Canada and is a writing consultant at a Canadian university.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of The Concubine Saga — In early 1999, he was introduced to China’s history and culture through the woman he would marry a few months later. That education has continued for more than a decade.

His wife was born in Shanghai and grew up during Mao’s Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution where she spent three years in a labor camp along with tens of millions of mainland Chinese youth to be educated in Mao’s attempt to erase the old culture and make China stronger to recover and survive the Western invasion of Asia. One of Mao’s first moves was to liberate women and elevate them to be equal to men when he famously announced that women held up half of the sky.

Since 1999, Lloyd has traveled extensively in mainland China with his wife as his tutor. In fact, he and his wife have a flat in one of the suburbs of Shanghai. He also spent about a decade learning about China through Robert Hart’s journals and letters (1835- 1911).

Hart is known as the godfather of China’s modernization. The Concubine Sage is the fictional story of Robert Hart’s early years in China and of his real-life love story with a Chinese woman, his concubine Ayaou. Lloyd’s reference library of China fills several shelves in his home office and he has written more than a half-million words about China for this Blog.

Continued on November 28, 2011 in Discussion with Troy Parfitt, the author of “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” – Part 2

See Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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China’s [Politically Motivated?] Science Fiction Craze – Part 4/4

November 23, 2011

Even after 1949 with the founding of the People’s Republic of China, science fiction literature continued to flourish. During this period, the genre adopted a popular science approach and directed the majority of its stories towards younger readers.

However, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), science fiction stagnated and then revived after March 1978 when the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council convened a national scientific congress in Beijing, proclaiming to China, “Science’s spring has come.”

Scientific enthusiasm and popular science followed, greatly promoting the development of science fiction in China.

From China.org we learn, “The monthly circulation of Science Fiction World, one of China’s most popular magazines, has exceeded 500,000, dwarfing all international counterparts. Yang Xiao, head of the magazine’s editorial board, said 70 percent of its readers were students who shared single copies of the journal between dozens of friends because they could not afford their own. Millions of Chinese young people were affected by science fiction, said Yang, who hailed the rise of the modernist genre among the people who would decide the nation’s future.”

Another sign of the progress of science fiction literature in China first took place August 25, 2007 at the Chengdu International SF/F Conference. Over two days, authors from America, Canada, Britain, Russia, Japan, and China, and over twenty-thousand science fiction fans arrived in Chengdu for the event, which in turn increased the influence of SF in China due to media coverage.

Then from Chinese Science Fiction.org, we discover the second Chengdu Science Fiction and Fantasy conference was held November 12, 2011 in Chengdu.

Meanwhile, China continues with plans to build a space station, and then a productive mining colony of rare-earth minerals on the moon with a future exploration of Mars on the books, while the United States space program languishes.

The cause of this development is due to the US national debt and the costs of the war on Islamic terrorism, which may have been caused by what Henry Kissinger calls, “American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world” even if the world isn’t interested resulting in this resistance from the Middle East.

In addition, many young people in the United States with a high sense of self-esteem do not read books while watching too much TV has been scientifically linked to lack of a development in part of the brain where imagination blossoms.

Return to China’s [Politically Motivated?] Science Fiction Craze – Part 3 or start with Part 1

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Note: You may read more on this topic [written by British thriller writer O. C. Heaton] over at A Rush of Green.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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