According to to various memoirs he suffered insomnia, shed tears over the failure of the Great Leap Forward, fell asleep with books all over the bed and requested that songs from Song Dynasty be played during an operation to remove cataracts from his eyes in 1975. Henry Kissinger once wrote that the Great Helmsman "exuded more concentrated willpower and determination than any other leader I have encountered, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle," Mao reportedly never bathed, preferring instead to be rubbed down with a hot towel. Mao was described by various people who met him as being hidebound, anti-cosmopolitan, ambitious, tough, erratic, canny, charismatic, self-aggrandizing, and a man who exaggerated differences and hated peasants despite his purported ambitions to help them. REPRESSION UNDER MAO, THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND NIXON REPUBLICAN CHINA, MAO AND THE EARLY COMMUNIST PERIOD Mao's Character and Physique "China Witness, Voices from a Silent Generation" by Xinran (Pantheon Books, 2009) is collection of oral histories from Chinese who survived the Mao period. "Fanshen" by William Hinton is the classic account of rural revolution during the communist-led civil war in the late 1940s. Also check out "Mao's New World: Political Culture in the Early People's Republic" by Chang-tai Hung (Cornell University Press, 2011) and "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" by Dr. There is also a Mao biography by Jonathon Spence. It characterizes Mao as cruel, materialistic, self-centered and a leader who used terror with the aim of ruling the world. President George Bush and embraced by the American right as a condemnation of Communism. Jung Chang, author of "Wild Swans", and her husband John Halliday, a British historian, portrays Mao as villain on the level of Hitler and Stalin. Websites and Sources Mao Zedong Wikipedia article Wikipedia Mao Internet Library Paul Noll Mao site /China/Mao Mao Quotations New York Times īooks: "Mao the Untold Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Knopf. Mao gave Evita Peron an ornately detailed screen, behind which she dressed and undressed. After the book was published, Zhisui's publisher, Random House, was attacked by Chinese authorities for producing a book “awash in lies and malice." In 1988, he fled to Chicago where his two sons lived, and in 1989 he promised his wife on her deathbed that he would record his story for his children and later generations. After Mao died in 1976 the doctor began writing what he remembered and this time he filled 20 notebooks. He sometimes taught the chairman English.Li filled 40 notebooks with observation of Mao in the 1950s and 60s, but he burned these out of fear of reprisals during the Cultural Revolution. He began working for Mao when he was 35 years old. īorn into a family of physicians, including two who served the Chinese emperor, Li was trained at an American-financed medical school in China and worked as a ship's surgeon in Australia for one year. Although at least one became pregnant, Dr Li knew that Mao was infertile he never revealed this to his patient. He continued, against Dr Li’s advice, to sleep with his numerous young partners, some of whom were described as his nurses. For years Dr Li listened to Mao boasting about his sexual practices and prowess he also treated the Great Helmsman for various venereal diseases. Jonathan Mirsky wrote in The Spectator, “ His consumption of young women, while he was married to Jiang Qing, one of the Gang of Four, was notorious, and became more so after the publication in 1994 of The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Li Zhisui, Mao’s doctor. Li often slept in a small room next to Mao's ballroom-size bedroom, traveled with him and had many late night conversations with him. Li Zhisui, Mao's personal physician for nearly 22 years. Andy Warhol's take on Mao A rare glimpse into Mao's personal life was furnished in "The Private Life of Chairman Mao", a 1994 book written by Dr.
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