Protected under lock and key at Stanford University, the personal diary of a prominent Chinese political official offers a rare inside look at eight tumultuous decades of Communist Party rule, recounting an unvarnished version of history at a time when the nation’s government is seeking to sanitize its past.
But the late Li Rui’s 94-year-old widow says the diary belongs to her, not Stanford. She’s filed a suit against Stanford, demanding its return to her in China.
“The case has enormous significance,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “In chapter and verse, Li Rui documented the myriad ways in which the Chinese Communist Party was very savage, inequitable and unjust.”
The diaries of former Chinese official Li Rui, a prominent critic of the Chinese Communist Party, are at the center of a U.S. legal battle. Stanford University assets that the diaries should remain at its Hoover Institution, where his daughter donated them, and not be returned to his elderly widow, who has been accused of acting as a front for Chinese authorities.(Hoover Institution)
The fight over its fate played out in an Oakland federal courtroom this week, pitting Stanford’s prestigious Hoover Institution Library & Archives against Li’s second wife and widow, Zhang Yuzhen, who the university alleges is a front for China’s powerful Communist Party.
It’s more than just an inheritance dispute. Historians fear that if the diary is returned to China, the government may alter it to rewrite the past. The trial before U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar ends on Thursday, and a decision will come later.
The real opponent, Stanford attorneys say, is not Li’s elderly widow, who likely has little income, but the Chinese government bankrolling the case.
“For political control, it’s very important to have a perfect version of history presented to the Chinese public,” said Perry Link, a leading American China scholar at UC Riverside and an emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton. “What this diary does is undermine that perfect picture.”
The handwritten diary and 40 boxes of other materials — letters, meeting minutes, work notes, poetry and photographs — document the life of Li, a top official and personal secretary to longtime party leader Mao Zedong. He died in China in 2019 at the age of 101.
They were donated by his daughter, Nanyang Li, a physicist and vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party who lives in the East Bay. According to court filings, Jiashu Cheng of the Stanford Center at Peking University realized the historical importance of the diaries in 2013 and approached the family about a possible donation. Li feared that the materials would be destroyed by the Party.
With her stepmother’s assistance, Nanyang Li gathered diaries and notebooks, according to court filings. She says she carried the materials out of China to honor her father’s wish that they rest at Stanford’s famed archives, where they would be accessible to international scholars.
Nanyang Li, daughter of former Chinese Communist Party official and critic Li Rui, says that …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
