A trial got underway this week in Oakland, California, to decide the ownership of diaries written by Li Rui, a former secretary to communist China’s founder Mao Zedong, who became a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party.

The trial will decide if Stanford University gets to keep the diaries donated by Li’s daughter or if they should go to Li’s widow, Zhang Yuzhen, his second wife, who is suing for the documents to be returned.

The university’s legal team and U.S.-based China scholars suspect Zhang’s lawsuit is bankrolled by Chinese authorities who aim to control the sensitive historic narrative on Mao and the Communist party.

“Li Rui is a living encyclopedia of the 80-year history of the Chinese Communist Party,” Cai Xia, a former professor at Beijing’s Central Party School who lives in the U.S., said in emailed replies to VOA Mandarin. “The Chinese Communist Party knows that the diaries contain history that cannot be exposed to the sunlight. Beijing will fight [to get] the diaries back at all costs.”

10 million words

Li wrote about 10 million words in scores of diaries, letters and notes during his lifetime, including criticism of Mao, the party and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.

On June 4, 1989, when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the military to clear pro-democracy protesters from Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds if not thousands, Li wrote, “I am restless all day long, and I always want to cry.”

On January 9, 2010, he wrote, “Mao’s actions are totally contrary to the universal values of freedom, democracy, scientific progress, and the rule of law.”

Li also criticized China’s current leader, President Xi Jinping.

In 2018, when China began removing term limits for Xi, he quoted in his diary a foreign media report, “Democracy Is Dead.”

In an interview with VOA Mandarin from his hospital bed that year, Li expressed disappointment with what he called Xi’s “low education.”

Li’s daughter Li Nanyang, a U.S. citizen, says before he died in 2019, she gave about 40 boxes of his documents to Stanford’s Hoover Institution, citing his wishes that they be preserved there, and she became a visiting fellow.

Zhang, Li’s widow, claims Li Nanyang exercised “undue influence” over her father and has denied any plan to suppress information in the documents other than “personal” information. She has also said Stanford can make copies of the documents. But Hoover Institute scholars argue that copies would lack the authenticity of the originals.

Zhang sued Stanford and Li Nanyang in 2019 in Beijing’s Xicheng District Court, which awarded the ownership of the documents to Zhang and ordered the university to return them within 30 days. Li Nanyang did not attend that trial.

Stanford that same year brought a “quiet title claim” against Zhang in the U.S., asking a federal court to step in and affirm its right to Li Rui’s archive.

Zhang hired an American lawyer and filed a counterclaim against Stanford and Li Nanyang in 2020, saying Li Nanyang “stole” personal information and “national treasures.” She accused Li Rui’s daughter and the university of “copyright infringement,” “public disclosure of private facts” and “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

Zhang’s lawyer in 2021 denied any involvement by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in supporting Zhang, despite lingering suspicions.

“I believed that from the beginning,” said Perry Link, a well-known sinologist and distinguished professor at the University of California, Riverside, to reporters outside the court Tuesday, a day before giving his testimony. “I am also prepared to present this argument in my testimony [that] the CCP is behind it.”

Link added that the party’s role is “so clear now that I don’t think I’d have to make that argument. I mean [Zhang] herself said that she doesn’t have the money or the will” to pursue a lawsuit.

Suspicions

On the second day of trial, Li Nanyang reiterated that her father had handed the diaries to Stanford University of his own free will.

Li Nanyang expressed her own suspicions about the case, first in a group email to friends, but her comments were then picked up by several Chinese media in May. She said she believes the CCP and the Chinese government are interested only in “covering up the truth” in order to “ensure that the image of the Communist Party will always be ‘great, glorious, and correct,’ and that it will always be able to govern.”

VOA Mandarin contacted the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco for a response but didn’t receive one by the time of publication.

Kicked out of party

Born in 1917, Li Rui enthusiastically threw himself into the revolution that saw China’s Communist Party seize power in 1949. In the mid-1950s, he briefly served as Mao’s secretary before a falling out that led to his being kicked out of the party and sentenced to eight years in prison.

When Li Rui was released in 1979, three years after Mao’s death, he was rehabilitated back into the party and promoted to executive deputy director of the Organization Department of the CCP Central Committee, responsible for selecting senior CCP officials.

In his later years, he became an outspoken critic of the CCP, calling for political reform and democratic constitutionalism, and was recognized as a liberal figure within the CCP, despite his often sharp criticism.

The Oakland trial will run through the end of the month.

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.