In this remarkable book, partly history and partly memoir, Olivia Cox-Fill throws open a window onto life in the secluded world of China’s topmost leaders during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. At the book’s center is the story of Wu Jieping, the personal doctor to China’s premier Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing, the imperious wife of Mao Zedong and the most powerful member of the so-called “Gang of Four,” which dominated China in the last years of the Cultural Revolution. Cox-Fill, a writer and businesswoman with long experience in China, became friendly with Wu in the 1970s, and he eventually confided the story of his life to her in a series of stunningly candid interviews that took place across several decades, on the condition that she publish his story only after his death.
Dr. Wu’s life encapsulated the history of China in the twentieth century. Born into an affluent family in the province of Jiangsu in 1917, he enjoyed a privileged upbringing and an excellent medical education, which included a stint at the University of Chicago after World War II. He could have remained in the United States, but was repelled by the anti-Chinese racism he encountered, and returned to China, where he also hoped to contribute to the country’s rebuilding after the war. Like many Chinese intellectuals of his generation, he was drawn to what he saw as the selfless honesty of Communists he encountered in the revolution’s early years, and he readily embraced Marxism.
Later events gradually eroded his enthusiasm, as he witnessed the catastrophic damage wrought by the so-called “Great Leap Forward” of the late 1950s, which Mao Zedong delusionally promised would overtake Britain in production within just a few years. In fact, it wrecked China’s already fragile economy. The regime even took away Dr. Wu’s mother’s metal bed frame and rice cooker to be melted down for industrial use. “We were there for [Mao] to mould according to his whims,” he told Cox-Fill. “Mao thought he knew everything, but he did not.”
Already regarded as the most eminent urologist in Beijing, in 1955 Dr. Wu was recruited to treat Zhou Enlai for appendicitis and cancer of the urinary tract. He came to respect Zhou for both his reasonableness and for his relentless work ethic despite potentially crippling ailments. Dr. Wu’s admiration grew during the Cultural Revolution when Zhou worked to protect scientists and intellectuals from the excesses of the hardline Maoists, as Red Guards ransacked homes and destroyed or confiscated evidence of “bourgeois culture,” including art works, books, antiques, and personal mementos. Medical colleagues with the best qualifications were abruptly reduced to menial jobs such as pig-farming and toilet-cleaning, while some of his high-ranking patients simply disappeared. Zhou himself collapsed with a heart attack after twenty-two straight hours of “struggle” – that is, violent personal attacks by militants. Dr. Wu discouraged his own children from pursuing an academic education, telling them, “It’s much safer to be an ordinary worker right now.” As Madame Mao’s physician he was fortunately spared the worst of the terror.
For a decade, Dr. Wu was “at the beck and call” of Jiang Qing, and lived for extended periods apart from his own family at the leadership’s luxurious compound known at Diaoyutai, near the Forbidden City, in central Beijing. He told Cox-Fill, “We lived in a bubble at Diaoyutai.” At any hour, Jiang Qing would capriciously demand his attendance, not just for medical treatment, but sometimes simply to keep her company, for instance to translate the old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films she liked to watch in the middle of the night or, on one particularly trying occasion, to procure for her a deck of American playing cards, an extraordinarily difficult operation that involved asking the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations in New York to personally buy the deck and send it to Beijing. Her “requests” were always commands. “We all lived in terror of being called to account for deeds we could not imagine,” he told Cox-Fill.
By the end of 1975, the dying Zhou Enlai had received no fewer than one hundred blood transfusions and undergone six surgeries. Dr. Wu struggled to keep him alive, but he finally expired in January 1976. Mao Zedong, also debilitated, died that September. Jiang Qing and the “Gang of Four” were finally overthrown a few months afterward. She died in prison by suicide, unrepentant, in 1991.
Remarkably, Dr. Wu survived his often harrowing experience among the Communist elite with his medical reputation intact. In the decades that followed, he was showered with awards and rose to become president of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
Cox-Fill writes chiefly as a reporter rather than as a historian, and as a loyal friend of Dr. Wu. Although she supplements his account with narrative background that places him within the larger context of the tumultuous events that tormented China beyond the cosseted confines of Diaoyutai, we are obliged to take much of his story on faith. This book should be essential reading for any student of the Maoist years. It is the nearest we have to an inside view of China’s paramount leaders from an intimate observer. Cox-Fill has performed an extraordinary service by bringing Dr. Wu’s recollections to the light of day. Although the most systematically brutalizing years of Chinese Communism may have ended, Cox-Fill reminds us that widespread repression still thrives in contemporary China, where with the advent of new technologies it has taken on inventive and sinister forms since Dr. Wu’s death in 2011.
Fergus B. Bordewich is the author of many books on American political history. He worked as a journalist in China in the 1980s.
