Mao’s Abuse-o-meter

---

La Torre de Alejandría

Israel Centeno

Based on testimonies from Dr. Li Zhisui

📉 Level 1:
👉 Abandonment of basic personal hygiene
— Mao stops brushing his teeth. Only rinses with tea and swallows it.
— Bathes exclusively in pools. Refuses tap water.

📈 Level 2:
👉 Absolute control of his court
— Eliminates critical advisors.
— Surrounds himself only with sycophants.

📊 Level 3:
👉 Abuse of young women
— Recruitment of teenagers for “therapeutic activities” in his bed.
— Recurrent genital infections and contempt for treatment.

📉 Level 4:
👉 Biopolitical cynicism
— Launches the “Great Leap Forward” without logistical oversight.
— Mass starvation: millions die while he takes a dip.

📈 Level 5:
👉 Decadence and necropolitics
— Paralyzed, he governs with incoherent phrases.
— Plans his mummification. His body remains on display.

---

The True Mao

Literary Criticism of Dr. Li Zhisui’s Biography

The Private Life of Chairman Mao is a biography that offers an intimate view into the life of Mao Zedong, told through the eyes of his personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui. This is not merely a historical account, but a psychological and moral study of a leader’s physical and ideological decay. Through its structure, voice, literary devices, and themes, the book becomes an unsettling exploration of power, intimacy, and betrayal.

The narrative follows a linear chronology, tracking Mao from his youth to his final days. While this structure allows for a clear progression, it sometimes risks flattening the complexities of such a multifaceted character. Yet Dr. Li breaks from strict chronology at key moments, inserting personal anecdotes and insights that offer glimpses into Mao’s contradictions, the darkness behind his charisma, and the moral erosion of his regime.

Li’s voice is critical: part-confessor, part-reluctant witness. As Mao’s doctor, he had access to the most private and vulnerable aspects of a man who projected invincibility to the public. This duality — between public myth and private decline — gives the book a compelling literary tension. Li’s tone oscillates between disillusionment and fascination, and while his proximity invites doubt, it also deepens the authenticity of the portrait.

The prose is rich with sensory detail and unsettling metaphors. Mao’s rotting teeth, his refusal to bathe, his addiction to sleeping pills, his physical decrepitude — all become metaphors for the rot at the heart of his rule. The body of the Chairman is treated not just medically, but symbolically: it decays in parallel with the ideals of the revolution. In many ways, Mao’s body is the last battlefield of the Communist utopia — bloated, breathless, refusing to die even after its time has passed.

The biography grapples with major themes: absolute power, moral solitude, ideological corruption, and the terrifying gap between political myth and human frailty. The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the purges of intellectuals — all these are recounted not just as historical events, but as manifestations of Mao’s psychological decline. The man who wanted to melt steel in the backyards of peasants ends up oxygenated, immobile, grotesque — a tragic figure who outlived his usefulness and became his own monument.

The book has not been free from criticism. Some have accused Li of bias, opportunism, or betrayal. But therein lies its strength: the ethical ambiguity of the narrator mirrors the moral ambiguity of the subject. This is not a book that offers easy answers. It is a work that forces the reader to confront questions about loyalty, complicity, and truth. How does one survive a dictator? How does one speak of him afterward?

The Private Life of Chairman Mao does not seek to demonize Mao entirely, but neither does it redeem him. It renders him human — and in doing so, terrifying. The body that once symbolized revolution becomes a metaphor for historical entropy. Dr. Li, reluctant chronicler of decline, gives us a story where politics, flesh, and memory converge into a devastating confession: even the most deified leaders decay.

This book reminds us that tyrants age. That even revolutions grow senile. That the bodies of men, like the regimes they build, eventually rot. And that sometimes, it takes a physician to write the most enduring literature of political horror.