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In August 2013, Josh Cheng, a Chinese businessman, was reading the newly published memoir of Li Rui, a senior Chinese Communist Party official, when he got an idea. In the book, which was banned in mainland China because it criticized the party, Li Rui revealed that he had maintained a diary since the 1930s, when he first joined the Chinese revolution.¹Cheng had secured his copy in Hong Kong. As a one-time secretary to Party chairman Mao Zedong, Li’s personal diaries were sure to offer an invaluable perspective on critical events in modern Chinese history. Li intimated that he planned to entrust the diaries to his daughter, Li Nanyang, so she could find a place for them to be studied after he died.

“It’s hard to remember the details of what transpired when I worked at the Central Organization Department,” Li Rui wrote.” But I’ve kept a diary almost every day. After I die, my daughter, Nanyang, will sort it out.”

When Cheng, a graduate of Stanford University, read this, he immediately thought of Stanford’s Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace, which was already home to, among others, the papers of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and Mei Yiqi, a heralded Chinese educator and a relative of Cheng’s wife. A self-described “history buff,” Cheng wanted to contribute to the world’s understanding of China. All he had to do was convince the daughter, Li Nanyang, to give the diaries to Stanford when the time came. 

During a visit to Stanford later that month, Cheng shared the idea with a group of Stanford professors whose support, he said in a legal deposition given in May, was “overwhelming.” Jean Oi, a professor of political science at Stanford who was the founding director in 2011 of the Stanford Center at Peking University, connected Cheng to Hoover. On a subsequent trip to Beijing, in November 2013, Cheng found Li Rui’s daughter. She, too, was keen, and according to Cheng’s deposition, she convinced her then 96-year-old father that Stanford was the right choice. Li Nanyang had already been smuggling parts of her father’s papers out of China since 2004 — sometimes on tiny flash drives; sometimes whole volumes stuffed in her handbag — and in February 2014, she started passing them on to Stanford. In all, she moved about 100 volumes of diaries, letters, poems and various other documents belonging to her father out of China.

Hoover, however, didn’t acknowledge that it had the diaries until Feb. 16, 2019 — the day Li Rui died. Two months later, on April 23, Hoover held an event to celebrate the addition of Li Rui’s papers to its collection. There, Li Nanyang shared the podium with Ian Johnson, a prominent writer on China, and other specialists on China. Johnson described Li Rui as a “patron saint” of the “unofficial history” movement in China. Cheng sat in the audience, pleased he could help the very university that, he told the deposition, had “changed my life.”

Little did Josh Cheng know, but his innocent aspiration to advance the study of Chinese history would touch off a trans-continental legal battle pitting Stanford and Li Nanyang against Li Rui’s 91-year-old second-wife Zhang Yuzhen, who wants the diaries back in China. Two courts in Beijing have already ruled that Li Rui’s papers should be returned to Zhang Yuzhen, according to Chinese inheritance law. Now, because Stanford’s lawyers claim they were denied the chance to represent Stanford’s case by the Chinese courts, they have filed suit in an American one. A third trial is set to begin in 2023 in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California to determine who owns the diaries.

Legal expenses for the fight are already into the millions. In Beijing, Zhang Yuzhen, a retiree on a small government pension, has referred all questions about the case to the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, which is believed to be footing her side of the bill; Stanford University is paying Hoover’s.

At first blush, the Li Rui story is a simple one. A diary written by an official who operated at the apex of power in Communist China shows up in the archives of the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace. Desperate to censor the study of its history, the Chinese Communist Party wants the papers back. For anyone in favor of academic freedom and preserving honest accounts of history — i.e., most Western observers — the verdict would appear to be obvious: Hoover should remain in possession of the diaries. As Eric Wakin, the director of Hoover’s library and archives, puts it, “How many insider accounts do you have from Communist China?” 

But a closer look reveals complexities and competing values not simply between the United States and China but within the United States as well.

For one, experts on Chinese law in the United States are by no means united in their support of Hoover. Jacques deLisle, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, is serving as an expert witness for Zhang Yuzhen’s side of the case. After reading the verdicts from the two Chinese courts, deLisle says that both appear to have appropriately applied Chinese law to the facts as found by the courts. 

“Where it’s a matter of a Chinese court properly applying Chinese law, there’s very little one can legitimately object to, at least where the Chinese law isn’t objectionable on, say, human rights grounds,” he says. And human rights grounds, he notes, don’t figure in this case.

Nicholas C. Howson, a professor of Chinese law at the University of Michigan, says that simply because Americans might not like rulings by the Chinese judiciary, that doesn’t make them unlawful or illegitimate. 

“We have been pressing the PRC to build rule of law in the civil and criminal law sectors for decades,” he says, “but then when rulings in perfect conformity with law are inconvenient or contrary to a parallel agenda of importance, we’d like to ignore those rulings or attack them.” 

Put another way, what should be done when values like the free-flow of information, transparency and scholarly access to valuable historical information conflict with what are seen as equally important values like the rule of law and the protection of personal and property rights? 

‘A CHINESE TREASURE’ 

Who was Li Rui? The answer to this question is at the center of this case. Was Li Rui, as the Stanford side argues, a closet dissident — a frequent and pointed critic of China’s system who lobbied for democratically-oriented political change? His daughter, Li Nanyang, has said it’s only natural that her father wanted his diaries out of China so they could be open to all. Li Rui visited Hoover in 1989, Li Nanyang told The Wire, and “was deeply impressed by the idea of an open archive and the free exchange of ideas.”

Or was Li Rui, as the other side argues, a committed member of the Chinese Communist Party who, despite years in prison for criticizing Mao Zedong, resolutely refused to relinquish his party membership and remained loyal to the party to the end? Someone like that, the legal team representing Zhang Yuzhen has argued, would never allow “a Chinese treasure” to leave his motherland.

“Anyone who knew Li Rui could not seriously believe that this longtime Chinese patriot and Communist party official would want his diaries stored outside China,” says Matthew Jacobs, an attorney at Vinson & Elkins LLP in San Francisco who represents Zhang Yuzhen, “much less at one of the most anti-China and anti-Communist institutions in the world.”

Pretty much the only thing the two sides agree is this: Li Rui served at the heart of China’s system for decades and his papers constitute a precious cache of information about modern Chinese history. When it comes to Chinese studies, says Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at American University and one of the few scholars to have read the diaries, “It’s hard to overstate the importance of the documents.” 

Democratic life in the party had already become abnormal, and our so-called democratic centralism was left only with centralism, focusing on the will of a single man.

Li Rui, writing in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward about the Party under Chairman Mao

Li Rui’s diary entries and subsequent writing on the Lushan Plenum, held between July and August 1959, for instance, show how that critical party meeting — and what Li Rui called Mao’s “leftist deviations” — led not only to a famine that killed upwards of 40 million people but also to the disastrous Cultural Revolution seven years later. During the plenum Mao purged his defense minister, Peng Dehuai, after he had criticized Mao’s policies. At the time, Li Rui refused to denounce Peng and was himself exiled to a labor camp and then to prison, where he spent eight years in solitary confinement. 

“Democratic life in the party had already become abnormal,” Li wrote, “and our so-called democratic centralism was left only with centralism, focusing on the will of a single man.” Chairman Mao, Li wrote, “could not be criticized.” If he was, Li wrote, “the whole party would severely punish any such offenders.” Li Rui’s indictment of Mao for policies that killed tens of millions of people is now illegal in China where the Communist party has outlawed such criticism, branding it “historical nihilism.”

Li Rui’s entries also provide a historically-important perspective on the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests. Li Rui’s entries from April through July of 1989 demonstrate how widespread support was for political reform among the top echelons of the party and how widespread opposition to a bloody crackdown was among senior military officers. 

“Today is an unforgettable May 17th,” he wrote of a gorgeous spring day in 1989 when upwards of one million people took to the streets in Beijing to demonstrate for a freer China. “The whole city is tumbling to support students.” Li Rui noted that workers had begun to join the protests, shouting slogans calling for political reform. “Ingenuity and talent are gushing out at this time,” he wrote. 

Such entries pop the party’s official narrative that the demonstrations were the work of a small group of “counter-revolutionaries.” This is another reason why the party wants them off-limits.

Li Rui also wrote about a group of relatively liberal party officials — of which he was a member — and their efforts to advise party boss Zhao Ziyang, who wanted China to move in a more democratic direction. In an entry on May 3, 1989, Li Rui notes that in addition to arguing against “shedding blood,” Zhao had proposed a series of far-reaching reforms — including reducing the privileges of the sons and daughters of China’s party elite, replacing a swath of middle-level party officials with better-educated younger graduates and “solving the issue of free speech” by opening up the media to private newspapers. Zhao’s more liberal views are widely known, but Li Rui’s diaries add granularity to the conclusion that Zhao was ready to negotiate with the students and was therefore silenced. 

In the end, Zhao Ziyang lost out to hardline party officials who demanded an iron response to the demonstrations — A “black weekend” was how Li Rui entitled a diary entry on June 4 — and Zhao spent the rest of his life under house arrest until he died in 2005. Starting in July 1989, Li Rui was called before a series of panels which interrogated him on his activities and views. On July 7, he told his diary he was ordered to write a self-criticism. Li’s interrogators kept on rejecting it. By Sept. 11, 1989, the document had grown to more than 5,000 characters and it still wasn’t enough. “I’ve started the third draft of my self-criticism,” he wrote. “I’m totally reluctant.”

Perhaps of most interest today, Li Rui also had a lot to say about China’s current party boss, Xi Jinping — and much of what he says contradicts the officially-approved narrative about Xi and his rise to power. Li Rui was close with Xi’s father, a senior party official named Xi Zhongxun, and wrote a fair bit about Xi Zhongxun’s constant lobbying on behalf of his son. In a diary entry in 1987, Li Rui recounts that the party secretary of Hebei province became so enraged at Xi Zhongxun’s advocacy for his son that he refused to promote Xi Jinping. Xi Zhongxun then arranged for Jinping to be transferred from Hebei to Fujian province where the party secretary there was more amenable to currying favor with Beijing’s elite by providing their offspring with sinecures. When Xi Jinping went to bid farewell to the party secretary of Hebei, the man, Li Rui wrote, brushed Xi Jinping off. “You are a cadre managed by the party center,” he said, “don’t talk to me.”

When Xi Jinping was appointed to another term as party-secretary at the 19^th Party Congress in 2017, Li smirked to his diary: “The front pages are covered with big headshots of Xi, not even the Mao era reached this level.”

Still, because of his friendship with Xi Zhongxun, Li Rui had been predisposed to support Xi Jinping. But the diaries trace an arc of Li Rui’s increasing alarm at Xi Jinping. In 2013 soon after Xi took power, Li Rui tried to help a friend, Jiang Yanyong, a military physician who in 2003 exposed how China was covering up its SARS epidemic. Jiang wanted permission to travel to Taiwan, and Li Rui appealed on his behalf to the party’s Organization Department. In his diary, Li Rui noted that someone from the department then called him. “Comrade Xi Jinping wants us to say,” the caller said, “You, Li Rui, in the future should be less nosy.” When Xi Jinping was appointed to another term as party-secretary at the 19^th Party Congress in 2017, Li smirked to his diary: “The front pages are covered with big headshots of Xi, not even the Mao era reached this level.”

No wonder the Chinese Communist Party wants the diaries back.

MUDDY FACTS AND WOBBLY BRIDGES 

When it comes to determining the rightful custodian of Li Rui’s diaries, there are three competing aspects to balance: legal, factual and contextual. 

The legal part of the case involves an argument about whether the verdicts in the Chinese courts — that Li Rui’s diaries are part of his estate and should be returned to China — are legitimate.  While some say the Chinese courts correctly applied inheritance and property laws to side with Li Rui’s widow, lawyers representing Stanford say that the Chinese court rulings are illegitimate. Stanford’s attorney, Mark D. Litvack, of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP in Los Angeles, says the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles refused to provide Stanford with papers that would allow it to present its case in Beijing. At the consulate, Litvack says, his colleagues were told “we know who you are and what this case is about. We will never legalize these papers.” When lawyers tried to represent Stanford at one point in Beijing, Litvack told The Wire, Chinese bailiffs escorted them from the courtroom. The Chinese embassy did not respond to an email seeking comment on this claim.

“How can anyone say there’s law in China,” says Li Nanyang. “All these experts say, ‘you have to respect Chinese law.’ Are they serious? The only law in China is the Chinese Communist Party.”

Lawyers representing Zhang Yuzhen contend, however, that Stanford purposely decided not to argue the case in China and launched the suit in U.S. federal court because it knew that it could only win the case in the United States. Stanford is “forum shopping,” says attorney Matthew Jacobs. One way to understand Stanford’s move to bring the case to the United States, Jacobs said, was by “flipping it.”  

“If historically significant original documents about, say, the Vietnam war had been stolen and taken to a foreign country, and a U.S. Court ordered their return,” Jacobs told The Wire, “you would hope and expect the other country’s courts to respect that ruling and return the materials.” The same should hold true for Li Rui’s diaries, he says.

How can anyone say there’s law in China… All these experts say, ‘you have to respect Chinese law.’ Are they serious? The only law in China is the Chinese Communist Party.

Li Nanyang, daughter of Li Rui

Michigan’s Nicholas Howson, who is not involved in the case, says there is plenty of precedent for American courts “enforcing a PRC judgment under PRC law,” including cases involving inheritance and property rights. China’s criminal justice system has a lot of problems, he says, but the Li Rui case doesn’t involve a criminal prosecution. It belongs, he says, to “the quotidien world” where U.S. courts enforce civil judgments of foreign courts.

As for the facts of the case, they are muddy. Did Li Rui want the diaries donated to Hoover or not? Li Rui left unsigned a will that bequeaths the diaries to his second wife. Also left unsigned is a document drawn up by his daughter, Li Nanyang, entrusting the diaries to her and by extension Hoover. The official donation document to Hoover carries only Li Nanyang’s signature. Li Nanyang said she signed the document herself because if she’d tried to get her father’s signature notarized in China, the Communist Party would have intervened.

A few facts do appear to be clear. Li Rui knew that his daughter wanted to move his diaries to Hoover. In his deposition, Josh Cheng told lawyers that he’d met Li Rui in Beijing several times in 2014 and 2015 and spoke with him about the idea. Autographing one of his books for Cheng, Li Rui thanked Cheng for serving as “a bridge” between him and Hoover.

Li’s diaries also mention his plans to donate his papers to Hoover. In an entry on Oct. 15, 2017, he writes about a visit by his daughter who discussed the donation plan with him. Li Nanyang was “busy with this important thing,” he writes. Earlier, in an entry on Jan. 30 of that year, he noted that he had advised others in party circles to follow his way of “handling things, i.e. giving the diaries to Hoover.” Li Rui wrote that at least one of his associates, Du Daozheng, a prominent liberal journalist and editor, was considering following Li Rui’s lead. (He didn’t in the end.)

There are other indications, however, that Li Rui had second thoughts and that his relationship with his daughter was often rocky. Li Nanyang, a 71-year-old U.S. permanent resident, is fiery. She’s a passionate supporter of ex-President Donald Trump and right-wing conspiracy theories in the United States. There’s also no love lost between her and Zhang Yuzhen, Li Rui’s widow, who married Li Rui in 1979. In 2020, Li Nanyang authored a book on Zhang Yuzhen titled My Stepmother: Wife and Political Commissar in which she accused the Communist Party of assigning Zhang to marry her father so that the party could monitor the influential, longtime critic. In an interview on Oct. 1, 2014, Li Rui expressed exasperation with his daughter’s deeply anti-communist views. “Li Nanyang is Li Nanyang and I am me,” he said. “Li Nanyang is my daughter but she can’t represent me, and I don’t allow her to represent me.”

The wider context surrounding the case is also impossible to ignore. Li Rui’s case is unspooling against a backdrop of unprecedented friction in U.S.-China relations — friction that is fueled, in part, by a withering crackdown on speech and thought in China. The presence of Li Rui’s diaries on U.S. soil, American University’s Torigian notes, is yet another example, that “America has become the repository of Chinese history.” 

In China, historical archives, which used to be open, have been shuttered to foreign and Chinese historians alike. Chinese censors are also engaging in a bizarre type of ex post facto censorship, deleting articles from digital collections of periodicals dating back to the 1950s because the articles are sympathetic to the idea of a more liberal China. The United States is one of the only countries that still keeps the hard copies of many of those magazines. 

“Chinese historians now come to the U.S. to study their history,” Torigian says, “because they often can’t access the uncensored materials at home.” 

This is why, says Hoover’s Wakin, the fight to keep the diaries is so important. Hoover can’t just make a copy of the diaries and return the originals to China. “In this day and age of rampant digital alterations,” Wakin says, “having the original documents is important to make sure they aren’t altered.”

For his part, Josh Cheng doesn’t want anything to do with the case anymore. In his deposition, he said he was worried that it had become too “political.” Cheng has found another way to promote an understanding of China. For the last six years, he’s been the executive director of the Stanford Center at Peking University, which according to its site, “represents a bridge across the Pacific for Stanford — a platform for education and research for faculty and students from all of Stanford’s seven separate schools — bringing together East and West.”

In an email response, Jean Oi, the Stanford Center’s founder, told The Wire: “I believe it clear from the diaries themselves that Li Rui was proud to have his materials at Stanford and I am glad I could help facilitate that desire, allowing scholars from around the globe to study Li Rui’s writings.”

Regardless of where Li Rui’s diaries end up, the case highlights just how wobbly this “bridge” has become for people like Cheng and institutions like Stanford. How should they weigh their desire to remain in the good graces of the People’s Republic of China — which for Stanford represents a huge source of talent and money — against the liberal ideas that made these institutions great in the first place? 

Delicately, if an email from Oi, the Stanford Center’s founder, to Cheng is any indication. In a note on Feb. 17, 2019, she agreed with Cheng’s assessment that they should keep a low profile. 

“Yes,” Oi wrote to Cheng, “also think it would be a good idea to keep our role quiet.” 

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