Li Rui

People’s Republic of China state institutions Dissident 1917–2019 ○ Natural causes

Mao’s secretary who defied him at Lushan, author of the Records of the Lushan Conference and advocate of inner-party democracy

From Pingjiang, Hunan, he joined the Communist Party in 1937 as a Wuhan University student and was held for over a year as a suspected spy in the “rescue campaign” of 1943. After 1949 he joined the Ministry of Water Resources and in 1958 became its youngest vice-minister; his case against the Three Gorges Dam caught Mao’s eye and made him Mao’s part-time secretary for industry. At Lushan in 1959 he criticised the Great Leap and refused to denounce Peng Dehuai, lost his party membership and was sent to a labour camp in Heilongjiang; in the Cultural Revolution he spent eight years in solitary confinement in Qincheng Prison. Rehabilitated after Mao’s death, he was vice-minister of the power industry and deputy head of the Organisation Department, and in retirement wrote on Mao and called for press freedom and inner-party democracy. He died in 2019, aged 101.

Also known as: Li Housheng