A Seven-Year Campaign Defeated
On March 31, 2026, a U.S. federal district court in California issued a landmark ruling, concluding one of the most significant transnational legal battles between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and an American academic institution. The court declared that the private archives of Li Rui, —a veteran CCP insider and one-time secretary to Mao Zedong—will remain permanently at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where they will stay freely accessible to the public.
According to Radio Free Asia, the litigation, initiated in 2019 by Li’s widow, Zhang Yuzhen, was framed as a family inheritance dispute. However, Zhang herself later disavowed the effort, famously stating that the lawsuit did not reflect her personal wishes and that “the organization”(a common euphemism for the CCP) had directed the effort.
The U.S. court’s decision is seen as a major blow to Beijing’s attempt to exercise “long-arm jurisdiction.” By rejecting the claim, the court effectively protected 40 boxes of handwritten manuscripts (roughly 10 million words including diaries from 1935 to 2018) that the Chinese state spent seven years attempting to seize and suppress.
Records the Party tried to erase
Li Rui’s diaries span 83 years and millions of characters, stripping away the carefully constructed mythologies of the CCP’s most controversial eras.
The Lushan Conference (1959): While official Beijing history frames this summit as a defense against “right-wing opportunism,” Li’s diaries reveal the raw reality of Mao’s indifference. He recorded Mao’s chilling response to the mass famine caused by the Great Leap Forward: “I don’t feel the slightest pain.”
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The Tiananmen Square Massacre (1989): Written from his home near Chang’an Avenue, Li’s entry for the night of June 3 reads simply: “Black weekend.” He documented the despair of senior military figures, including General Xiao Ke, who called the crackdown “a crime for the ages.”
The Xi Jinping Era: Perhaps most sensitive are Li’s critiques of China’s current leader. Having helped vet Xi for leadership in the 1980s, Li expressed late-life despair over the dismantling of reforms, famously noting on his deathbed that Xi’s intellectual depth was merely at an “elementary school level.”
A testament to survival
The archive’s existence is the result of three “miracles” of survival:
- The Hidden Notebooks: During the Cultural Revolution, Li managed to hide his most sensitive records from Red Guard searches. One notebook was even returned to him intact after his eight-year imprisonment.
- The “Ant-Moving” Operation: Between 2004 and 2018, Li’s daughter, Li Nanyang, meticulously smuggled the archives out of China. In a process she described as “ant-moving,” she transported the documents piece by piece past customs and informants to ensure their safety in the United States.
- The Choice of Hoover: Li Rui personally chose the Hoover Institution for his donation, knowing its reputation for preserving the diaries of other historical figures like Chiang Kai-shek. He sought a repository that transcended partisan politics, famously stating he wanted his life to be “completely exposed, made public to all.”
The verdict: truth over censorship
The federal court’s ruling upheld the legal agreement between Li Nanyang and Stanford, dismissing a prior ruling from a Beijing court that had favored the widow. The U.S. judge found that the Chinese legal proceedings lacked due process and were heavily influenced by state interests.
While Beijing’s agents successfully cleared out Li Rui’s study in China immediately after his death, they failed to capture the core of his legacy. The 40 boxes at Stanford represent a rare failure of the Party’s reach—a permanent record of history that cannot be incinerated or rewritten.
