Li Rui’s story

The bewilderment, familial dislocation and altered state of reality which coloured the Cultural Revolution are most forcefully conveyed in Morning Sun through the extraordinary story of Li Rui (right) and his daughter Li Nanyang.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward, involving a mass re-organisation of labour and agriculture, had proven a spectacular failure by the early 1960s, contributing to mass famine and the death by starvation of an estimated 30 million people.

Despite the failure, few were prepared to tell the revered leader that the experiment had failed and extravagantly exaggerated production figures were published to hide the problem.

Li Rui, then a secretary of Mao, wrote to him saying that the publication of false production figures was masking a massive problem. At first exalted for highlighting the potential propaganda value of false production figures, Li Rui was subsequently disgraced in the late 1950s and again during the Cultural Revolution, enduring almost two decades of exile and public humiliation before being exonerated and rehabilitated in the late 1970s.

His daughter, Li Nanyang (left), was very young when her father was first discredited and grew up believing in the values of the Cultural Revolution, wishing her father was dead.

In Morning Sun, she tearfully recalls how her father had been brought home for public humiliation after years in exile and she had tried to resist the urge to acknowledge him.

“At school the next day I dutifully made a report. I said, ‘My father came for a visit and I called him Dad. That was wrong. It shows that I have not fully reformed myself, I will try harder’.”

More than a decade later, after becoming disillusioned with the party, she became reconciled with her father and helped exonerate him.

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