Mao Zedong’s personal secretary, Li Rui, who became one of the former Communist Party leader’s most vocal critics, died on Saturday at a hospital in Beijing. He was 101. A bold and deeply respected figure, Li continued to fight for political reform to his final days and frequently warned of the dangers of one-party rule and unchecked power. His death was announced in a statement released by his daughter, Li Nanyang, and confirmed by his former publisher and family friend, Wu Si. Li had been battling lung disease for several years. He is survived by his daughter and second wife, Zhang Yuzhen. Li joined the party more than eight decades ago and helped establish the institutions of post-Mao collective leadership. But in the Xi Jinping era, he was perhaps the lone dissenting voice within the ruling elite, speaking out publicly against the campaign to promote a cult of personality around the president and some of his Maoist policies. When the party changed China’s constitution last year to abolish term limits on the presidency – limits that were proposed by Li and put in place by Deng Xiaoping – Li suggested there were parallels between Xi and Mao. “A country like China produced people like Mao Zedong. Now it gives birth to a Xi Jinping,” Li told Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao in March last year. In October 2017, his absence from the opening of the five-yearly party congress was seen as an act of defiance by some – Xi’s political ideology was enshrined in the party charter during the meeting, raising his stature above that of Deng and putting him on a par with Mao. Although Li said later he was unable to attend because of ill health, the real reason he was not inside the Great Hall of the People might have had more to do with a letter he wrote to the party’s Central Committee – circulated online in the days leading up to the congress – that criticised Xi’s crackdown on the media, free speech and civil rights. Mao's former secretary Li Rui says you always had to agree with him Li was known for writing such letters, and for challenging the status quo. In the 1980s, as a senior party official with the personnel department, he pushed for measures to limit and check the power of party officials, to introduce elections for government officials, to set up an independent judiciary and to protect free speech. He spent his lifetime pressing for change, and paid a price for it. During the Mao era, Li was tortured and jailed for more than nine years, he did time in a labour camp and was expelled from the party. But he continued to fight. China watcher Johnny Lau Yui-siu, who was friends with Li for more than three decades, described him as a “typical sincere communist in the party’s early years” and “a true traitor to the party in its later years”. In those early years after 1949, the party led a campaign for political freedom and democracy in their fight against Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, but critics say Mao’s rule proved much worse than Chiang’s dictatorship. Wu Wei, who has worked for the party’s political reform research office, said Li embodied the party’s history – from the political movements of the Mao era to the sweeping market reforms under Deng. “His life reflected the party’s history in a systematic way, which is rare for a party member,” he said, adding that Li’s vision of a future China with constitutional democracy inspired many people both within and outside the party. Born in 1917, just six years after the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), Li was an activist from an early age, leading protests against local warlords and the Kuomintang as a high school student in central Hubei province. Chinese intellectual Fan Liqin who openly criticised move to scrap term limits speaks out At university, he threw himself into the movement against the Japanese occupation of China. And in 1937, he trekked to the communist base at Yanan in the northwest, where he joined the party, driven by a youthful dream of freedom and democracy, and fighting the corrupt and authoritarian Kuomintang regime. But within a few years in Yanan, Li became a victim of revolutionary persecution. Tortured and jailed for more than a year, the ordeal was his first encounter with the brutality of the party. It strengthened his resolve, and he went on to become secretary to Chen Yun – a conservative who was Deng’s arch-rival in the post-Mao era – during the civil war that began in 1945. From there he was made vice-minister of water resources and electricity in the early 1950s, before he was hand-picked by Mao to be his personal secretary in 1958. But the following year, Li was stripped of his party membership and positions at a conference in Lushan, Jiangxi, after he openly criticised Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward – a radical modernisation policy that led to a famine and the deaths of an estimated 30 million to 60 million people. In his later years, Li drew on his time working closely with Mao to write five books on the founding father of communist China – all of them published overseas and banned on the mainland. He described Mao as dismissive when it came to the suffering and millions of deaths that resulted from his radical policies. “Mao put no value on human life. The deaths of others meant nothing to him,” he wrote. According to Li, Mao often said he was “Emperor Qin and Marx in one”, likening himself to the first monarch of unified China in 220BC notorious for his ruthless, dictatorial rule. Li wrote his last book in his nineties. Memoir of Li Rui, Mao’s Secretary: Chinese Communist Party is China’s Problem was published in 2013 and called for the “one-party, one-leader and one-ideology regime” to be overhauled to allow for greater diversity in society. In all of his books, he argued that the “global wave of democracy” could not be resisted. Party veteran Li Rui, still pushing for reform in China at age 95 Li endured years in jail for his beliefs. After the Lushan conference in 1959, he was sent to a labour camp, where he nearly starved to death. He was later imprisoned for eight years during the Cultural Revolution, a decade of chaos and violence that began in 1966. But he made a political comeback in 1979, three years after Mao’s death. He was elected to the party’s Central Committee in 1983, and was made an executive vice-minister of the powerful Central Organisation Department, which handles personnel matters and decides who gets promoted and demoted within senior party, government and military ranks. An ally of reformist party chiefs Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s, Li was also a leading critic of the controversial Three Gorges Dam project that was supported by then conservative premier Li Peng. But his campaign for political reform and the rule of law would be a constant throughout Li’s life. He defied the party to remain one of the few vocal advocates of Western-style democracy and constitutionalism in China in the decades since the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. He also repeatedly urged the party to face its history and denounce Mao’s ideology and policies – something it has yet to do. Li said the party abandoned universal values such as democracy and rule of law in the crackdown on the student movement. He also called for the rehabilitation of Hu – purged in 1987 for his liberal stance and whose death in April 1989 triggered the pro-democracy movement – and Zhao, who sympathised with the students and was ousted and kept under house arrest for 16 years until he died in 2005. ‘It will sow the seeds of chaos for China’: intellectuals urge lawmakers to vote down end to presidential term limit Li’s dogged determination can be seen in the letters he wrote every five years to the party leaders, urging them to take on Western-style political reform. He did this before every party congress held since 1997, including the last one in 2017. But along with other reformist party elders, Li was disappointed by the lack of progress in the decades since the bloody crackdown on June 4, and upset by the conservative turn the party took and its revival of Maoist doctrine under Xi. Li revealed his frustration in an interview with the South China Morning Post in 2013. “My China dream is a dream for constitutional governance,” he said, referring to Xi’s so-called Chinese dream of national rejuvenation. Three years earlier, Li led 23 retired party officials in an open appeal for press freedom, free speech and an end to media censorship, after jailed democracy activist Liu Xiaobo – who died in custody in 2017 – was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Even at the age of 99, he was still actively campaigning. In an article titled “A centenarian reflection”, published in liberal magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu in 2016, Li wrote that he still hoped to see “democracy, constitutionalism and rule of law” in China, repeating a call he had made in the same publication a year earlier. Only last March, he told Ming Pao that he was disappointed by the revival of Maoist ideology and personality cult in recent years, which he saw as a major political setback. Chinese Maoists join students in fight for workers’ rights at Jasic Technology This determination to continue the reform fight made Li a symbolic figure for the liberal- and reform-minded within the party, Wu said. “He had a unique role in recent years. He represented a generation of party elders calling for more reflection on the history, and for China’s political transformation to constitutional democracy.” Li’s death was a great loss for like-minded intellectuals, he said. “He hoped for China to become a constitutional democracy in the future, and it really pained him to see the country regress in recent years.” China watcher Lau, who met Li as a Beijing correspondent for Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po in the mid-1980s, said he was a rare party member who had stayed true to its cause. “He was among the few veteran communists who have never forgotten the original purpose of the communist movement,” he said.