‘Monument to history’ battle between US and China over future of Mao’s secretary’s diary

Beijing is believed to be behind court bid to secure account of life inside Communist HQ

In the early hours of 4 June 1989, Li Rui, a veteran of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), was standing on the balcony of his apartment on Chang’an Boulevard in central Beijing. He could see tanks rolling towards Tiananmen Square.

For weeks, up to a million protesters had been gathering peacefully in Beijing’s plaza, demanding political reform. But they failed. Instead, as Li observed from his unique vantage point, troops opened fire, killing an estimated several thousands of civilians. It was the worst massacre in recent Chinese history. “Soldiers firing randomly with their machine guns, sometimes shooting the ground and sometimes shooting toward the sky,” Li wrote in his diary. A “black weekend”.

The first-hand account of an event that the Chinese government has systematically tried to distort and erase from the historical record is one of thousands of observations noted in Li’s diaries, which he kept meticulously between 1938 and 2018. Few people, especially not of Li’s stature, have kept such detailed records of this tumultuous era in Chinese history. Now those diaries are the subject of a hotly disputed lawsuit, the trial of which begins on Monday.