Zhang Yuzhen, widow of Mao Zedong’s personal secretary has filed a lawsuit IN Beijing’s Xicheng district court to prevent the publication of his diaries, which are held by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and could shed invaluable light on the inner workings of the Communist Party. Mao's personal secretary Li Rui, joined the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1930s and died aged 101 in Beijing in February. He not only witnessed the party’s inner circle in Mao’s day, but was later put in charge of the Central Organisation Department in the 1980s where he was responsible for identifying promising young cadres, some of whom eventually rose to the highest echelons of Chinese politics.

(Comment: A long-standing reformist, Li Rui was known as one of Mao and the party’s most outspoken critics.)