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Yes, Mao Zedong Had Sex With Minors

By WitheredSummer · 2026-07-06 01:57:21

Introduction

In December 2025, PraxBen wrote a thread on X¹ where, drawing from multiple historical sources, he made the claim that communist dictator Iosif Stalin held a sexual relationship with a minor. In February 2026, an American Communist Party propaganda account run by an user who calls himself "Dmitriy" wrote a thread himself, where he attempted to debunk PraxBen's claims, as well as other claims also made by PraxBen elsewhere, accusing Mao Zedong of holding similar relationships to Stalin's with minors.² Dmitriy's argument relies on attacking PraxBen's sources and their authors, claiming that the authors had ulterior motives, that the sources had been doctored, and that many of the events mentioned were false, and that people interviewed were lying.

The following article was originally written by me in late February 2026, in response to Dmitriy's "debunk" of the accusations held against Mao Zedong. It is presented here in an improved, better-structured and more polite version, which seeks to strike a balance between its original straight-to-the-point nature and my longer, more academic writings.

As for Iosif Stalin, PraxBen later wrote a new thread on X³ which serves an indirect refutation of Dmitriy's thread by addition of new evidence against Stalin. This article will focus entirely on Mao Zedong only.

Yes, Mao Zedong Had Sex With Minors

Dmitriy, and by extension many other communist apologists, have tried to claim that the idea of Mao Zedong holding sexual relationships with minors can only be traced back to three unreliable sources, thus disproving it as a historical fact. However, this is flat out false and misleading claim. Mao Zedong's multiple sexual and romantic relationship with minors can be corroborated beyond the three sources cited by PraxBen in his thread. While noblesse oblige that we admit that Li's memoir has some flaws, this has not stopped just about every single respectable historian from treating it as a valid and reliable source. This list includes, but is not limited to, Frank Dikötter, Andrew Nathan, and Lorenz Lüthi, among others.

Now, it is a well-known historical fact that Mao used to host weekly dances at Zhongnanhai (the residence of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party) with young women, most of them in their teens. Ironically, ballroom dancing was officially banned in Maoist China for being "decadent and bourgeois," but yet, the CCP would host them anyway for their very own decadent and bourgeois enjoyment. For this, Mao would often call girls from military troupes across the country to dance for him. One such case is mentioned in Hongkonger journalist David TK Wong's memoirs:

Soon after she [Shu-Ching] had turned 16, her teacher told her that the academy had been asked to put on a show for senior government officials. It was rumoured that Chairman Mao himself might attend. (...) The performance duly took place and it proved a great success. Chairman Mao was indeed in the audience. A few days later, word came unexpectedly that Shu-Ching had been asked to go to Zhongnanhai to dance for the Chairman again. (...) After a few more questions, the Chairman stood up and said: “Come with me.” Shu-Ching obediently followed, as the Chairman walked slowly out of the hall and in the direction of his personal suite. (...) Once inside, the Chairman said: “I feel a little tired. I think I will take a nap. You must be exhausted too after your performance. Take a nap too.” “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I can rest on one of the sofas here.” “No, it is more comfortable on a bed. I have a big one. Come with me. We can rest together.” (...) She had no recollection of how long she slept. But through the haze of waking, she became aware that the Chairman was caressing her and trying to remove her clothes. She became petrified. She was only sixteen and did not know what to do. She had never been touched by any man before, especially by one so powerful and universally adored as the Chairman. (...) That was how the Chairman turned her from an innocent and frightened girl into a woman.

(Wong, 2021, pp. 17–22).⁴

Quoting Zhisui Li:

Liu was only eight or nine when the Communist party came to power and she was chosen to train with the air force’s Cultural Work Troupe. (...) Another young woman, a member of the Railway Corps’ Cultural Work Troupe, was the orphaned daughter of “revolutionary martyrs.” (...) To have been rescued by the party was already sufficient good luck for such young women. To be called to the Chairman was the greatest experience of their lives. (...) Imagine, then, what it meant for a young girl to be called into Mao’s chambers to serve his pleasure! (...) They were all very young when they began serving Mao—in their late teens and early twenties—and usually unmarried. When Mao tired of them and the honor was over, they married young, uneducated men with peasant pasts. (...) The young women stood in the same awe of Mao’s sexual prowess as they did of his political leadership. At sixty-seven, Mao was past his original projection for the age at which sexual activity stops but, curiously, only then did his complaints of impotence cease altogether. It was then that he became an adherent of Daoist sexual practices, which gave him an excuse to pursue sex not only for pleasure but to extend his life. He was happiest and most satisfied with several young women simultaneously sharing his bed. He encouraged his sexual partners to introduce him to others for shared orgies, allegedly in the interest of his longevity and strength.

(Li, 1994, pp. 357–358)⁵

In a hilarious twist of historical irony, the conservative-reactionary campist communists at the ACP don't realize that Mao wasn't only attracted to minors, but that he was equally attracted to men too:

Mao’s sexual activity was not confined to women. The young males who served as his attendants were invariably handsome and strong, and one of their responsibilities was to administer a nightly massage as an additional aid to sleep. Mao insisted that his groin be massaged, too, a practice I became aware of only in 1960, when one of the guards refused to oblige him. (...) Later, in 1964, I witnessed a similar incident on Mao’s train. As his guard was preparing him for sleep, Mao grabbed the young man and began fondling him, trying to pull the man into bed with him.

(Ibid, p. 358)

On an additional note, there exist claims (mostly documented by Zhisui Li as well) that Mao had a special bedroom built for him in 1962 adjacent to the dance hall at the Zhongnanhai. I leave it to the reader imagination's to figure out why the Chairman would have a had this bedroom built right next to the stage where many underage girls danced for his personal indulgence, considering the previous quotes and what will be mentioned next.

Zhisui Li also mentions that Chairman Mao had venereal diseases, which he transmitted onto women. As per Li, Mao had Trichomonas vaginalis and genital herpes. While Li's claim are taken with a degree of skepticism from many historians, his very active extramarital sexual life is well-recorded (as proven throughout this article), and it is also well-known that Mao refused to bathe, and favored "alternative" methods to cleanse himself. Li wrote that he would often treat the women whom Mao had intercourse with:

But Mao refused to bathe. “I wash myself inside the bodies of my women,” he retorted. I was nauseated. Mao’s sexual indulgences, his Daoist delusions, his sullying of so many naive and innocent young women, were almost more than I could bear.

(Ibid, p. 364)

This is also mentioned by New York Times journalist Harrison Evans Salisbury in 1992, in a book published two years before Li's memoirs (which in itself disproves the claim by Dmitriy that all these claims originate in said book):

In 1958 Kang Sheng, the shadowy police specialist, popped up in Beijing once again. He had been down in his native Shandong as party secretary, engaged in a regional reign of terror. Now Mao brought him into Beijing to “oversee higher educational institutions.” Kang had been involved in some of the Sino-Soviet talks and now began to move into an intimate and deadly relationship with Mao. His lures were paranoia and sex. He knew Mao’s tastes and seemed to have access to an endless roster of libidinous young women.

(Li Rui, 1988 interview, & Rewi Alley, 1987 interview, as cited in Salisbury, 1992, p. 150)⁶

That Kang Sheng should have assisted Mao in forming his “dirty picture” collection was consistent with the character of this man who had insinuated Jiang Qing into Mao’s circle. Kang Sheng made it his business to supply Mao with sexual partners. There is evidence that he was not the only police official who curried Mao’s favor by these means. Like the establishment of art ensembles to provide Mao with dancing partners all this was very much in the imperial tradition. (...) Mao’s establishments paled by comparison with the battalions of females assembled for possible use by earlier emperors. About this time Mao, by some accounts, began to indulge in sexual water filling his heated indoor swimming pool with bevies of unclad young women.

(Salisbury, 1992, p. 218)⁷

From the 1960s to the early 1970s, Mao’s quarters sometimes swarmed with young women. It was like a latter-day harem. An important woman whose duties required her to go daily to Mao’s quarters simply did not appear during these sexual saturnalia. She stayed away until things quieted down.

(Ibid, p. 219)

Russo-American historian duo Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine—experts in Soviet and modern Chinese history—corroborate Salisbury's claims, based on declassified files from the USSR:

Mao tried not to cause her any stress. He satisfied his sexual needs with innumerable charming young women whom he encountered during his travels. Most of all he loved dancers from the People’s Liberation Army Song and Dance Ensemble.

(Pantsov & Levine, 2007/2012, p. 453)

There is also a historical curiosity worth mentioning at this time: Mao Zedong exchanged letters with Argentine fascist quasi-dictator Juan Domingo Perón, during Perón's exile in Francoist Spain.⁸ Previously, Mao had also sent gifts to Perón's wife, Evita Perón.⁹ The only reason I mention this is because Perón has been widely accused of having held relationships with a 17-year-old and a 14-year-old girl (among others, supposedly) while he was in his late 40s and his 50s already.¹⁰ It seems fitting that two authoritarians attracted to minors would have a degree of fondness of each other, even if their ideologies were diametrically opposed.

In effect of all these sources and quotes I hae provided, there is simply no coherent or intellectually honest way to excuse Mao or pretend that he was not involved in at the very least some of the morally repulsive behavior he's been accused of. We can safely conclude that his attraction to underage women is factual, as verified by multiple independent accounts. Even if one wanted to doubt the story of Ms. Chen, or doubt the authenticity of Zhisui Li's accounts (on no coherent basis, since they're both ultimately considered to be trustworthy), the pattern remains.

No, PraxBen Was Not Refuted

The second part of this article now focuses on proving that Dmitriy does not really provide any counterclaims as much as he just says something along the lines of "uhm, well, according to some sources, these sources are wrong!". As mentioned previously, virtually all historians do acknowledge that Zhisui's book has various flaws, but it is a leap of faith to then affirm that the entirety of his depictions of Mao's relationships with teens, or that the many controversial aspects of his private life are false. As this article has proven, this pattern being discussed does not just rely on Li as a source, but it predates him (Salisbury, 1992), and is proven by independent accounts (T.K. Wong, 2021). As a matter of fact, Li even protested some of the additions made to the English translation (which shows that he did not even hold a grudge against Mao). Even he recognized that Mao had boundaries, thus disproving the perception from Mao apologists that Li only sought to ruin his image in every way possible:

Liu Tao, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old daughter of Liu’s former wife, Wang Qian, was also very active and outgoing and friendly to Mao. She, too, would occasionally swim with him out to the raft and at the twice-weekly dancing parties often asked Mao to dance. She asked in innocence, and Mao never took the same liberties with Liu Tao that he did with so many other young women.

(Li, 1994, p. 175)

Even then, the aforementioned renowned historians—Andrew Nathan, Frank Dikötter and Lorenz Lüthi—consider the book to be reliable, so to go against these respected mainstream historians here with a fallacy and leap of faith as the only source is, in the best of cases, laughable. The Chinese language version of Li's memoirs was self-censored, as is commonly done with sexual topics in Taiwan's market, and western readers had a lot of basis to evaluate these claims, as proven here.

Another one of Dmitriy's arguments relies on claiming that, because Li's diaries were burnt decades before he wrote his memoirs, he must have misremembered many facts or just fabricated them. However, this is almost entirely irrelevant. The burning of one's diaries may lead to forgetting very specific events, or to reconstructing them with some mistakes in structure, facts or timelines, but it does not lead to outright hallucinations of entire patterns repeating through many years. Otherwise, we should doubt every single autobiography ever written unless they were based on decades of readily-available diaries to source the mentioned events from.

Some posthumous letter attributed to Li are also mentioned by Dimitriy, in which he supposedly mentions that many of the claims in his book are factually false. However, this letter is considered apocryphal by most historians. The letter came from Chinese state-vetted publications in 1996, which is strikingly convenient. It gained traction because it was mentioned in a book titled The Man and the Book of Li Zhisui, which was a collaborative effort by Mao's former staff (including his secretary Lin Ke), which sought explicitly to debunk Li's claims to preserve the Chairman's image. While there might exist a slight chance that the letter could be real, it has never been proven as such, nor is there any proof that its existence predates the aforementioned politically-motivated book.

As for Ms. Chen, Dmitriy claims that she lied, motivted for financial incentives. But as this article has proven already, she is not the only source from which we know that Mao held relationships with underage teens. And Jonathan Mirsky, besides, contrary to Dmitriy's accusations, was not some random journalist, but a very credible and experienced one, particularly when it came to China. He spoke fluent Mandarin and used to be a Maoist in his younger years. Essentially nobody doubts his interview at all outside of communist revisionists. The purported financial incentive from Chen is also largely irrelevant. Mirsky did not pay for the interview and there exists no proof to the contrary; the account was published because it aligned precisely with the already-documented recruitment system of teenage dancers at Zhongnanhai.

Another incredibly incoherent refutation that Dmitriy attempts to use is the claim that Chen could not produce a birth certificate. But how is this even remotely relevant? Nobody could reasonably expect a notarized 1962 birth record from a low-level air-force dance troupe member who later became a political exile. She did provide consistent personal details, photos, and a timeline that matches the known pattern of troupe recruitment (girls often joined at 14–15, as shown in the quotes presented in this here article). It is completely absurd to expect documentary "proof" of the Chairman's private life at Zhongnanhai, just as it is absurd to expect proof of what any other dictator did behind closed doors; these things always rely on historians and journalist converging testimony from multiple insiders, as it is common in these professions.

Lastly, history is not a court of law, unlike how Dmitriy wants to treat the concept. Discarding entire accounts because a single witness supposedly wanted to be paid, or because they lacked a photocopied ID from over 60 years ago is nothing short of a surreal idiocy. If we had this standard of proof for historical research, we would have to doubt every single piece of historical knowledge that predates the digital age. Because Chen's testimony is consistent with other independent reports, it is perfectly credible, unless someone could provide proper empirical and/or logical proof that Chen's claims were anachronistic, or outright false.

It is very hard to take Dmitriy seriously in this and any other instance or topic. Throughout his thread, he completely rejects various sources based on the motivations he claims their authors had, yet he goes on to cite other sources and authors that he himself just rejected. Nathan's critique of Chang and Halliday is completely valid, but as it turns out, Nathan was also involved in the publication of Li's book, and he has always insisted that the book's accounts are legitimate. Even if we disavowed things like the 70+ million death toll from the Great Leap Forward (which is actually a topic that can be discussed), it is still accepted by the vast, vast majority of historians that it took, at the very least, 20 million lives, and it is usually averaged out to around 45 million based on both conservative and liberal estimates. It does not help Dmitriy that he quotes multiple sources which actually support the claims of Mao Zedong having been an ephebophile.

Acta est fabula, plaudite.

References

1. @benbackupbackup (2025, December 28), "Did You Know: Joseph Stalin raped and impregnated a 13 year old girl, twice?!", X. https://x.com/benbackupbackup/status/2005382633635860523
2. @InfraDmitriy (2026, February 11), "The Myth of Stalin and Mao's 'Pedophilia'", X. https://x.com/InfraDmitriy/status/2021480509512015887
3. @benbackupbackup (2026, June 26), "Breaking: New evidence proves Stalin raped a child!", X. https://x.com/benbackupbackup/status/2070498502317150248
4. Wong, D. T. K. (2021). Chapter 15: Mistress of Mao [PDF document]. David T.K. Wong. https://davidtkwong.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Chapter-15-Mistress-of-Mao.pdf
5. Li, Z. (1994). The private life of Chairman Mao: The memoirs of Mao's personal physician (H. Tai, Trans.; A. F. Thurston, Ed.). Random House.
6. Salisbury, H. E. (1992). The new emperors: China in the era of Mao and Deng. Little, Brown and Company.
7. Pantsov, A. V., & Levine, S. I. (2012). Mao: The real story. Simon & Schuster. (Original work published 2007)
8. Perón, J. (1965, July 15). La carta de Perón a Mao [Letter to Mao Tsetung]. Partido Comunista Revolucionario de Argentina. https://pcr.org.ar/la-carta-de-peron-a-mao/
9. Sánchez, L. (2017, September 1). Visita a la Quinta de San Vicente: El sitio elegido por Perón y Evita. Agencia Comunas. https://www.agenciacomunas.com.ar/visita-a-la-quinta-de-san-vicente-el-sitio-elegido-por-peron-y-evita/
10. Carajo. (2026, January 17). "Nelly Rivas: Perón, menores de 14 años y el escándalo que nadie quiere recordar | Diego Recalde" [Video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=k5UfybnEHag

Yes, Mao Zedong Had Sex With Minors

Introduction

Yes, Mao Zedong Had Sex With Minors

No, PraxBen Was Not Refuted

References

See also