Walking a Tightrope: Memories of Wu Jieping, Personal Physician to China’s Leaders

Join us for this fascinating talk presented in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies by author Olivia Cox-Fill on her new book Walking a Tightrope: Memories of Wu Jieping, Personal Physician to China’s Leaders.

Dr. Wu was selected as personal physician to China’s leaders by Premier Zhou Enlai.  The book provides an intimate portrait of one of China’s leading doctors, who treated Zhou Enlai and Madame Mao while trying to survive in the harsh early years of Communist rule.  The memoir shows what exceptional talent it took to survive as an intellectual in an era when most leading intellectuals were expelled to the countryside, imprisoned or beaten to death. As one of China’s most prestigious physicians, Dr. Wu developed from an intellectual into a national leader of New China and became a Vice Chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee.  He established his global reputation in the field of Urology, with significant medical achievements. This book takes readers behind the Bamboo Curtain, during China’s most destructive and turbulent period – the devastating Cultural Revolution – characterised by Dr. Wu as cultural extinction.  The new edition, with illustrative maps and photographs, considers the repressions of the last decade and invites readers to consider what they can do now to revatilise the embers of hope and promise, rekindled during the reform and ‘opening-up’ of China.  It concludes with the author’s reflections on the experiences of Dr. Wu and considers parallels with life in China today.

Learn more about the author: Olivia Cox-Fill