After nearly two weeks of trial, the case of the ownership of Li Rui’s diary came to a conclusion in the United States federal court in Oakland, California. The judge has tentatively scheduled the closing arguments for December 3rd, with the judgment on the diary’s ownership expected to be announced next year.
In the final day of the trial on August 29th (Thursday), Li Rui’s daughter, Li Nanyang, appeared in court with her three lawyers. On the defense side, Li Rui’s widow, Zhang Yuzhen, was represented by lawyers Jeff Faucette and Marty Glick from the law firm Skaggs Faucette LLP in San Francisco.
The judge overseeing the case, Jon S. Tigar, announced that due to a countersuit filed by the other party, the Stanford University Board of Trustees v. Zhang Yuzhen et al., it will be consolidated with Zhang Yuzhen’s countersuit against Li Nanyang and Stanford University. Each party will have 90 minutes for closing arguments in December and may engage in cross-examination.
In the final days of the trial, expert witnesses focused on discussing the 2019 ruling by a court in Beijing’s Xicheng District, which ordered Li Nanyang to return the original documents of Li Rui’s materials. The debate centered on whether this ruling was influenced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
During the trial on the 29th, defense expert witness Jacques deLisle, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, testified. In his four-hour statement, he emphasized that due to a lack of evidence, it is difficult to determine whether the CCP intervened in the judiciary, thus no definitive conclusion can be drawn.
However, the prosecution’s expert witness Thomas E. Kellogg, executive director of the Asian Law Center at Georgetown Law School and a prominent scholar in Chinese legal reform, constitutionalism, and civil society movements, analyzed the CCP’s influence on the case in his testimony on Wednesday (28th). He pointed out that when the case was filed in Beijing on April 5, 2019, the Hoover Institution was named as a third-party defendant, despite Hoover not having independent legal personality.
This led to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, as one of the defendants in Zhang Yuzhen’s lawsuit against Li Nanyang, being unable to defend itself in court. Kellogg believes that these minor issues could have been overcome, but the CCP utilized certain legal provisions to prevent Stanford University and the Hoover Institution from participating, showing CCP’s interference in the judiciary.
Mark Litvack, representing the Stanford University Board of Trustees and Li Nanyang, stated that evidence in the case had been smoothly submitted in the last few days. He also noted that since Li Rui was a political figure, the case carries political implications. Furthermore, the case is not about inheritance as the Hoover Institution and Stanford University had ownership of the materials before Li Rui’s passing.
It is reported that Li Rui’s widow Zhang Yuzhen has made a will to donate Li Rui’s diary to the National Library of China. It is widely believed in academic circles that given the advanced capabilities of artificial intelligence to create forgeries that are hard to distinguish, only the original manuscripts can serve as reliable evidence for scholarly research. The loss of the original manuscripts would be an irreparable blow to historians and scholars. Kellogg stated that once the originals fall into the hands of the CCP, they would deny the research findings of experts and scholars, affecting many Chinese people who trust the CCP’s narrative.
Attendee Wang Lili expressed her view that this case is not a private dispute between Zhang Yuzhen and Li Nanyang but a political case. She believes that the CCP regime is supporting Zhang Yuzhen in the background. As an elderly person in her nineties, it is unlikely that Zhang Yuzhen has sufficient financial resources to fight this lawsuit.
Li Nanyang, Li Rui’s daughter, gradually brought out over ten million words of her father’s diary, filling 40 boxes, from China to the United States between 2014 and 2017, and donated it to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. After Li Rui’s death in Beijing in February 2019, his widow Zhang Yuzhen immediately filed a lawsuit in Beijing’s Xicheng District Court against Li Nanyang and the Hoover Institution, seeking to reclaim the original documents of Li Rui’s diary.
In May 2019, Stanford University filed a lawsuit in California, seeking to dismiss Zhang Yuzhen’s ownership claims over these diaries and listing Zhang Yuzhen, Li Nanyang’s brother and sister, and anyone claiming ownership of Li Rui’s diaries and original manuscripts as defendants.
On June 25, 2019, the Xicheng District Court in Beijing held a hearing for Zhang Yuzhen v. Li Nanyang and Stanford Hoover, and in November of the same year, ruled that Zhang Yuzhen owned the diaries and ordered Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to return them to Zhang Yuzhen within 30 days. In May 2020, Zhang Yuzhen filed a countersuit in California against Stanford University and Li Nanyang, accusing them of conspiring to steal “national treasures” and demanding the return of all copies, electronic texts, retrieval indexes, and other data related to the diaries except for the originals.