BBC to Air Mao Documentary Over China’s Objections : Britain: The program depicts the late ruler as obsessed with sex. Beijing warns of ‘consequences.’

Plans by the British Broadcasting Corp. to televise a documentary depicting the late Chinese ruler, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, as a sex-obsessed tyrant have drawn severe objections by the government of China, but the BBC pledged Saturday not to pull the broadcast.

The Chinese said that the British government should be “fully aware of the consequences” if the documentary, “Chairman Mao--The Last Emperor,” airs as scheduled on Monday night’s “Timewatch” public affairs program.

The program is expected to further chill relations between London and Beijing, which are already frayed because of British insistence that additional democratic reforms be enacted in Hong Kong before the colony is turned over to China’s control in 1997.

Mao, founder of Communist China, presided over one-quarter of the world’s population from 1949 until his death in 1976. The 100th anniversary of his birth will be celebrated in China on Dec. 26.

Mao was married four times. In the program, Mao’s physician for 22 years, Dr. Li Zhisui, who now lives in exile in Chicago, claims the leader had a secret sex life with numerous young women.

“In public Mao espoused the cause of women’s rights,” BBC producer Jeremy Bennett said. “In private he collected, used and discarded concubines in the hundreds.”

The program’s revelations, Bennett said, “lay bare Mao’s sexual excesses and the full extent of the moral corruption which characterized his private life, and they throw new light on his hypocrisy and the true nature of his exercise of power.

“The image promoted by the Communist authorities of Mao as an ascetic, almost puritan figure could not, according to the doctor, have been further from the truth.”

The women, according to the program, were often recruited as attendants on Mao’s special train. If he liked them, they would be invited to retire with him for the night. In Beijing, he would frolic with a group of naked girls in his heated swimming pool, Li said.

Mao liked women “very young with a low level of education,” Li said. They had to be politically reliable and healthy and were screened by his security chief.

“Women felt honored to have sex with Mao,” Li said. “It was a great and natural thing to do because Mao was god and the supreme ruler. A relationship with such a man was very glorious.”

Mao often talked about an emperor of the Ming Dynasty who was said to have had 5,000 concubines during his reign, Li said.

He said several mistresses claimed to have had children by Mao, as a way of gaining protection for themselves and their families.

A statement issued by the Chinese Embassy in London declared of the program: “It only serves to lay bare the degeneration of journalistic ethics on the part of the producers . . . and their political motivation of hostility toward China. The documentary is pure slander on Chairman Mao.”

Last month, Beijing asked the British government to censor the program, months in the making, but a British Foreign Office official responded, “We emphasized that the BBC is editorially independent and they would have to take the matter up with the BBC.”