Mao Zedong Read online

  In all these writings, Mao was either implicitly or overtly criticizing the ruling militarist in Hunan, General Zhang Jingyao, who seemed to represent everything against which Mao was now beginning to rebel. Like others in this period, Zhang had acquired his early knowledge of soldiering as a bandit, before transferring into a military academy and, after graduation, joining the coterie of a powerful northern Chinese politician. Through personal contacts and his control of a sizable body of troops he was appointed military governor of Hunan in 1918, after a savage war in which tens of thousands of Hunanese were killed, and even more homes and businesses were destroyed. Zhang brought with him into Hunan as senior administrators his three brothers, all as ruthless and corrupt as he was. It is not surprising that when Zhang heard of Mao’s fifth journal issue, with its provocative subject matter, he ordered all copies confiscated and destroyed. Unfazed, Mao got himself appointed as the editor of another journal, the New Hunan, for which he penned a new but far briefer manifesto. This journal, he declared, would have four guiding principles: to criticize society, to reform thought, to introduce new learning, and to discuss problems. All power or “authority”—Mao printed this word in English, which he was struggling to learn at this time— that might endeavor to silence them would be ignored. Mao might have believed that this journal would receive a measure of protection because it was the organ of the Yale-in-China association in Changsha (the American university’s offshoot in China), founded after the Boxer Uprisings of 1900 to bring Western medical education to China. If so, he was mistaken. This journal, too, was suppressed after one issue, by the same General Zhang.

  Blocked from this new avenue, Mao became a regular contributor to Changsha’s largest newspaper, the Dagongbao. It was for this paper that he wrote a series of nine articles on the suicide of a local Changsha woman named Zhao Wuzhen, which attracted wide attention. Zhao had killed herself inside her enclosed bridal sedan chair, as she was being taken to an arranged marriage that she bitterly opposed. Mao used the opportunity to develop the ideas he had absorbed from Yang Changji, and other writers for New Youth, about the need to end old marriage customs, abolish matchmakers and their endless “cheap tricks,” and inaugurate an era of freedom of choice and economic opportunities for women in the new China.

  During this period of the summer and fall of 1919, Mao continued to work on organizing the Hunan “United Students’ Association,” and in December he organized a widely supported student strike of thirteen thousand middle school students against Zhang Jingyao, who had further alienated all teachers and students by slashing the Hunan educational budget, cutting teachers’ merit raises, blocking teachers’ salaries, beating up those who protested, and billeting his unruly troops inside school buildings. All this was in addition to Zhang’s troops’ ongoing record of extraordinary cruelty to farmers’ families in the countryside, his seizure of banks’ assets, and his proven record of massive opium smuggling and the illegal selling of lead-mining rights to German and American businessmen. Zhang’s harsh repression of the student strike led Mao to consider his own future options with renewed care. Furthermore, Mao’s mother died that fall, on October 5, and, presiding at the funeral on October 8, he gave a loving oration in her memory. He was still unmarried and had become something of a marked figure in Changsha, as well as a definite thorn in the side of the dangerous General Zhang. So in December, Mao traveled once again to Beijing to see the Yangs, to attempt to deepen his contacts with Li Dazhao and other writers he admired, and to seek support for a national campaign to oust the corrupt general Zhang from Hunan Province.

  Mao arrived in Beijing to find Professor Yang Changji desperately ill. A gastric illness the previous summer had somehow led to massive swelling of his body and to collapse of his digestive system. Convalescence in the scenic western hills, and specialized care in the Beijing German hospital, had alike been unavailing. Yang’s colleagues ascribed the illness to overwork at Beijing University, where he was teaching a full load besides translating two books on Western ethics and writing educational surveys. Yang died at dawn on January 17, 1920, and on January 22, just a few months after giving the eulogy at his own mother’s funeral, Mao became the cosignatory of the funeral eulogy for his most influential teacher. One day later, on January 23, Mao’s father died at his home in Shaoshan.

  Mao, however, stayed on in Beijing. There must have been family matters to attend to back in Hunan, but there was a lot to do in Beijing. There were the Yangs, mother and daughter, to see to. Most important to Mao’s political future was Li Dazhao, whom he now got to know better, for both were mourning the loss of a mutual friend. Li now had organized a more formal Marxist Study Society in Beijing, and a translation of the Communist Manifesto was under way (some of it already completed, for Mao to see) along with more technical works like Karl Kaut sky’s Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. Yet if Mao was now getting a more specific knowledge of Marxist-socialist theories, he remained very eclectic in his own mind—his surviving letters to friends from this time show him dreaming of a wide range of options, including a work-study school in the verdant Yuelu hills outside Changsha, a dream he had harbored since 1918. The students and teachers would learn and work at farming in all its aspects—from tending vegetables and flowers to raising rice and cotton, growing mulberry trees, and breeding fish and poultry. (Mao noted that such work would be regarded as “sacred,” but if the “rough work” was too hard for the students, then “hired hands should be employed to assist them.”) If farming proved impractical, an alternate approach would be to found a “Self-Study University” in which the teachers and students “would practice a Communist life.” Income for this project would be derived from teaching, publishing essays and articles, and editing books, and expenses would be cut by having the community do its own cooking and laundry. All income would be held in common, for this would also be a “work-study mutual aid society.” Intellectual focus would come from an “Academic Symposium,” meeting two or three times a week. After two or three years of such training the students and teachers might be able to set off for Russia, which Mao was now defining as “the number one civilized country in the world.”

  Mao, in other words, was restless. As he wrote in March 1920 to a friend whose own mother had also just died, there was now a whole category of “people like us, who are always away from home and are thereby unable to take care of our parents.” In a letter to his girlfriend, Tao Yi, who was teaching in Changsha but hoping to come to Beijing, Mao repeated that he would like to go to Russia. To make that dream a reality, once things were peaceful again in Hunan he would form a “Free Study Society” in Changsha, hoping “to master the outline of all fields of study, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign.” Mao added, “Then I will form a work-study team to go to Russia.” He was confident, he told Tao Yi, that women going to Russia would “be particularly welcomed by the Russian women comrades.” He had been “consulting” Li Dazhao on this and other matters, he added. The reasons for not going abroad, however, were also considerable. Since one could read translations so much faster than the foreign-language originals, one could learn more and faster in China. “Oriental civilization,” wrote Mao, “constitutes one half of world civilization. Furthermore, Eastern civilization can be said to be Chinese civilization.” So why go anywhere?

  When Mao did leave Beijing at last, on April 11, it was for Shanghai. This time he took twenty-five days for the trip, stopping off on the way at the north China sacred mountain of Taishan and at Confucius’s hometown of Qufu. In Shanghai he stayed with three other activists from the movement to expel Governor Zhang from Hunan. In early June, Mao was considering learning Russian—all three of his housemates wanted to go to Russia—and trying, he told a friend, “to find a Russian with whom to study the Russian language,” but he had trouble finding one. Mao was also trying to learn English, “reading one short lesson from the simplest primer every day.” Self-study was going to be his rule from now on: “I have always had an intense h
atred for school, so I have decided never to go to school again.” As to philosophy, he was concentrating on Bergson, Russell, and Dewey. Mao also found the time and opportunity to meet with Chen Duxiu, one of the key radical faculty leaders of the May Fourth Movement, and the sponsor of the full translation of the Communist Manifesto, which was just being completed.

  Fate solved Mao’s indecisiveness with startling suddenness when a rival coalition of political and military leaders unexpectedly attacked Changsha and drove out the hated General Zhang. It turned out that Mao had hitched his wagon to the right star after all: one of his former teachers with the requisite political contacts was named director of the Changsha normal school, and used his new influence to appoint Mao director of the attached primary school. On July 7, 1920, Mao was back in Changsha with a respected career opened up in front of him, and he moved swiftly to assert his presence. In just over three weeks after his return, on July 31, 1920, Mao announced to the local newspapers the formation of yet another new venture, one that would draw together at least some of his dreams of the previous years. It was to be called the “Cultural Book Society.”

  Mao’s announcement started banteringly: How would one expect to find “new culture” in Hunan? Few of the thirty million Hunanese had received any schooling. Of those who had, only a few were “functionally literate.” And of the literate, how many knew what the new culture was? New culture was not just a matter of “having read or heard a few new terms.” Indeed most of the world, not just Hunan, had no knowledge of new culture. At this point Mao boldly inserted a phrase that showed the definite orientation of his thought: “A tiny blossom of New Culture has appeared in Russia, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.” The Cultural Book Society would try to ensure that this blossom would flower in Hunan. A bookstore would start the process, but a research wing, along with editorial and printing facilities, would soon be added. Through Chinese and foreign books, the new culture would reach across Hunan. The conclusion to the announcement had a special slant, emphasizing that this was no conventional capitalist enterprise. It had been founded “by a few of us who understand and trust each other completely.” None of the money that had been invested would be withdrawn by the investors. There would be no dividends. joint ownership would be perpetual. No one would take a penny of profit if it succeeded; “If it fails, and not a penny is left from the venture, we will not blame one another. We will be content to know that on this earth, in the city of Changsha, there was once a ‘collectively owned’ Book Society.”

  Mao listed himself among the original investors when the Cultural Book Society issued its first report on October 22, 1920. So how had he raised the money for the shop? Had Mao received a sizable inheritance, in the form of land and the cash profits from his father’s trading ventures? This would explain why Mao in 1920 apparently had none of the financial problems living in Beijing and traveling by train to Shanghai that had plagued him in 1919. And even though Mao drew no wages as manager of the bookshop, he had his salary as director of the primary school. Furthermore, Mao began to push the cause of Hunan independence with extraordinary energy after he returned to Changsha in July, and this was a cause dear to the heart of many wealthy businessmen and to the new governor of the province, Tan Yankai. Mao’s backers certainly covered a wide spectrum: as well as local business leaders, Mao listed the Beijing Marxist Li Dazhao as one of the “credit references” who persuaded the local book and magazine distributors to waive their customary security deposits.

  Then there was the curious fact that the store run by the Cultural Book Society itself was not located in a Chinese-owned site in Changsha, as the board had apparently planned, nor in the city education building as some had suggested, but was rented from the Hunan-Yale medical school, the offshoot of the original Yale-in-China mission in the city. The guarantor of this lease—which was publicly announced in the director’s report—was a well-known Hunanese cultural and educational leader, who also invested in the venture (as did Mao’s friend Tao Yi, who put up ten silver dollars, although she was always so desperately short of money). Certainly the business was well-run, despite its unusual character and structure. According to the figures prepared by Mao Zedong—it was not for nothing, his father’s insistence that he learn accounting—income from sales for the first announced financial period was 136 Chinese dollars, while expenses, including the rent and start-up equipment, were only 101 Chinese dollars. With a surplus of 35 dollars from its sales of New Youth, and authors such as Bertrand Russell, Hu Shi, and Kropotkin, the Cultural Book Society’s store was turning a profit of more than 30 percent.

  Mao seemed to have found a new niche as a businessman, bookseller, and school principal, and it was time to think of the future. Certainly Tao Yi had been generous, and was an independent spirit. But Yang Kaihui had returned to Changsha after her father’s death, and also was regarded as a bold pioneer in women’s educational circles, with her own excellent range of contacts. At her father’s funeral back in January there had been a public appeal—cosigned by Mao Zedong—for funds to help Yang Kaihui and her younger brother, who it was alleged had been left with no “means of support.” But in fact her father had owned some land in or near Changsha, and the appeal stipulated that the money raised for the children “could either constitute savings or be used as capital for a business.” So now neither Mao nor his teacher’s daughter was destitute, and they obviously had a great deal in common. In late 1920, Mao Zedong and Yang Kaihui began living together.

  4

  Into the Party

  THE FIRST TIME that Mao in his own writings discussed the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin at any length was in an article of September 1920. The context, rather surprisingly, was Hunanese independence, for which Mao had become a forceful spokesman. In his essay, Mao argued that China’s apparent size and strength had always been deceptive: when it was examined more closely, one could see that China had been “solid at the top but hollow at the bottom; high-sounding on the surface but senseless and corrupt underneath.” The farce of China’s current attempts at proving itself a Republic was evidence of the truth of these assertions. Effective political organizations had to grow out of an integrated social system. Such a social system could initially take root only in “small localities,” and in such local settings “it is the individual citizens who comprise the foundation of the citizenry as a whole.” To Mao this had to be a voluntaristic process: “A forced attempt at construction simply will not work.” Mao then drew on the discussions of Marxism he had attended in Beijing but suggested that some of those arguments were lacking in cogency. People had used the example of Lenin, wrote Mao, to argue that “political organizations can reform social organizations,” and that “group forces can transform the individual.” Mao felt Lenin’s example in Russia was a special case, not one that could be simply applied to China. For a start, Lenin had relied on “millions of party members” to undertake his “unprecedented course of popular revolution that made a clean sweep of the reactionary parties and washed away the upper and middle classes.” Lenin had a carefully thought-out ideology—Bolshevism—and a “reliable mass party” that carried out his orders “as smoothly as flowing water.” The peasants of Russia also responded to his revolutionary call. Were there to be a “thorough and general revolution in China,” Mao wrote, he would support it. But he knew that was not possible at the moment. Accordingly, he would work for a Republic of Hunan “that shines like the rising sun.”

  Events, however, were pushing China away from the federation of provinces that Mao envisioned. Part of the problem was that Hunan was in no way united, and within a few months of Mao’s return to Changsha from Shanghai, rival warlords were once again vying for control; although the province did declare its formal independence in November 1920 and formulated its own Hunanese constitution, including the granting of full civil rights to women, the Hunan assembly never established a fully independent jurisdiction. Equally fateful were developments in the Soviet Union. In March 1
919 Lenin convened the first meetings of a “Third Communist International” to replace the Second International, which had disintegrated during World War I. This new international—known as the Comintem—was to be the global arm of the Soviet Communist Party, fostering revolution overseas not only to spread the cause of the world’s proletarians, but also to strengthen the Soviet Union’s own defenses. In the spring of 1920 the first of the Comintern agents (one of them was a Chinese raised in Siberia, who acted as interpreter) arrived in China to speed the formation of a Chinese Communist Party. The Soviet group rapidly identified the New Youth editors Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu as the two most prominent Chinese intellectuals interested in Marxism. Having conferred with Li in Beijing, they traveled to Shanghai to visit Chen. Though the Soviet agents did not meet Mao in either Beijing or Shanghai, and Mao had already returned to Changsha by August 1920 when a Communist “small group”—the first in China—was established in Shanghai, he and his fellow Hunanese had nevertheless made enough of an impression on the inner circle of leading radicals for Changsha to be included among the six cities in which further Communist “small groups” were to be formed. (The other four cities were Beijing, Wuhan, Jinan in Shandong province, and Canton.)

  The first brief “Manifesto” of the Chinese Communist Party appeared in Shanghai in November 1920, but there is no evidence that Mao saw it right away. From a flurry of letters that Mao wrote at this time to friends in many parts of China and in France, we know that he was frantically busy with his teaching, running the New People’s Study Society and the Cultural Book Society, building up a “rent-a-book readers’ club,” and coordinating the struggle for Hunanese independence. Mao does not mention the Manifesto to any of his November correspondents, so it is unlikely that he had seen it yet or had any hand in drafting it. To a woman student friend from Changsha, who was then in France, Mao expressed his pessimism over the Hunanese people’s capacity for change, but added philosophically, “Education is my profession, and I have made up my mind to stay in Hunan for two years.” Mao was also clearly thinking deeply about his relationship with Yang Kaihui, struggling to avoid the entanglements and hypocrisies of what in an unusually frank letter he called the “capitalist” type of marriage in which fear and “legalized rape” were combined. The loftier goal must always be to develop a meaningful union based on “that most reasonable thing, free love,” wrote Mao to another friend on November 26. He added: “I have long since declared that I would not join this rape brigade. If you don’t agree with me, please put into writing your opposing views.”