Library:Mao Zedong, a Biography. Volume 1. 1893–1949

CCCPC Party Literature Research Office

Chief Editors Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji

Translated by Foreign Languages Press, edited by Sheng-chi Shu

Originally published by CCCPC Party Literature Research Office,

Chief Editors Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji, Volume I and II in

2011.

More information at

www.cbi.gov.cn/wisework/content/10005.html

Leaving Home

An age- old legend tells us that 5,000 years ago Emperor Shun, while on an inspection tour of southern China, came to the Xiang river. There, while resting on a hilltop, the emperor ordered the playing of a tune called Shao Yue (Melody of Shao). The music is said to have attracted a flock of phoenixes that danced to its lilt. From this, people began to call the hill Shaoshan (Mount Shao), and to call the narrow valley it embraces Shaoshan Chong (Shaoshan Valley), located in what is now Xiangtan County of Hunan Province.

In this same Shaoshan Valley, on 26 December 1893 (19th day of the 11th lunar month in the 19th year of Qing Dynasty Emperor Guangxu), a boy was born to the family of peasant Mao Yichang. The child was named Zedong, also to be known as Yongzhi and later as Runzhi. Two babies preceding this child had died in infancy and, fearing a likely recurrence, the mother took her new-born son to a small temple of the Stone Statue of the Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin, or Avalokitesvara in Sanskrit). There, she bowed her head to the ground and asked the great rock to be the child’s adoptive mother, so the boy acquired the pet name of Shi San Yazi (Third Kid of the Rock).

This Mao family of Shaoshan was originally from Jiangxi Province. In the early years of the Mind Dynasty, the family moved to settle in Xiangxiang Country, Hunan Province. Two sons moved to Shaoshan Valley, where, in a place some 40 kilometers west from the middle reaches of the Xiang River, three Hunan counties -Xiangtan, Ningxiang and Xiangxiang – come together. It is a narrow valley, surrounded by hills, where inhabitants have lived largely by agriculture, so the Mao family engaged mainly in land reclamation and farming. Some 500 years elapsed before Mao Zedong, the twentieth generation after Mao Taihua, was born.

Despite the lovely legend of its name, the valley’s conditions when Mao Zedong was born were much as in other poor, secluded areas of later imperial China. In Shaoshan Valley were more than 600 households, one being that of Mao Enpu, Mao Zedong’s grandfather, an honest kind-hearted peasant. As he became increasingly hard-up, he had to pawn some of his ancestral lands to sustain the family. He had only one son, Mao Zedong’s father; and when he passed away, Mao Zedong was only 10 years old.

Mao Zedong’s father, Mao Yinchang, also known as Mao Shunsheng or Mao Liangbi, began to help manage household affairs when he was only 17 years old. Pressed by family debts, he had to leave his home village to join the local army of Hunan Province. This broadened his vision and gave him the chance to save some money. When he returned home, Mao Shunsheng first redeemed the farmland pawned by his father. Then he bought a little more land so that his holdings totaled 22 mu (about 1.5 hectares) that yielded about 80 dan (about 4 tons) of grain annually. Mao Shunsheng then turned to buying, selling and transporting rice and livestock to the markets of Xiangtan Country. In this way, his wealth grew gradually to about 2-3,000 Chinese silver dollars. With this accumulated capital, he even once issued a kind of local paper money in the name of ‘Mao Yishun & Co.’, so in his little valley he would have been reckoned a moneybags.

In late imperial China, peasants, who managed to rid themselves of poverty were invariably hardworking, frugal, cleaver, and resolute. These characteristics of the father naturally had an important influence on Mao Zedong from his childhood. Like most peasants, Mao Shunsheng attempted to mould his sons after his own life experience, starting with household chores and field labour. From the time he was 6 years old, Mao Zedong began to do such things as weeding paddy fields, herding cattle, collecting animal dung as organic manure, chopping firewood, and the like. Later, after he learned to read, Mao Zedong began to help keep family accounts. For two years, when he was 14-15, Mao Zedong was ordered to work all day long in the fields with hired farm labourers. His father’s severity made a long-lasting impression on him. Recalling those years, Mao later [in 1936] told the visiting American journalist Edgar Snow that his father was a ‘severe taskmaster who, if he saw me idle or with no account-keeping to do, ordered me to do farm work. He had a hot temper and often beat me and my two younger brothers.’ Mao also recollected: ‘His stern attitude did me good in that I had to do farm work diligently and do the accounts with great care as to avoid his beating or criticizing me.’ In this way, Mao learned the skills of local farm work, including ploughing and levelling paddy fields, rice-transplanting, cutting and harvesting paddy rice, and the like. The young Mao Zedong even offered to compete with hired farm labourers to take on challenging jobs. He thus acquired the finer qualities of mountain peasants: enduring hardships. Defying difficulties, and having an assiduous and down-to-earth style of work. At the same he began to acquire a fairly deep understanding of the sufferings peasants faced.

Mao Shunsheng wanted his sons to become as accomplished at moneymaking as himself, and, seeing that his sons were not quite following his footsteps, he resorted to high-handed disciplinary measures. This led to inevitable confrontations between father and sons, which, for Mao Zedong, served to nurture rebelliousness from his early youth.

On the winter solstice in 1906, Mao Shunsheng hosted a banquet for his fellow businessmen. The father ordered his 13-year-old-son, Mao Zedong, to wait on the guests, but the latter was loath to do so. Angry, his father scolded young Mao for being lazy and good-for-nothing, and lacking filial piety. To this, young Mao Zedong retorted in front of all the guests, ‘A father’s kindness and his son’s filial obedience go hand-in-hand’ – meaning that only when ‘the father is kind’ can there be a ‘filial son’. Enraged, and raising his fist, Mao’s father threatened to beat him, whereupon Mao Zedong ran off to the edge of a huge pond and threatened to jump in should his father come any closer. Through his mother’s good offices, the episode ended peacefully.

However, from this experience, Mao Zedong perceived that to yield meekly under pressure would merely invite more scolding or beating, and that only by resisting resolutely could one protect oneself.

To his father, Mao Zedong’s most striking example of ‘unfilial’ behavior was his refusal to accept his father’s single-handed arrangement of marriage of the 14-year-old Mao Zedong to the 18-year-old daughter of a family named Luo, primarily for the purpose of adding another pair of hands to work in the household. Mao Zedong never accepted that arranged marriage and never lived with the girl as her husband. The father was helpless to do anything more about it than to enter the Luo girl’s name in the formal record of the family tree only as ‘Mao, nee Luo’.

Compared to his father, Mao Zedong’s mother, Wen Suqin, left a much greater impact on him. His mother was the seventh sister in the Wen family and her pet name was Qimei (Seventh Sister). Her parents’ home was in Tangjiatuo, later called Tangguige, in Xiangxiang County on the other side of the mountain and about 10 li (5 km,) from Shaoshan Valley. The Wen family, also peasants, was well-off. At the age of 18m Wen Qimei was married to Mao Shunsheng, to whom she bore five boys and two girls. Four of the children died in fancy, and three brothers survived: Mao Zedong, Mao Zemin, and Mao Zetan.

Like many other country women, Mao’s mother spent her time quietly attending to household chores and bringing up children. She was gentle, kindhearted, and had a strong sense of sympathy. In years of famine, she would send rice to the starving without the knowledge of her husband. She also would often go to Buddhist temples to pray and worship Buddha piously. She instilled her children with beliefs in ‘accumulating virtue and doing good’ and ‘karma and retribution’. Once, when Mao Zedong was about 9 years old, he even discussed earnestly with her how to persuade his father to believe in Buddha. When his mother fell ill, the 15-year-old Mao made a special trip to the holy temple on Mount Heng to pray for his mother’s speedy recovery. This shows the impact that his mother’s teaching by example had in the teenaged Mao, who then had not much understanding of Buddhist doctrines.

Indeed, his mother’s teaching by words and deeds helped make Mao Zedong, from his early youth, sympathetic towards the poor and weak in their sufferings, and willing to help others in times of need.

Once, a nearby peasant, also surnamed Mao, had received from Mao Zedong’s father a deposit of money to buy some pigs at an agreed price. Later, when Mao Zedong was sent by his father to collect the pigs, the price for the pigs had gone up considerably. The peasant sighed repeatedly, blaming his own ill fate, and opined that several silver dollars were nothing to a well-off-man, but that it was a big loss to a poor fellow’s household. Upon hearing this, Mao Zedong cancelled his father’s deal for the pigs.

On another occasion, when Mao was 11, his father wanted to buy 7 mu (about 1 acre) of farmland from cousin Mao Jusheng, who depended on that land for a living and was then faced with great difficulties. Both Mao Zedong and his mother agreed the right thing to do was to help Mao Jusheng ride out his difficulties instead of seizing the chance to buy his only bit of farmland. Mao’s father thought otherwise, insisting it was perfectly all right to buy the land with a cash payment. Efforts at dissuasion by Mao and his mother were to no avail, but the incident left a deep impression. Decades later, when recalling this on various occasions after the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong told Mao Zelian (son of Mao Jusheng): ‘The private ownership system in old China made brothers and cousins forget fraternity, to such an extent that father refused to listen to any persuasion, insisted on buying the 7 mu of land, and cared only for making money’.

Mao Zedong had a deep affection for mother. In the summer of 1918, on the eve of leaving Changsha for Beijing, Mao was so worried about his mother, who was recuperating from illness at his maternal grandmother’s home, that he obtained a medical prescription and then entrusted his uncle to carry it to his mother. The following spring, after returning to Changsha, Mao brought his mother to the provincial capital for medical treatment. She died on 85 October 1919, at age 52, from scrofula, then customarily referred to simply as ‘herniated neck’. One hearing the sad news, Mao sped back to Shaoshan to keep vigil beside the coffin. On that occasion, Mao Zedong wrong an affectionate ‘Elegy for Mother’ in four-character lines:

Mother’s virtues are many, and

Outstanding is her universal love.

She extended to so many,

Whether acquainted with her or not,

Her kind and sympathetic heart,

That folks are deeply moved.

Her affection is powerful

As it originated in sincerity.

She never boasted, and

Never attempted to

Cheat…. Held in high

esteem

Her integrity is untainted.

In a letter to Zou Yunzhen, a schoolmate, Mao at that time wrote: ‘There are three kinds of people in the world, those who harm others to benefit themselves, those who benefit themselves without harming others, and those who benefit others at the cost of their own losses; and my mother is one of the third kind.’ Indeed, Mao’s mother’s influence on him was keenly felt throughout his life.

After his mother’s passing, Mao Zedong invited his father, Mao Shunsheng, to stay with him for a time in Changsha. His father no longer interfered with his life, but agreed to continued financial support for his schooling. For this Mao Zedong was grateful to his father, who died from acute typhoid at age of 50, on 23 January 1920.

While parental education usually has a great bearing on a child’s growth, schooling invariably has an impact on a child’s future course of development. Mao Zedong spent much of his early childhood at his maternal grandmother’s home in Tangjiatuo in Xiangxiang County, where his maternal grandfather was engaged in farming. His mother’s brother ran an old-style private school and taught local children. Mao often attended classes at that school until 1902, when he was 8 years old and was brought back to Shaoshan Valley, where he began learning at a nearby old-style private school. In the eight years that ensued, excepting the two years when he was required by his father to work at farming the family’s land, Mao attended six different private schools in the nearby localities of Nan’an, Guangongqiao, Qiaotouwan, Zhongjiawan, Jingwanli, Wuguijing and Dongmaotang. In retrospect, Mao summed up those years as ‘six years of reading Confucian books’. Even then, he still helped with farming, collecting animal dung in the early morning and late afternoon, and joining in the work at harvest time.

By that time, the imperial examination system had in the main been abolished, and modern schools had begun to emerge. Introducing Western literature and going abroad to Japan for studies were in vogue. By the time Mao Zedong began to receive elementary schooling, the two people he admired – Yang Changji, who was to become his teacher, and the great man of letters Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren) – had left for Japan for advanced studies. In Shaoshan Valley, the old-style private schools were then still the only choice for local children’s schooling. By sending Mao to school, his father cherished no high hopes beyond his son’s acquiring enough literacy to keep family accounts and to be prepared for lawsuits if necessary. Following the custom of the time, Mao Zedong began with popular readings of traditional Confucian literature, such as San Zi Jing (The 3-Character Classic), Bai Jia Xing (The Hundred Surnames, in rhythmic arrangement – actually totaling more than 500 surnames), Zengguang Xianwen (Wise Sayings to Broaden One’s Horizon) and Youxue Qionglin (Selected Readings for Children). After these Mao began to study the Si Shu (Four Books) and Wu Jing (Five Classics). The original copies of The Book of Songs and The Analects of Confucius that Mao read are today on display at the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall in Shaoshan.

Though Mao did not find the difficult classical works to his liking, he had an extraordinary memory and comprehension, and was able to learn them well and by heart. Indeed, once committed to memory, what one has learnt in childhood cannot be erased from one’s mind. That is why Mao could apply these works easily long after he grew to manhood. Mao also studied the Zuo Zhuan (Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals), and that led to his great interest in studying history. His six-year education in Confucian culture helped cultivate his enthusiasm for ‘taking history as a clue to the present’, and it also helped develop his later approach of ‘making the past serve the present’.

In his yearly youth Mao Zedong did believe in the exhortations of Confucius and Mencius but the old-style, private school teachers’ stereotyped way of instruction had little in it to attract him. In 1908, when attending the private school at Jingwanli, he had a particular interest in reading what the teachers branded as ‘frivolous books; or ‘trash books’ -such famous novels as The Water Margin, Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Biography of Yue Fei (the patriotic general) and Romances of the Sui and Tang Dynasties. As the teacher did not approve of reading these books, he had to read them on the sly, putting a text-book over them as a cover-up when he was in school. At home, since his father did not allow him to reach such books, Mao Zedong had to cover up his window so that his father could not see the lamp light inside his son’s room.

Once he had read these novels and romances, Mao Zedong would recount the stories to other children or to the elderly folks of the village. Much later, in retrospect, Mao told Edgar Snow [in 1936]: ‘It occurred to me one day that there was one peculiar thing about those stories – the absence of peasants who tilled the land. All the characters in those stories were warriors, officials, or scholars; never was there a peasant hero.’ As a peasant’s son, Mao Zedong felt puzzled for some time, and he began to analyse those novels and concluded that the heroes in them ‘did not have to work the land because they owned and controlled the land and evidently made the peasants work it for them’. Mao felt that this was a case of inequality.

Peasants were naturally opposed to such inequality, and the rebellious figures depicted in The Water Margin became real heroes in Mao’s mind. The influence of this notion was meaningful and far-reaching. Later, in the long years of hardship in his revolutionary life, The Water Margin was a book he always kept handy for reading.

The incidents in these novels attracted Mao Zedong’s attention were reflected in events that occurred in real life. A rebellion staged by a starving mob erupted in Changsha in April 1910. It was a year of famine in which food prices soared unusually high, and whose families committed suicide. A large number of hungry people gathered at the gate to the governor’s office to present petitions, but they were shot at, and fourteen of the petitioners were killed instantly, with many more wounded. Such an act of suppression was too much for the masses to tolerate, and they set fire to the governor’s office and smashed the offices of some foreign firms, shipping companies and customs board. The Qing government sent in more troops to suppress the rioters, killing so many that the Shiziling area outside the Liuyang Gate of provincial capital was drenched with blood. (Shiziling was also the place where, twenty years later, Yang Kaihui, wife of Mao Zedong, was executed). Many of the rioters were beheaded, and their heads were displayed over the southern gate of the city as a sort of warning to future rebels.

Several small-time peddlers who had seen the tragedy and managed to escape the shooting spread the news of the hungry mob’s rebellion to Shaoshan Valley, and this evoked much discussion and indignation for several days thereafter. As days went by, and many people began to forget the incident, Mao Zedong continued to be very much distressed at heart, and it took him a long time to calm down. He felt that those who joined in the rebellion were good, ordinary people who had been driven by starvation and had no choice but to revolt. All those innocent people murdered in cold blood! How distressing! Decades later, he said emotionally that that incident’ affected my life’.

In the following year, famine struck Shaoshan Valley. The hungry peasants organized themselves and staged a chi-da-hu (seizure and eating of food in the houses of landowners), and in the process seized a lot of rice that Mao Zedong’s father had prepared for delivery to the country seat for sale. His father was immensely enraged. Mao Zedong did not sympathize with his father, but ‘also thought that the ways employed by the villagers were not right’.

About that time, Mao Zedong learned that Li Shuqing, a teacher of the reformist school, had returned to Shaoshan Valley. Mao thought highly of his teacher, and often called on him to learn about new developments outside his home town, and especially about the constitutional reform in the last years of the Qing Dynasty. It was about this time that Mao Zedong happened to read the book Shengshi weiyan (Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age), written by Zheng Guanying and published some ten years before. Mao particularly liked the book’s idea that society needed reformation. He became acquainted with some major current events in China outside his native village, and he began to feel that China should not remain what it had been.

Nor was Mao Zedong to remain what he had been. Up to the age of 17, he had not gone beyond the area between Shaoshan Valley and Tangjiatuo, his maternal grandmother’s village. He developed a strong urge to continue schooling somewhere outside the secluded area, though his father originally wanted him to be apprenticed to a rice merchant in Xiangtan County. At this point in his life, Mao was told by his cousin Wen Yongchang that modern knowledge was being taught at the Dongshan School, run by the county authorities of Xiangxiang, some 50 li (25km) from Shaoshan Valley. Eager to attend school there, Mao Zedong managed to convince several of his relatives – his mother’s brother, Wen Yuqing, his father’s cousin Mao Luzhong, and his cousin Wang Jifan – to persuade his father to approve such a move. His father finally agreed, thinking there might be some benefit to be gained.

In the autumn of 1910, Mao Zedong left the secluded Shaoshan area and headed for the wider world outside his home town. That was the first turning point in his life. Naturally, he felt excited. On the eve of his journey, and in that mood, he composed a short poem in an old pattern and stuck the poem into the family accounts book that his father examined daily.

Your son has decided to leave home to study

And will not return until he is accomplished.

One needn’t die only in one’s home town,

For there’s good burying ground

Anywhere along the road of life

The Dongshan School was at the foot of Mount Dongtai outside the Xiangxiang Country seat. In addition to teaching traditional classics, like other private schools, the school had new subjects, such as Natural Sciences, Geography and the English language. It was at this school that Mao learned that the Guangxu Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi had both died, and that the Xuantong Emperor had already been on the throne for two years. At that time, Mao still felt the emperor and most officials were good, intelligent men, who needed only the help of reformists such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Mao had read works on reform, written mostly by Kang and Liang, and had a particular liking for Liang’s impassioned style of writing. He held Kang and Liang in rather high esteem at the time, and he was not aware that Sun Yat-sen’s advocacy of overthrowing the Qing regime with a revolution had become the mainstream of thought, replacing the idea of reformist constitutional monarchy advocated by Kang and Liang. The revolutionists focused their attention on building liaisons among revolutionary elements and on leading armed uprisings, and paid little attention to raising public awareness. Their publications were banned from circulation in the interior provinces. On the other hand, after the failure of the Reform Movement of 1898, the journal Xinmin congbao (New People’s Miscellany), edited and published by Liang Qichao in Japan, which introduced Western bourgeois literature and political thinking, was then widely read in China. Moreover, Hunan Province had been an important base for the reformists, and Liang Qichao had once been chief lecturer at the School of Contemporary Affairs in Changsha. It was quite natural that Mao Zedong received his rudimentary political education from the reformists. The Xinmin congbao had stopped publication in 1907. However, Mao managed to borrow a bound volume of the journal from his cousin Wen Yongchang, which he read and re-read, and he was able to commit to memory many of its articles. While reading that bound volume, he would write notes or comments. About the essay ‘Thoughts on the State’, in Section 6 of Volume 4 of the journal, Mao wrote:

A formally established state is a constitutional state, whose constitution is formulated by the people, and whose monarch enjoys popular support. On the other hand, a state not formally established is an autocracy whose laws are drawn up by the monarch who enjoys no popular support. Countries like Britain and Japan today fall under the former category, while all the monarchs who had usurped power in the dynasties spanning several thousand years in China fall under the latter category.

The above passage is the earliest political commentary in Mao Zedong’s writing discovered so far. It shows his understanding, at that time, of constitutional monarchy and feudal autocracy. From following Confucian classics to admiring the reformist leaders Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, from Zhen Guanying’s Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age to approving of conditional monarchy, with Britain and Japan as models – all this marked the first stage of Mao’s ideological development in his youth. More importantly, Liang Qichao’s Xinmin shuo (On the New People) penetratingly analysed the constituent core of national culture and advocated ‘changing the character of the people’. This way of thinking was the forerunner of the May Fourth Movement that advocated restricting the national spirit, and it had a lasting effect on Mao Zedong. It is quite likely that the title of Liang’s work could be the origin of the name of Xinmin xuehui (New People’s Study Society) – that first organization set up by Mao, later in Changsha.

By that time, Mao had begun to notice events outside China. From a returned student who had studied in Japan and was then a school teacher, Mao learned how Japan had become a strong country through its Meiji Restoration, and he was impressed. Then, after reading a book titles Great Heroes of the World, borrowed from a classmate named Xiao Zizhang (who later became the famous poet known as Xia San), Mao was greatly inspired by the heroes depicted in this book, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Boneparte, Peter the Great and others. Upon returning the book to Xiao San, Mao said, ‘China should produce such great personalities. We in China should lay stress on making the country prosper and the military strong… Every Chinese must do his utmost.’

In the spring of 1911, Mao’s teacher, He Langang, who received an appointment to teach at the Provincial Xiangxiang Middle School in Changsha, was ready to take Mao along with him because of the latter’s excellence in learning. Mao travelled for the first time by river streamer to Changsha, where he successfully passed the entrance examination to the Provincial Middle School. Changsha was the provincial capital of Hunan. On the eve of the 1911 Revolution, it was also the hub of Hunan revolutionary activity, and it seethed with propaganda against the feudal Qing Dynasty. The new military forces garrisoning the provincial capital were increasingly leaning to the side of the revolutionaries. On arriving in Changsha, the 18-year-old Mao immediately felt his vision was broadened and the social atmosphere was vastly different from that in the countryside. For the first time, he had access to Minli bao (People’s Journal), run by the revolutionists, and he became an ardent reader of the journal. From it, he became acquainted with a lot of revolutionary vies and statements. When he read the report in the journal of Huanghuagang Uprising in Guangzhou, led by Huang Xing, it had a great impact on his thinking. Later, in the Xiangjiang pinglun (Xiang River Review), he wrote: ‘The Guangzhou Uprising led by Huang Xing on the 19^th of the third month of Emperor Xuantong’s reign [27 April 1911] shook the whole of China. When the news spread to Hunan, the revolution-inclined students were very much eager to have a try.’

Mao was one of those ‘eager to have a try’. This led him, one day, to write an article that he posted on a wall of the school campus. It expressed support for the revolutionists’ programmed to overthrow the Qing Dynasty so as to establish a republic in China. In his article, Mao proposed that Sun Yat-sen be invited back from abroad to serve as president of the republic, Kang Youwei be appointed prime minister, and Liang Qichao foreign minister. Mao sounded rather naïve at that time, not yet capable of discerning the differences in political programmes between Syn Yat-sen, and Kang and Liang. That was the first public expression, however, of Mao’s political views.

As a demonstration of determination to break with the corrupt Qing regime, Mao advocated and took the lead in cutting the queue (the long, single braid of hair worn by mature men by order of the Qing Dynasty). He and some other activists launched a ‘surprise attack’ to cut the queues of a dozen or so schoolmates who had promised to cut theirs but showed reluctance to do the deed. This incident illustrated Mao’s style of saying what he meant and being resolute in taking action.

On 10 October 1911, the historic Wuchang Uprising broke out. The new revolutionary government of Hubei Province soon sent representatives to Changsha, to ask revolutionaries in Hunan to rise up in response to the uprising. A representative, who came to the Provincial Middle School to brief the students on the Wuchang Uprising, made an impassioned speech at the students’ assembly. More than twenty years later, this incident was still quite fresh in Mao’s memory: ‘Seven or eight students rose in the assembly and supported the representative with vigorous denunciations of the Qing regime and calls for actions to establish a republic.’ Mao was then even more excited, and believed that the ongoing acute struggles against the feudal regime needed more reinforcements from the people, so he decided to cast aside his pen to join the army. He was about to leave for Wuhan to join the ranks of the revolutionary armies there, when the revolutionaries in Changsha launched an armed uprising on 24 October 1911 and established a revolutionary military government in Hunan. Mao Zedong immediately joined the new army in Changsha. Disinclined to join its student detachment, Mao joined the regular army as a private in the left platoon of the First Battalion, 25^th Brigade, of the Hunan New Army.

In his army life, Mao had a monthly salary of 7 Chinese silver dollars, and, apart from receiving military training, he would spend most of his time reading newspapers and journals and books, which he managed to subscribe to or purchase with his salary. He became an avid reader of such newspapers and journals, where he followed new political developments in China, and reading newspapers carefully became a habit of his. One day, in reading an article in the Xianghan xinwen (Xianghan News), he happened on his first acquaintance with the term ‘socialism’. It was, in fact, an article advocating social reformism, written by Jiang Kanghu. However, quite interested by what he had read, Mao discussed the subject with his fellow soldiers, and he wrote to several of his former schoolmates, proposing that the subject was worth studying. There was however, little enthusiasm for his suggestion – only one of them responded in agreement.

The revolution developed rapidly. Barely two months after the Wuchang Uprising of 10 October 1991 most of China’s provinces had declared independence from the Qing regime. Then, through a peace arrangement, Yuan Shikai usurped the fruits of victory of the revolution to become provisional president of the republic. Following the abdication of the last Qing Dynasty emperor, people rejoiced, thinking that the revolution had ended successfully. Feeling that his own aims in joining the army had been met, Mao began reconsidering his next course of action, and decided to leave the army in order to continue schooling. By then, he had served in the army for a little over half a year.

Mao began scrutinizing student recruitment advertisements in newspapers. He was for some time unable to decide on a profession, so he registered for the entrance examinations of the police academy, the soap-making technical school, the politics and law institute, and the public high school. By the found none of these to his liking. Finally, after ranking first in the entrance exam, Mao was admitted to the Hunan Provincial Senior Middle School (later called the Number One Provincial Middle School).

Mao Zedong stayed in this Senior Middle School for only half a year, and left behind an essay that Liu Qian, his teacher of classical Chinese, praised as a ‘realistic analysis of society’. The topic was ‘How Shang Yang Established Confidence by the Moving of the Pole’. The essay started with very candid comments:

‘Having read history up to the point at which Shang Yang shifted the pole to establish credibility, I could not help but lament the folly of the nation’s people at that time, lament the painstaking effort of those at the helm of state, lament the lack of enlightenment of the people over several thousand years, and lament the nation’s survival crisis.’

This essay shows that, on the question of national salvation, Mao Zedong was continuing to advocate developing people’s awareness to mould a new generation, as advocated by Liang Qichao. This is the first complete essay we have from Mao’s youth. Totaling only 600 Chinese characters, it won a 150-character comment from his teacher, who wrote that the writer of the essay ‘possesses outstanding intellect that suggests a very promising future’, and ‘the accomplished writing style indicates a quality of future greatness, and with continuous effort he may attain heights beyond imagination’. The teacher asked that the essay be circulated among Mao’s classmates.

Not long after, Mao became dissatisfied with the rigid regulations and limited scope of the high school’s curriculum. Liu Qian had lent to Mao the complete set of 116 volumes of the Imperially Approved and Edited Mirror of Successive Dynasties (Yupi lidai tongjian jilan). Mao read the chronicles and comments assiduously. From this, he felt he benefited greatly, and concluded it was much better for him to read and study on his own than to continue with schooling. Once he made up his mind, Mao was capable of taking steps that would astonish others. Resolutely, he left the Provincial Senior Middle School and took lodgings at the Xiangxiang Guild Hall in Changsha’s Xin’an Lane. From there, he would walk 3 li (1.5 km) daily to the Provincial Library outside the Liuyang Gate for self-study.

Mao Zedong then drew up for himself a comprehensive plan for self-education. He delved into the books pertinent to his study, by both Chinese and foreign authors, and studied them as avidly as a hungry cow let into a vegetable garden eats everything in sight. He took great interest in and benefited much from the then-available Western works of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries on bourgeois democracy and modern sciences. They included such works as Rousseau’s Social Contract, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Yan Fu’s translation of Adam’ Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in particular, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology, and the like. It could be said, then, that Mao had a fairly systematic self-education in modern Western thought and culture. It was also at the Provincial Library that he saw for the first time a huge world map hanging on the walls of the entrance hall, which paused to study daily. It was there that he realized that the world was so big, that China was only a small part of it, and that Xiangtan, his home town was not even on the map. How exciting the discovery must have been to a young student who had left home barely one and a half years earlier!

Thus passed another half-year.

That period of self-education, though ‘very rewarding’ to Mao, as he later told Edgar Snow, was not to last. Firstly, his father refused to give financial support to what seemed to him an aimless way of learning. Second, the Xiangxiang Guild House where he was staying became occupied by disbanded army men from Xiangxiang, who often resorted to fist-fighting, which made it impossible for Mao to stay on longer.

Under such circumstances, Mao had to plan his future course more realistically, though he still hesitated about what to do next. By then, he had become a young man, nearly 20 years old, who had read a lot and was not altogether without experience.

The College Student

Mao Zedong made up his mind to go back to school and resume his studies. A newspaper advertisement recruiting students for the Hunan Provincial Fourth Teachers’ Training College caught his eye. It offered waiving tuition fees, nominal charges for room and board, and a teaching post for each graduate. The year before, when he took the essay-writing test for the entrance examination to the Provincial Senior Middle School, applicants were asked to write on the subject ‘Just at the birth of the republic, when all neglected tasks remain to be done, which is more important, education or industrialization?’ In his essay, Mao had employed the theme of ‘let education be in control’. As advocated by Liang Qichao. After careful consideration, Mao felt he was most suited to being a teacher. In the spring of 1913, Mao passed the entrance examination and enrolled in the five-year programme of the Fourth Teachers’ Training College. The following spring, when this college was merged with the Hunan Provincial First Teachers’ Training College, Mao Zedong became a member of the eighth entering class. He actually spent five and a half years in the college. The Fourth Teachers College enrolled students in the spring term, but the First Teachers College did so in the autumn term. In consequence, as the colleges adjusted their respective curriculum schedules, Mao had to repeat in the autumn courses he had taken in the spring, and so he did not graduate until the summer of 1918. The college campus faced the northward rush of the Xian River, at the foot of the Miaogao Peak, to the south of Changsha’s southern city gate. East of the campus was the Hankou-Guangzhou rail line, to the west, beyond the river, the lush green of Mount Yuelu could be seen. The natural environment of the campus was indeed beautiful. The rumble of trains that raced by the campus brought to it the breath of a new era.

Formally established in 1903, the First Teachers College was called the Hunan Provincial Normal School in its early years. Its earliest predecessor was the Chengnan Shuyuan (City-south Classics Academy), where renewed Confucian rationalist philosophers, such as Zhang Yue of the Southern Son Dynasty had lectured. The academy was neighbour to another renowned academy on the other side of the Xian River, the Yuelu Classics Academy, where the great scholar Zhu Xi (1130-1200) had lectured. Since 1912, the Hunan Provincial Normal School had been called the First Hunan Provincial Teachers’ Training College. Its size and equipment and the academic levels of the teaching staff dwarfed all the other schools Mao Zedong had attended before. According to the educational policy expressed in the college charter, ‘in addition to the objectives of the Ministry of Education, the college adopts an up-to-date educational approach’ that placed great emphasis on ‘cultivation of virtue’, ‘physical activity’ and ‘living in society’, as well as ‘every sort of instruction that should encourage initiative’.  This was very much in keeping with the thorough nurturing of moral character and scholarship. The college consistently engaged a teaching facility noted for the breadth and depth of their knowledge, progressive outlook and fine moral character. The faculty included such important scholars as Yang Changji, Xu Teli, Fang Weixia, Wang Jifan, and Li Jinxi. During Mao’s stint in the college, a number of enthusiastic and progressive young men were also enrolled there, such as Cai Hesen, Zhang Kundi, Chen Zhangfu, Luo Xuezan, Zhou Shizhao, Li Weihan, Xiao Zisheng, and Xiao Zizhang. He Shuheng who was seventeen years Mao’s senior and had earlier passed the imperial examination at the county level, was also enrolled in the college at the same time. The first Teachers College was then rightly regarded as a cradle of progressive youth.

The college undoubtedly exerted a great influence on Mao Zedong’s development. He not only acquired a good foundation of knowledge at the school. It was also there, in the context of China’s evolving situation, that he began to develop his own way of thinking and political views, gained initial experience of social action, and befriended quite a few like-minded people.

When Mao entered the Teachers College, China was undergoing a period pf perplexity and depression that was difficult for people to endure. A republic had replaced the imperial dynasty, yet China had not gained a new life. The hope for national independence, democracy and social progress, cherished by people before the 1911 Revolution, was not realized. Instead, in 1915, Japan forced the Beiyang government to accept its so-called ’21 demands’ for domination of China; the warlord Yuan Shikai restored an imperial regime, followed by the farce of an imperial restoration staged by the warlord Zhang Xun, and the entire country then descended into incessant internecine wars among separatist warlord regimes. In the cultural arena, Confucianism opposed and blocked revolutionary thinking. Deep frustration replaced high hope among the people. The harsh realities, however, did not stop a young generation from searching for a way out.

Having become a full-time student, what objectives did Mao Zedong set for his school years? Young people love to talk about their aspirations and career goals, such as their hopes to become military strategists or educators. Mao Zedong though that his aspirations should concentrate on searching for the truth. Otherwise, he would merely imitate those who had gone before. He was convinced that genuine aspiration required searching for the truth, and then following its lead. As he wrote to his teacher Li Jinxi, in 1917, ‘If in a decade one fails to get at the truth, it is ten years to no purpose; and if not found in a life time, it is a waste of a life.’

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