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).[1] 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.’[2] 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.[3] 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’.[4]
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.
- ↑ Shao has come to mean 'beautiful' from its association with the music of the legendary Emperor Shun. lt was said that Confucius was so transported by the melody's beauty that he could not eat for days.
- ↑ Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (originally published in London by Gollancz in 1937; Chinese-language edition titled Xixing manji, with translation by Dong Leshan, Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1979), pp. 106-7. The pages cited hereafter refer to the Chinese-language edition
- ↑ Mount Heng in Hunan Province, the southernmost of China’s so-called ‘five sacred mountains.
- ↑ Mao Zelian’s recollections (February 1973) in Gao Jucun et al. Qiagnian Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong in his Youth) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi zilao chubanshe, 1990), p. 8.