Skip to main content <#maincontent>
We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!
Internet Archive logo A line drawing of the Internet Archive
headquarters building façade.
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Upload icon An illustration of a horizontal line over an up pointing
arrow. Upload
User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up
| Log in
Web icon An illustration of a computer application window
Wayback Machine
Texts icon An illustration of an open book.
Books
Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip.
Video
Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker.
Audio
Software icon An illustration of a 3.5" floppy disk.
Software
Images icon An illustration of two photographs.
Images
Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
Donate
Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses.
More
Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by
interacting with this icon.
Internet Archive Audio
Live Music Archive Librivox Free
Audio
Featured
* All Audio
* This Just In
* Grateful Dead
* Netlabels
* Old Time Radio
* 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
Top
* Audio Books & Poetry
* Computers, Technology and Science
* Music, Arts & Culture
* News & Public Affairs
* Spirituality & Religion
* Podcasts
* Radio News Archive
Images
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Featured
* All Images
* This Just In
* Flickr Commons
* Occupy Wall Street Flickr
* Cover Art
* USGS Maps
Top
* NASA Images
* Solar System Collection
* Ames Research Center
Software
Internet Arcade Console
Living Room
Featured
* All Software
* This Just In
* Old School Emulation
* MS-DOS Games
* Historical Software
* Classic PC Games
* Software Library
Top
* Kodi Archive and Support File
* Vintage Software
* APK
* MS-DOS
* CD-ROM Software
* CD-ROM Software Library
* Software Sites
* Tucows Software Library
* Shareware CD-ROMs
* Software Capsules Compilation
* CD-ROM Images
* ZX Spectrum
* DOOM Level CD
Books
Books to Borrow Open Library
Featured
* All Books
* All Texts
* This Just In
* Smithsonian Libraries
* FEDLINK (US)
* Genealogy
* Lincoln Collection
Top
* American Libraries
* Canadian Libraries
* Universal Library
* Project Gutenberg
* Children's Library
* Biodiversity Heritage Library
* Books by Language
* Additional Collections
Video
TV News Understanding 9/11
Featured
* All Video
* This Just In
* Prelinger Archives
* Democracy Now!
* Occupy Wall Street
* TV NSA Clip Library
Top
* Animation & Cartoons
* Arts & Music
* Computers & Technology
* Cultural & Academic Films
* Ephemeral Films
* Movies
* News & Public Affairs
* Spirituality & Religion
* Sports Videos
* Television
* Videogame Videos
* Vlogs
* Youth Media
Search the history of over 835 billion web pages
on the Internet.
Search the Wayback Machine
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Mobile Apps
* Wayback Machine (iOS)
* Wayback Machine (Android)
Browser Extensions
* Chrome
* Firefox
* Safari
* Edge
Archive-It Subscription
* Explore the Collections
* Learn More
* Build Collections
Save Page Now
Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in
the future.
Please enter a valid web address
* About
* Blog
* Projects
* Help
* Donate
* Contact
* Jobs
* Volunteer
* People
* Sign up for free
* Log in
Search metadata
Search text contents
Search TV news captions
Search radio transcripts
Search archived web sites
Advanced Search
* About
* Blog
* Projects
* Help
* Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
* Contact
* Jobs
* Volunteer
* People
Full text of "891100 "
See other formats
MAO
JONATHAN anes
MAO
From humble origins in the provinces, Mao
Zedong rose to absolute power, unifying
with an iron fist a vast country torn apart by
years of weak leadership, colonialism and
war. In this sharply drawn and insightful
account, Jonathan Spence, award-winning
historian and author of acclaimed books
about both the old and the new China,
brings to life this modern-day emperor and
the tumultuous era that he did so much to
shape.
Both a canny tactician and a hardworking
organizer, Mao parlayed the privations of
the famous Long March and the success of
his guerilla army into a powerful cult of
personality and secured a dominant
position in the burgeoning Chinese
Communist Party. The Communist victory
in 1949 not only elevated him to supreme
leader but made his eccentric version of
Marxism official dogma: his regime was a
volatile mixture of power and mystique that
exploded in the havoc of the Cultural
Revolution. Jonathan Spence captures Mao
in all his paradoxical grandeur and sheds
light on the radical transformation he
unleashed that still reverberates in China
today.
£12.99 IN UK ONLY
Jonathan Spence's twelve books on Chinese
history include The Gate of Heavenly Peace and The
Death of Woman Wang. He teaches Chinese
history at Yale University and was appointed
honorary professor at the University of Nanjing
in 1994. His awards include a Guggenheim and
a MacArthur Fellowship.
God's Chinese Son:
‘An enthralling piece of history, presented with
both erudition and verve.'
Anthony Storr, FINANCIAL TIMES
‘Crammed with passion and violence and
moments of humour. It reads like a great
novel, and once again confirms that Jonathan
Spence is the great literary historian of China
writing in England today'
Linda Jaivin, THE AUSTRALIAN
‘Both scholarly and spellbinding...'
Robert Bemstein, NEW YORK TIMES
The Chan's Great Continent
‘Jonathan Spence is not only one of the greatest
historians of China: he is as good as any
historian writing today about anywhere. He has
a vast and generous imaginative range anda
driving narrative style.'
Chris Patten, TELEGRAPH
JACKET IMAGE: Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square:
AKG Photo
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
The Orion Publishing Group
Orion House
5, Upper Saint Martin's Lane
London WC2H 9EA
Other titles in the Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Lives series include:
Already published:
Edmund White on PROUST
Larry McMurtry on CRAZY HORSE
Edna O'Brien on JAMES JOYCE
Garry Wills on SAINT AUGUSTINE
Peter Gay on MOZART
Forthcoming:
Mary Gordon on JOAN OF ARC
Elizabeth Hardwick on MELVILLE
Carol Shields on JANE AUSTEN
Jane Smiley on DICKENS
Sherwin Nuland on LEONARDO DA VINCI
Janet Malcolm on CHEKHOV
Karen Armstrong on BUDDHA
R.W.B. Lewis on DANTE
Patricia Bosworth on MARLON BRANDO
Marshall Frady on MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Paul Johnson on ANDREW CARNEGIE
General Editor: James Atlas
MAO
JONATHAN
SPENCE
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
LONDON
First published in Great Britain in 1999
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
First published in USA in 1999
by Viking/Penguin
© Jonathan Spence
The moral right of Jonathan Spence to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
the (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book.
A CI P catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 0 297 64347 9
Typeset by Selwood Systems, Midsomer Norton
Set in Minion
Printed in Great Britain by
Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
The (rion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
For Annping
Also by Jonathan Spence
The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds
The Chinese Century: A Photographic History of the
Last Hundred Years (coauthor with Annping Chin)
God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of
Hong Xiuquan
Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture
The Search for Modern China
The Question of Hu
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their
Revolution, 1895-1980
The Death of Woman Wang
Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-hsi
To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960
Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant
and Master
CONTENTS
Foreword xi
Acknowledgments xv
A Child of Hunan 1
Self-Strengthening 17
Casting Around 33
Into the Party 49
Workers and Peasants 63
The Long Retreat 79
Crafting the Image 95
Taking Over 113
. The Ultimate Vision 133
10. Bleak Harvest 149
1L. Fanning the Flames 163
12. Embers 183
WP ONAMNAWNHE
Notes 197
This page is intentionally left blank
Kings ought never to be seen upon the
stage. In the abstract, they are very disagree-
able characters: it is only while living that
they are "the best of kings." ... Seen as they
were, their power and their pretensions look
monstrous and ridiculous.
William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
This page is intentionally left blank
FOREWORD
MAO'S BEGINNINGS WERE commonplace, his education
episodic, his talents unexceptional: yet he possessed a relentless
energy and a ruthless self-confidence that led him to become
one of the world's most powerful rulers. He was one of the
toughest and strangest in China's long tradition of formidable
rulers who wielded extraordinary powers neither wisely nor
well, and yet were able to silence effective criticism for years or
even decades by the force of their own character and the
strength of their acolytes and guards. Mao need not have done
what he did, and it was he alone who ensured that his visions
of social and economic change became hopelessly enmeshed
with violence and fear. It was his rhetoric and his inflexible will
that led to the mobilization of hundreds of millions of Chinese
citizens, who - even when they wished to - could find no way
to halt the cataract of energy swirling around them.
Those who endured Mao's worst abuses execrate his
memory. Those who benefited from his policies and his
dreams sometimes still revere him, or at least remember the
forces that he generated with a kind of astonished awe. In the
xi
end it was really only physical decay and weakness that
brought him down, even though his chosen policies had
long been shown to be full of inconsistencies and what Mao
himself termed ‘contradictions.’
One goal of this book is to show how Mao was able to rise
so high, and sustain his eccentric flight for quite so long.
Context was naturally intrinsic to the drama, and the narra-
tive tries to introduce the essential background that any
reader needs to make sense of Mao's life. Historians in China
and the West are slowly hauling Mao back down to earth,
deflating the myths that sustained him, even as they often
exclaim over the patience and deliberation with which Mao
and his confidants constructed those same myths. We are
learning more about Mao's relations with his family, friends,
and confidential assistants; and Mao's own youthful writ-
ings, his poems, original drafts of several key speeches, and a
good many surviving personal letters help us get some way
into his mind. But many of the wilder flights of Mao's fancy,
and the remarkable efforts he expended to attain them, take
the historian out into a different zone, where the well-tried
tools of exploration are of only limited help.
I have come to think of the enigmatic arena in which Mao
seemed most at home as being that of order's opposite, the
world of misrule. In the European Middle Ages it was
customary for great households to choose a ‘Lord of
Misrule.' The person chosen was expected to preside over the
revels that briefly reversed or parodied the conventional
social and economic hierarchies. The most favored time for
the lords' misrule was during the twelve days of Christmas,
but they might preside, too, at other festivals or saints' days.
xii
When the brief reign of misrule was over, the customary
order of things would be restored: the Lords of Misrule
would go back to their menial occupations, while their social
superiors resumed their wonted status.
In the European examples with which we are familiar, the
period of misrule was expected to be strictly limited, and the
intention of the entire exercise was lighthearted. But some-
times the idea of Lord of Misrule would spill over from the
realm of revel to the realm of politics. Milton wrote of the
‘loud misrule of Chaos,' and the need to overcome it if the
purpose of creation were to be realized. In the seventeenth
century, some churchmen applied the Lord of Misrule label
to Oliver Cromwell. The term also came to have sexual
connotations, as in John Lyly's sixteenth-century play
Endymion, when the hero declaims that ‘love is a Lorde of
Misrule, and keepeth Christmas in my corps.’ Similar types
of reversals could be found in many other European
societies: in some, the apprentices took over from their guild
masters for a reckless day or two, in others gender roles were
reversed for a day as the women took over the tasks and airs
normally associated only with men.
Chinese philosphers also loved the paradoxes of status
reversed, the ways that wit or shame could deflate pretension
and lead to sudden shafts of insight. Even if they did not
specify the seasons, they knew the dizzying possibilities in-
herent in turning things upside down. To Chinese thinkers,
the aspects of misrule were always embedded within the
concept of order, for they were natural dialecticians, and
understood that everything contains within itself the seeds
of its own opposite.
xiii
It was Mao's terrible accomplishment to seize on such in-
sights from earlier Chinese philosophers, combine them with
elements drawn from Western socialist thought, and to use
both in tandem to prolong the limited concept of misrule
into a long-drawn-out adventure in upheaval. To Mao, the
former lords and masters should never be allowed to return;
he felt they were not his betters, and that society was liberated
by their removal. He also thought the customary order of
things should never be restored. There would be no Twelfth
Night to end the Christmas season. The will of most people
seemed frail to Mao, their courage to bear the pain of change
pathetically limited. So Mao would achieve the impossible
for his countrymen by doing their thinking for them. This
Lord of Misrule was not a man who could be deflected by
criticisms based on conventional premises. His own sense of
omniscience had grown too strong for that.
Xiv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE THE WARMEST thanks to several people for their help
with this book. Zhao Yilu was indefatigable in locating and
translating recent Chinese sources on Mao and his family, and
Argo Caminis made a broad computer review of recent
Western sources. Professor Zhang Guangda read the first draft
with care, and alerted me to several problems. Lorenz Luthi
gave me copies of some important sources I had missed. Jesse
Cohen's editorial suggestions were sharply on target. Betsy and
Julie McCaulley, and Peggy Ryan, typed the drafts with their
customary unflappable precision in the face of imminent
deadlines. And Annping Chin, besides helping with Mao's
poetry, kept me always alert to what his actions and visions
had meant to others.
XV
TNE SLAY ity wel
Nd Apelivalls
A a r it ad a ki i FH
BEE APE Ste A i)
ay et E han e ud
a dah yi j r
any!
This page is intentionally left blank
1 A CHILD OF HUNAN
MAO ZEDONG WAS born in late 1893, at a time when China
was sliding into one of the bleakest and most humiliating
decades in its long history. The Qing dynasty, which had
ruled China with a firm hand for two hundred and fifty
years, was falling apart, no longer understanding either how
to exercise its own power or how to chart the country's
course into the future. For over thirty years the Qing rulers
had been trying to reorganize their land and naval forces,
and to equip them with modern Western weapons, but in
1894 their proud new navy was obliterated by the Japanese in
a short, bloody war that also brought heavy casualties to the
Chinese ground forces. Victorious, the Japanese staked out
major spheres of influence in southern Manchuria - once
the ancestral home of the Qing rulers - and also annexed the
Chinese island of Taiwan, transforming it into a Japanese
colony. Before the century was out, the Germans had seized
areas of north China, near the birthplace of China's ancient
sage Confucius, the British had expanded the territory they
dominated in central China, along the Yangtze River, and
the French were pushing their influence into China's
mountainous southwest. In 1898, an emperor with a broad
view of the need for economic and institutional change was
ousted in a palace coup only a hundred days after he began
his reform program. And in 1900, as the old century ended,
rebels in north China seized Beijing, and by killing scores of
foreigners and thousands of Chinese Christian converts,
brought upon their country an armed invasion of reprisal by
a combined force of eight foreign nations.
These catastrophic political events occurred as other
elements of Chinese society were feeling the stirrings of
change. In some of China's large coastal cities like Shanghai
and Canton, a class with many of the traits of the Western
bourgeoisie began to emerge. Some members of this new
Chinese middle class had been educated in missionary
schools and had acquired a knowledge of Western science,
religion, and political structures; others were exploring new
aspects of business, discovering the effectiveness of advertis-
ing, distributing foreign goods inland, and experimenting
with new forms of labor organization in their fledgling
factories. This new middle class also began to subscribe to
Chinese-language newspapers and journals that advocated
political and social change, to use the postal and telegraph
services newly installed by foreign companies, and to travel
on China's rivers by steamer. But in a largely rural, inland
province like Hunan, where Mao was born, such changes were
barely felt. Only in the Hunan capital of Changsha might one
have found a considerable clustering of self-styled reformers,
and their eyes were turned more toward the far-off east coast
cities than into the unchanging villages and farms that were
spread all around them.
Mao Zedong was born in a sprawling courtyard house
with a tiled roof in one of these farm villages, called
Shaoshan, about thirty miles south and slightly west of
Changsha. The exact date was 26 December 1893. He began
to work on his parents' farm at the age of six, and after he
was enrolled in the village primary school at the age of eight,
he continued to do farm work in the early mornings and in
the evenings. Their farm was small by Western standards,
around three acres, but in that area of Hunan such a farm
was considered a decent size, more than enough to support
a family if well managed. As soon as his reading and writing
skills were good enough Mao also began to help his father
keep the family accounts, since his father had only two years
of schooling. Mao stayed in primary school until some time
in 1907, when he was thirteen and a bit; at that point he left
school and began to work full time for his father, who had
prospered in the meantime, buying at least another acre of
land, hiring a paid laborer to help in the work, and
expanding into bulk grain trade.
Mao's mother was born in an adjoining county, southwest
of Shaoshan; although her birthplace was just the other side
of a range of hills, in that highly localized rural society she
grew up speaking a dialect that was quite distinct from her
husband's. She bore seven children altogether - two
daughters and five sons - but only three survived, all boys.
Mao Zedong was the eldest of these three survivors, born
when his mother was twenty-seven. The few records we have
concerning his childhood and early adolescence suggest a
timeless world, rooted in long-standing rural Chinese
patterns of expectation and behavior. For months on end in
his early childhood, Mao lived with his maternal grand-
parents and must have absorbed some of their gentler
outlook on life - his father had served as a soldier in the
provincial army before returning to the farm, and always
had a quick temper and firm views. Family discussions often
focused on his mother's Buddhism - she was a devout
believer, while her husband was a skeptic. The young Mao
was caught between the two, but sympathetic to his mother's
point of view. She had a kind of ‘impartial love,’ he said of
her in his funeral eulogy (she died in 1919 at the age of fifty-
three), ‘that extended to all, far or near, related or unrelated.'
He added that his mother 'never lied or cheated. She was
always neat and meticulous. Everything she took care of
would be put in order. She was clear in thinking, adept in
analyzing matters. Nothing was neglected, and nothing was
misplaced.’
Despite Mao's love for his mother, it was his father who
laid out the lines of the boy's life: there would be five years of
study in the Shaoshan village school, with a traditional
teacher, in time-honored texts from the Confucian canon
emphasizing filial behavior and introducing some aspects of
early Chinese history from the first millennium BC. There
seems to have been no suggestion that Mao should do more
than acquire basic literacy to help on the family farm; no
hints, for example, that Mao might strive to pass the first
level of the state examination system that would edge him
toward the rural gentry life of those trained to work in the
bureaucracy. In any case, if there had been such an intent, it
would have vanished in 1905, just before Mao left school,
when the court in Beijing announced the end of the exam
system based on knowledge of Confucian classics. Mao's
father encouraged his eldest son to be adept at calculation on
the abacus; he had plans to apprentice the boy to work in a
rice shop. If he valued his son's literacy for anything more
than its teaching of filial behavior and practical book-
keeping, it was so that his son's knowledge of classical texts
and use of some well-chosen quotations, produced at the
right moment, 'could help him in winning lawsuits.
Mao at thirteen, like any other healthy adolescent in
China, was regarded as having moved from schoolboy status
to adulthood, 'doing the full labour of a man,' in his own
words; thus in 1907 his father arranged for Mao to marry a
woman from the neighboring Luo clan. The Luos had land,
some of the Luo sons were scholars, and the two families had
close connections: the bride's grandmother was the sister of
Mao Zedong's grandfather. The marriage took place in 1907
or 1908 when Mao was fourteen and she was eighteen. They
were together for two or three years on the farm, until she
died at age twenty-one. There is no record of any surviving
children, and Mao did not discuss the marriage in later
years.
Was it his young wife's death that broke Mao out of his
apparently predestined circle of farm and family? Or was it
already some deeper compulsion, some filtration into
Shaoshan Village of knowledge about the dramas of the
wider world? Mao Zedong traced it later to the impact of a
book that a cousin sent to him at this time, a book that he
added to his customary fare of historical novels about
China's past. He had devoured such novels during and after
school, going over the plots and characters again and again
with his friends, until he ‘learned many of the stories almost
by heart,’ and could exchange the tales with the old men in
the village who prided themselves on their storytelling
knowledge and abilities. This new book, so different from
the others Mao was used to reading, was called Words of
Warning to an Affluent Age (Shengshi weiyan). Its author,
Zheng Guanying, was a new kind of figure on the Chinese
literary scene, a merchant who had worked with Western
business firms in China, understood the foreigners’ business
techniques, and had dark forebodings about what might
happen to China unless the foreigners were curbed. Zheng
urged his compatriots to adjust to the modern world of
rapid change before it was too late: by developing new
communications systems such as railways and the telegraph,
by industrializing, by creating a network of public libraries,
and - most daringly of all - by introducing parliamentary
government to China.
This book, Mao said later to an interviewer, ‘stimulated in
me a desire to resume my studies.’ Though he did not have
the money for any formal schooling, and his father would
give him none, Mao left the farm in 1910 and found two
tutors in the nearby county town of Xiangtan to work with
him part-time, one an unemployed law student, and the
other an elderly Chinese scholar. The law student widened
Mao's horizons with current journal and newspaper articles,
while the older scholar awakened in Mao a more profound
interest in a range of classical texts than had ever been
possible under the earlier pedantic village schoolteacher.
Among the eclectic mix of things that Mao read at this
time - perhaps provided by that same cousin or by the
unnamed student of law - was a pamphlet on ‘The
Dismemberment of China,’ which covered such topics as
Japan's colonization of Taiwan and Korea, the French
conquests in Indochina, and the British dominance over
Burma. Decades later, Mao still remembered the opening
line, 'Alas, China will be subjugated,’ and he attributed to the
pamphlet the beginnings of his ‘political consciousness.'
Another incident, much closer to home, widened the range
of his political feelings. A series of bad harvests in Hunan led
to outbreaks of famine, and some of the desperate Hunanese
formed a group under the slogan 'Eat Rice Without Charge,’
and seized stores of rice from the wealthier farmers. Among
the shipments they seized was one that Mao's father was
sending to the county town of Xiangtan. Mao later recalled
the ambiguity that this primal clash between family
obligation and social desperation had aroused in him: he
could not sympathize with his father, who continued to
export rice from his farm in Shaoshan to the bigger county
town markets, despite the local famine; nor would he
condone the violence of those who seized the property of
others.
Political news of a different kind filtered into Xiangtan,
and to a new school in neighboring Xiangxiang township in
which Mao enrolled late in 1910: tales of secret-society
risings, of larger grain seizures and riots in the provincial
capital of Changsha thirty miles to the north, of desperate
villagers building mountain strongholds. Some of the
incidents sharply revealed the extent of duplicity used by the
authorities to regain or maintain their power: in Changsha,
for example, rioters were first offered a general pardon if
they would disperse, only to be later arrested and beheaded
- 'their heads displayed on poles as a warning to future
‘rebels.’ 'In Mao's home village of Shaoshan, a group of
villagers protested a legal verdict brought against them by
their landlord; they were discredited, despite what Mao saw
as the justness of their case, by the landlord's spreading of a
totally fabricated rumor that they had sacrificed a child in
order to gain their ends. Their leader, too, was caught and
beheaded.
In the Xiangxiang school, centered in a bustling market
town on major road and river routes, Mao found an eager
group of volatile fellow students. The school had been
brought to Mao's attention because it was ‘radical,’ and
emphasized the 'new knowledge’ of the West. Convinced by
neighbors that the school would increase Mao's earning
power, his father agreed to his enrollment, and Mao was able
to put down a deposit of fourteen hundred copper cash
(around two US dollars) to cover five months' room and
board and the necessary study materials. Mao found himself
despised for his rustic clothes, his lowly background, and for
being an ‘outsider,’ even though he was from a neighboring
county. Nevertheless, the school was a revelation to Mao. It
offered courses in the natural sciences and in Western
learning, as well as in the Chinese classics, and one of the
teachers was a Chinese scholar who had studied in Japan, as
many ambitious reformist youth were beginning to do.
While in Japan, so as to appear 'modern,' this teacher had cut
off his long queue of hair, a style that had been a
distinguishing trait of Chinese men ever since the Manchus'
conquest of China in the seventeenth century. Cutting off
the queue was illegal in China, and Mao soon noticed that
when the teacher taught, he wore a false queue braided to his
own hair - another example of the odd anomalies of a China
on the edge of transition.
This man taught music and English, and shared songs
from Japan with his students. One of these was a hymn of
triumph to the Japanese victory over the Russians in the war
of 1904-5. Japan's defeat of a Westernized power like Russia
enchanted the students, who saw the possibility for a
regeneration of their own country in the example of Japan's
astonishingly swift race to modernization through indus-
trialization and constitutional reform. 'The nightingale
dances / And the green fields are lovely in the spring,’ ran the
lyrics of one of the songs that Mao remembered throughout
his life; the students sang the words lustily, while the man
with the false queue urged them on. Other teachers
introduced Mao to a maze of new names and their
accomplishments, to Napoleon and Catherine the Great, to
Wellington and Gladstone, to Rousseau and Montesquieu, to
Washington and Lincoln. At least one sentence stayed with
Mao from a book he read that year called Great Heroes of the
World: After eight years of difficult war, Washington won
victory and built up his nation."
These months in Xiangxiang township were the first time
that Mao had been exposed to a wider world of con-
temporary events. It was only now, in 1910, two years after
the event, that Mao heard of the death of the emperor in
whose reign he had been born. And thanks to the same
cousin who had lent him Words of Warning, Mao received in
the mail the writings of two prominent reformers who had
been exiled in the 1890s, when that same emperor had
attempted an unsuccessful political reform movement.
These two were the philosopher Kang Youwei and his
disciple, the historian and pioneering journalist Liang
Qichao. Both were fine classical scholars who became
absorbed with the problems of China's future destiny. Kang's
solution was to explore the ways that Confucius himself had
sought to change the world, and to endeavor to establish in
China a constitutional monarchy that might both keep the
Qing dynasty securely on the throne and make China a more
equal partner with the Western nations. Liang, more boldly,
wrote of his feelings about the need of revolutionary change
for China, citing the examples of the French revolutionaries;
he also introduced Chinese readers to the complexities - and
the hopeful model - of the Italian reunification and
independence movement in the nineteenth century. In
Mao's words from a quarter of a century later, 'I read and re-
read these until I knew them by heart. I worshipped Kang
Youwei and Liang Qichao, and was very grateful to my
cousin.’ But just as Mao had not been ready to approve the
violence of those who seized his father's grain, so he was not
yet ready for Liang's radicalism, and continued to consider
himself a monarchist.
The new school's promise to teach the natural sciences
had also been an attraction to Mao. But in a letter to a friend
he confessed that he was 'wearied by the burdensome details
of science classes.’ If science was neglected, knowledge of
China's own past continued to absorb Mao. Classical history
was well taught at the school, and perhaps because as a good
10
monarchist Mao ‘considered the Emperor as well as most
officials to be honest, good and clever men,' he continued to
be ‘fascinated by accounts of the rulers of ancient China,’
and to read about them with sustained interest.
Good schools foster intellectual restlessness, and within a
few months of leaving his home village and family farm for the
county town of Xiangxiang, Mao was feeling the urge to go to
the provincial capital of Changsha. Though Changsha was a
large city, Mao did not have to fear being totally lost, for he
had heard of a special middle school there for boys from his
area. Armed with a reference letter from one of his Xiangxiang
primary school teachers (he does not say if it was the Chinese
scholar with the fake queue and the love of music), Mao
walked the thirty-odd miles to Changsha. Half expecting to
have his application rejected, he was admitted right away.
It was now 1911, and Mao was just seventeen. The Qing
dynasty, already in such trouble when he was born, was by
this time teetering on the edge of total collapse. Opposition
to the Qing had found a new focus in the elected assemblies
of local notables that had been founded in every province on
orders from the court. The Qing rulers intended these
assemblies to play a docile advisory role, but the assembly-
men soon seized new prerogatives for themselves, expanded
their base among the assertive new commercial and educated
middle-class reformers, and began to push for the convening
of a national parliament and the right to wield full legislative
power. An exiled political radical from the Canton area, Sun
Yat-sen, had also been patiently building up an underground
revolutionary party in opposition to the Qing throne, and
many of Sun's supporters were active in the same assemblies,
11
or had friends who were members there. Sun's followers had
also infiltrated the Qing armies, which were riddled with
disaffection, despite the training in modern weaponry and
discipline to which they were now being introduced. The
Qing government itself, ruled by Manchu regents in the
name of the new emperor, who was still only a boy of six, was
reviled by many Chinese for its weakness in the face of the
foreigners. The fact that foreign investors had gained
financial control over much of China's emerging railroad
system added fuel to this fire, and the Qing government's
clumsy attempt to solve this problem by nationalizing the
railways became a further volatile focus for provincial anger.
Mao found himself swept up in this excitement. As the
capital city of Hunan province, Changsha was the seat of the
Hunanese provincial assembly. Radical newspapers were
widely available in the city, and Mao avidly bought and read
them. In the spring of 1911, he and the other citizens of
Changsha were galvanized by the news of a major uprising in
Canton by Sun Yat-sen's supporters, and of the ‘seventy-two
martyrs' who gave their lives in the name of freedom from
the Qing yoke. Reading whatever he could find on Sun Yat-sen
- Sun himself was still in exile at the time, shuttling among
Japan, Southeast Asia, and the United States in search of
funds and support - Mao became a convert, at least intel-
lectually, to the revolutionary cause, though he still held on
to his Xiangxiang primary school enthusiasms for Kang
Youwei and Liang Qichao. Typical of his mood at this time,
Mao recalled later, was a manifesto he posted on the wall of
his school that spring, suggesting that Sun Yat-sen be made
president of China, with Kang acting as premier and Liang as
12
foreign affairs minister. He joined in student demonstra-
tions in Changsha against the Qing, and clipped off his own
queue of hair as a symbol of his new reformist self. When
student friends of his whom he had thought to be
revolutionary sympathizers expressed reluctance to cutting
off their own queues, Mao and another friend took their
shears and forcibly chopped them off.
The final Qing collapse began with a massive military
mutiny in Wuhan, not far from Changsha, in early October
1911. Once rebels seized the city, other provinces rose in
sympathy, often led by their provincial assemblies; Sun's
Revolutionary Alliance members joined them, along with all
those eager for change or frustrated by the government's
incompetence. Mao heard a public address in his school
from a member of the Revolutionary Alliance which so
inspired him that he decided to leave at once for Wuhan to
join the revolutionary army. Somewhat less than heroically,
however, he delayed his departure while he hunted for
waterproof shoes, having heard that Wuhan was a rainy city.
Before he could locate the shoes, Changsha was occupied -
almost without incident - by the revolutionary army forces
led by two local leaders, and Mao could be no more than a
spectator as the ripples of revolution spread through Hunan
and out across the country. In February 1912, deserted by
most of their former supporters, the Qing regents abdicated.
China became a republic, led briefly by Sun Yat-sen, and
then by one of the former Qing military strongmen who had
also been interested in strengthening the state and recasting
the form of the government.
The immediate lesson that Mao absorbed in these
13
tumultuous events was the transient nature of fame and
success. The two men who had done the most to bring the
revolution to Changsha were Jiao Defeng and Chen Zuoxin.
Jiao, from a wealthy Hunan landlord family, had studied
briefly at a railway school in Japan before returning to China
and founding his own revolutionary group with local secret-
society support, which he named the ‘Forward Together
Society’ With some backup financial support from the
Revolutionary Alliance, Jiao, still only twenty-five in 1911,
managed to create a remarkable underground following
among shopkeepers, farmers, craftsmen, coolies, and army
personnel, whom he organized in a formidable array of front
organizations. Chen had served in the Qing government's
new army forces, where he rose to the rank of platoon
commander, and became a close friend of Jiao's. The two
men may have agreed with the basic republican goals of Sun
Yat-sen, but they also had their own ideas about how the
revolution in China should help the poor and the dis-
advantaged while at the same time increasing the power base
of the affiliated secret societies.
Though they showed considerable courage and shrewd-
ness in winning the city of Changsha to the revolutionary
camp in October, neither Jiao nor Chen had a firm footing
among the wealthy merchants and scholars who dominated
the Changsha assembly. Accordingly, as soon as their radical
goals became known, the two men were outmaneuvered and
isolated by a number of local political leaders and military
men, and they were killed in a sudden mutiny by the very
troops they thought they were leading. As Mao succinctly
described the events later in his life, Jiao and Chen 'did not
14
last long. They were not bad men, and had some
revolutionary intentions, but they were poor and repre-
sented the interests of the oppressed. The landlords and
merchants were dissatisfied with them. Not many days later,
when I went to call on a friend, I saw their corpses lying in
the street.’ It was Mao's first introduction to the realities of
power politics.
The fates of Jiao and Chen seem to have given Mao pause.
He had missed his chance to join the first revolutionary
army in Wuhan due to the speed of events - and to the
elusive rain shoes. But when other students from Changsha
schools hurried to enlist in a 'student army' from the city to
hasten the revolutionary cause, Mao was cautious. He did
not exactly understand their motives, nor did he think the
volunteer force was well managed. So instead he made the
pragmatic decision to join the regular army - that is to say,
the army once loyal to the Qing emperors, which had been
won over to the republican cause by the rhetoric and skillful
planning of Jiao and Chen. By a strange twist, therefore,
Mao's commanding officers were now the people who had
instigated the murders of both Jiao and Chen.
Mao did not see combat during his six months in the
Republican army, but seems to have remained on garrison
duty in Changsha. He did make some friends in his squad,
two of whom were workers, one a miner and the other an
ironsmith; they may have given him some new insights into
the world of labor. If so, the conversations he had with them
were doubtless sharpened by new reading that Mao was
doing in his leisure time, in the pages of the Xiang River
Daily News. This Hunan paper devoted considerable space to
15
socialist theories - Mao said later this was the first time he
encountered the word ‘socialism’ - and also led him to read
essays by one of the first socialist theorists and organizers in
China. But when Mao tried to share this latest enthusiasm,
in correspondence, with some of his former school friends,
he found that only one of them showed any interest at all.
The members of his squad, however, looked up to him as
an educated man, a new experience for Mao, who was now
almost eighteen years old. They respected his ‘learning,’ and
Mao reciprocated by writing letters home for them. Perhaps
this respect brought out a basic arrogance in Mao, even
though it was not long since he had left the family farm,
where he had been a laborer as well as his father's accountant.
Mao now declined to go and fetch his own water from the
springs or wells outside the city, as the soldiers were expected
to do. As somebody who had been a student, Mao wrote later,
he ‘could not condescend to carrying, and bought it from the
water-pedlars.' It was an odd kind of irony that the money he
could have used to buy more socialist tracts was spent instead
on buying water that he could easily have gotten for himself,
but China was full of such twists of status. Army life, in any
case, was not very fulfilling for Mao. Despite the antagonisms
between different military and political leaders on the
Republican side, the Qing dynasty itself had fallen with little
more than a whimper, and China seemed set on a fair course
toward the future. 'Thinking the revolution was over,’ Mao
recalled later, 'I resigned from the army and decided to return
to my books.’
16
2 SELF-STRENGTHENING
IT WAS ONE thing for Mao to say he had to get back to his
books. It was quite another to decide how to do it. For a few
months in 1912, Mao simply browsed through the educational
advertisements in the local newspapers, and (according to his
later reminiscences) because of his gullibility and lack of
experience, he was briefly convinced of the inestimable value
of a whole range of special training schools, at least to the
extent of sending in his dollar registration fee and in one case
taking courses of a few weeks. The schools that caught his eye
were for police training, legal work, commercial skills, and
soap making. These new schools, with their promises of
guaranteed careers for ambitious youth, were themselves
reflections of the rapid changes that were sweeping China.
Their claims were flamboyant because they were untried and
unprovable, and, as Mao learned to his chagrin, some of them
held their classes mainly in English, which he could not
understand except for a few phrases remembered from his
earlier primary school.
Perhaps on the rebound from all this new knowledge,
17
Mao retreated in mid-1912 to the shelter of a more tradi-
tional middle school in Changsha, one with a predictable
curriculum of Chinese learning. His teachers there
encouraged him to explore China's own imperial past more
deeply, believing that he had the ‘literary tendencies’ to
undertake serious study. One teacher led him through a
collection of selected imperial edicts from the Qianlong
emperor's reign in the eighteenth century, a period when
China had been rich and prosperous, and had greatly
expanded its borders. Others took him more deeply into
earlier texts in classical Chinese than he had ever gone
before, including the celebrated Historical Records (Shiji) by
the second century BC historian Sima Qian, still regarded as
China's greatest master of expository and narrative history.
Mao had almost certainly read some of these stories before,
perhaps in simplified versions; it was at primary school that
he began to delve deeply into the histories of early rulers,
including the builders of the Qin dynasty, which after
centuries of steady military expansion and administrative
experimentation was finally in 221 Bc able to draw all of
known China together into a single centralized imperial state.
One of Mao's middle school essays, dated June 1912, has been
preserved and gives us an entry into his intellectual mindset
at this time. It is an analysis of one of the Qin's first famous
ministers, Lord Shang. Lord Shang was condemned by later
Chinese scholars for his ruthlessness and deviousness, and for
imposing savage and inflexible laws that terrified the people
and reduced them to silence or to sycophancy. The historian
Sima Qian said that Lord Shang was ‘endowed by heaven with
a cruel and unscrupulous nature’ and was a 'man of little
18
mercy.’ The eighteen-year-old Mao took a different tack. His
point of entry into his own essay was an enigmatic paragraph
in the center of Sima Qian's biography in which Lord Shang is
presented as trying to convince the people of Qin to obey the
new laws and take them seriously:
When the laws had been drawn up but not yet
promulgated, Lord Shang was afraid people would not trust
him. Therefore he set up a three-yard pole by the south gate
of the capital market and announced that any member of the
populace who could move it and set it up by the north gate
would be given ten pieces of gold. The people were suspicious,
and no one ventured to move the pole. Then Lord Shang
announced, 'Anyone who can move it will be given fifty gold
pieces!’ When one man moved the pole, he was promptly
given fifty gold pieces, thus making clear that there was no
deception. Then the laws were promulgated.
In his essay, Mao observed that when he read this passage
he was drawn to ‘lament the foolishness of the people of our
country.’ The Chinese people, now as in the past, were
‘mutually dependent and interconnected,’ so how could the
people distrust their government? Lord Shang's laws 'were
good laws,' Mao wrote firmly. Lord Shang himself was 'one
of the very first on the list' in the four-thousand-year-long
record of those who had sought China's welfare. He defeated
the states bordering Qin's territory, unified the Central
Plain, preserved the people's wealth, and increased the
prestige of the state and 'made slaves of the indigent and idle,
in order to put an end to waste.’ The fact that the people
19
feared and distrusted him, so that he had to use the pole and
the golden reward to convince them, was proof to the young
Mao of 'the stupidity of the people of our country,’ a
stupidity that was ongoing and pervasive, and had led the
people of China into a long period of ‘ignorance and
darkness' that had brought the entire country 'to the brink
of destruction.’ The story of Lord Shang and the pole, Mao
concluded, not only showed the innate stubbornness of the
masses of the people - 'at the beginning of anything out of
the ordinary, the mass of the people always dislike it’ - but
constituted a shameful secret for the nation as a whole. If
those in the Western nations or the ‘civilized’ Eastern ones
(Mao meant Japan) heard of it, they would ‘laugh uncon-
trollably so that they have to hold their stomachs, and make
a derisive noise with their tongues.’
That the derision of the foreigners should be seen as a
potent factor to Mao is interesting in itself - by the first
decade of the twentieth century the Chinese were circulating
translations of various sharp critiques of their own country
made by foreign missionary observers, as if to rub salt into
their own wounds, and Mao had probably seen these in the
newspapers he read so avidly. But more significant is Mao's
self-confident acceptance of the necessity of Lord Shang's
laws, despite the fact that those same laws had been seen by
so many Chinese commentators across two millennia as
ultimately destructive and self-defeating. The laws that Lord
Shang had decreed included the following: all people in
China would be grouped in units of five or ten households,
linked in mutual surveillance and held mutually responsible
under the law; those failing to report an offense of which
20
they were aware should be cut in two at the waist; all families
with more than two sons must declare the formation of a
second household for tax purposes; people of all ages must
‘exert all their strength’ in farming and weaving; profiteers
and those 'who became poor out of laziness' were to be
arrested and made government slaves; social and economic
status categories were to be sharply defined and backed by
rules concerning clothing and ownership; and anyone giving
shelter or lodging to strangers without proper credentials
was to be prosecuted.
In the months after Mao wrote this essay, with its bleak
view of China's ordinary people, China did in fact embark on
the only broad-based political elections in its history. The
elections were called under the rules of the new draft
constitution promulgated in 1912, and a large number of
political parties were formed and competed for seats in the
new Chinese parliament - among them Sun Yat-sen's pre-
viously illegal and underground Revolutionary Alliance, now
renamed the ‘Nationalist Party’ (Guomindang). Candidates
and voters in these elections had to be male, with certain
educational or economic qualifications, and the elections
were hard-fought, with the Nationalist Party winning the
largest plurality but not an absolute majority. In a tragedy for
China, Song Jiaoren, a close friend of Sun Yat-sen's and the
architect of the Nationalist election victory, and who many
had believed would be China's new premier, was assassinated
in March 1913 as he waited in Shanghai to board the train to
Beijing. The assassination may well have been ordered by
China's acting president, the former Qing dynasty governor-
general Yuan Shikai, but that was never proved. What was
21
clear was that Yuan was bitterly hostile to the Nationalist
Party, and that within a few months he had declared the party
illegal and had driven most of its leaders, including Sun Yat-
sen, once more into exile. For the next fourteen years, during
the most important phase of Mao's schooling and young
manhood, the Chinese republic became a sham, with the real
power focused largely in the provinces and concentrated in
the hands of local military leaders.
Mao commented on none of these crucial events of 1913, at
least not in any sources that have survived. Instead he tells us
that he spent this dramatic year of China's history wrapped up
in an intensive period of private study in the Changsha public
library. The establishment of such public libraries had been
one of the priorities recommended by China's late Qing
reformists, and now Mao was to reap the benefits. Though
very short of money, and living in a noisy Changsha hostel for
Xiangxiang natives, Mao established his own rigorous reading
schedule during the library's open hours, pausing only at noon
each day to buy and eat a lunch of two cakes of rice. According
to his later memories, he concentrated his reading on 'world
geography and world history’ As well as carefully scrutinizing
world maps - the first he had seen - he plunged into his first
serious study of Western political theory. Among the works
that Mao recalls reading in translation during this time were
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Darwin's The Origin of
Species, and Herbert Spencer's Logic. Mao also mentions
reading John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, and
there is no reason to doubt him: by this time all the titles Mao
mentions had been translated into Chinese and were available
in China's better provincial libraries.
22
It must have been a solitary life, and one without clear
purpose; certainly Mao's father thought so, and refused to
send any more money unless Mao formally enrolled again in a
school from which he might really graduate, and which might
lead to gainful employment. Also, life in the Xiangxiang hostel
grew intolerable, as fights flared regularly there between the
students and the restless demobilized Xiangxiang soldiers and
militia who used the same premises. When a group of soldiers
tried to kill some of the students - Mao writes that he hid out
in the toilet during this confrontation - he decided to leave.
Once again, an advertisement caught his eye: it was for a
school in Changsha called the 'Hunan Provincial Fourth
Normal School,’ and it offered free tuition along with cheap
room and board. Urged on by two friends who asked him to
write their application essays for them, and with a written
promise of renewed support from his family if he was
admitted, Mao applied in the fall of 1913. He and his friends
were all accepted. 'In reality, therefore, I was accepted three
times,’ as Mao put it.
This was the school that drew things together for Mao; it
gave him support and focus through teachers he both
admired and respected, and a group of friends with whom to
share life's travails and adventures. Mao was to stay there for
five years. Even though he fretted under the restrictive
regulations, especially the required courses in natural
sciences and life-drawing (both of which he hated), he had
outstanding teachers in classical Chinese and in the social
sciences. The classical-language teacher made him restudy
all he thought he knew about the early Chinese language,
pointing out that Mao wrote like a ‘journalist,’ due to the
23
pernicious stylistic influence of some of the reformers he
had been reading so avidly. This teacher, whom the students
nicknamed "Yuan the Big Beard,’ put Mao through an
intensive course on the great Tang dynasty prose writers and
poets of the eighth and ninth centuries, whom many
considered the finest stylists in China's long history. Some
fragmentary pages from Mao's surviving school notebooks,
dated around December 1913, show the wide range of literary
works that teacher Yuan discussed, and the detailed way that
he led Mao (and the other students) through the variant
classical pronunciations, the accurate translation of archaic
economic and social terms, the exact identity of historical
personages mentioned in the texts, and an analysis of the
passages from various earlier Confucian classics chosen by
Tang writers for inclusion in their own essays and poems.
Some of Mao's other notes show how carefully Yuan (or
perhaps other teachers in the middle school) introduced and
analyzed the work of poets from the mid-seventeenth
century, who wrote in anguish at the victory of the Manchu
conquerors over the once proud Ming dynasty. Such poems
had complex racial and nationalist overtones in their
contempt for foreign barbarians and their veneration of the
long literary traditions of China's past. From such
instructors Mao emerged with a decent familiarity with
China's traditional culture, though not with the kind of
encyclopedic sweep and depth of knowledge that would
allow him to write or argue on an equal footing with those
young men who had spent years working with scholars in
their own private academies. And for the rest of his life Mao
was interested in poetry and continued to write poems in the
24
classical style even during the most strident periods of later
revolutionary upheaval.
Strong though his literature teachers' impact may have
been, it was Mao's social science teacher, Yang Changji, who
was to have the deepest influence on Mao's intellectual life.
As Mao recalled later, Yang 'was an idealist, and a man of
high moral character. He believed in his ethics very strongly
and tried to imbue his students with the desire to become
just, moral, virtuous men, useful in society.’ Yang was, by all
accounts, a remarkable figure, and the fact that men of his
background were now available to be the teachers of restless
middle school students is one of the indices of how the
intellectual world of China was shifting in the early
twentieth century. A Changsha native born in 1870, Yang
spent the years between 1902 and 1913 in a series of schools in
Japan, Great Britain, and Germany. From these experiences
Yang had developed his own broad-based system of ethics
that combined the idealism of Kant and the theories of
individual 'self-realization' developed by British philos-
ophers. The Changsha middle school position was Yang's
first teaching job, and he led Mao and the other students
through a rich series of ethical arguments, some of which he
illustrated through selected passages drawn from the
Analects of Confucius, and others by a careful reading of the
German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen's System of Ethics,
which had just been translated into Chinese. Yang explored
the moral problems inherent in hedonism and utilitarian-
ism, and in the evolutionary theories then becoming
popular. At the same time he queried such deeply held
Chinese beliefs as 'Family priorities should come before
25
national ones,’ and argued that intense family protection of
the individual could in fact harm that individual's develop-
ment of independence. Yang also encouraged Mao and other
students to meet with such radical figures as the Japanese
socialist Miyazaki Toten, who came to lecture at the
Changsha normal school in March 1917.
Yang could not make Mao into a philosopher any more
than Yuan could make him into a classical exegete, but Yang
could and did introduce Mao to a global array of philos-
ophical concepts, and gave him some of the analytical keys
to continue his own investigations. By a lucky chance, Mao's
original copy of Paulsen has been preserved, along with the
marginal notes that Mao made during his senior year. The
notations show him reading with close attention and
occasionally expressing his own excitement in writing. Mao
was especially intrigued to learn that moral philosophy
always sprang from experience and that accordingly
morality was different in different societies. From such a
perspective, wrote Mao, ‘all our nation's two thousand years
of scholarship may be said to be unthinking learning.’ Some-
times Mao's comments reflect his awareness of a different
road opening up before him. Opposite Paulsen's comment
that ‘all human beings without exception tend to stress self-
interest over the interests of others,' Mao wrote, 'I really feel
that this explanation is incomplete.’ And where Paulsen
suggested that certain people were ‘devoid of feelings for the
interests of others ... [and] even take pleasure in the
suffering of others,’ Mao exclaimed, 'Except for those who
are sick and crazy, there definitely are no such persons."
Many passages of Paulsen reminded Mao of Chinese
26
philosophers or the early historical tales he had loved to
read, just as others reminded Mao of something as local as
the behavior of the lawless troops in Changsha, or as
portentous as the fate of Republican China. Most moving,
perhaps, are the moments when Mao read into Paulsen's
words the deepest feelings of his own psyche. "This section is
very well done,’ he noted next to Paulsen's powerful passage
on the human wish to live 'an historical life,' one in which
each person could ‘form and create, love and admire, obey
and rule, fight and win, make poetry and dream, think and
investigate.’ Sometimes Mao sighed over his new knowledge,
as is seen in his handwritten comment on the pervasiveness
of evil: 'I once dreamed of everyone being equal in wisdom,
and of the whole human race being made up of sages, so that
all laws and rules could be discarded, but now I realize that
such a realm cannot exist.’
Yang not only wrote on ethics, he also wrote on physical
culture and personal strength, and here his words touched
another chord in Mao. Yang wrote that scholars in China
were so physically frail that they were incapable of serving in
the army, and hence military service was left to ‘scoundrels
with little education.’ On the other hand, in Japan, as in the
West, all kinds of sports from baseball and soccer to fencing
and rowing were used to strengthen the citizenry, and in
those countries outings to scenic spots were a basic part of
life. Mao absorbed many of these ideas. He came to believe
that exercise should be both violent and systematic,
conducted in the nude if possible or in the lightest of clothes,
and directed at strengthening the spirit as well as the body.
By 1915 at the latest, Mao had begun to go on long tramps
27
through the countryside with small groups of friends,
staying with peasant families or in out-of-the-way mountain
temples. He even posted notices around in Changsha, calling
for 'worthy men’ to join him in these activities. After a day of
hiking in the hills, the young men would swim in the Xiang
River or one of its tributaries in the twilight; then they would
sit on the riverbank and talk the hours away, discussing
China's fate, the meaning of Western culture, the need for
economic reform, and the best modes of social organization,
before returning to their simple lodgings for a well-earned
sleep. Mao never lost the love of swimming he developed
during these years, and he often promoted it to his friends as
the finest form of exercise.
It was surely because of Yang's help and encouragement
that a lengthy essay Mao wrote on physical education, its
spiritual and physical effects, and the best ways to exercise
different parts of the body, was published in April 1917 in the
prestigious Beijing monthly journal New Youth. This was the
banner publication for new ideas in China, and was edited
by a formidable group of scholars, many of whom were on
the Beijing University faculty. At the same time, during 1917,
Mao expanded his activities by forming a discussion society
among his like-minded circle of students and friends, and by
taking practice-teaching courses run by the middle school in
the local community. In May, from the experience gained in
the course, Mao and other students started a small school on
their own, the 'Workers' Evening School.’ The school offered
instruction in basic math, reading, and writing, but also
introductions to history, geography, ‘moral cultivation,’ and
economics. Mao taught history. In April 1918, with the help
28
of Yang Changji, a formally structured 'New People's Study
Society’ met in Changsha. Mao was a founding member.
Throughout these years, Mao and other normal-school
students were often invited to Yang's home. Yang had a
daughter, Kaihui, born in 1901 just before her father left for his
studies in Japan and Europe. She was raised until his return in
1913 by her mother, who sent her to a local school, at which
Kaihui was the first female student. Later she transferred to an
all-girls' school run by a teacher recently returned from Japan,
who regaled the girls with tales of democratic revolutions. By
1911 or 1912 she was transferred to the Number One Changsha
girls' school, where she stayed until her father's return. At this
point, her father seems to have kept her at home so he could
tutor her himself in both Chinese and English. Yang Changji
was interested in problems of women's education and freedom
for women, and in an article he wrote in 1915 for a radical
friend's journal, he praised the free choice of marriage partners
common in the West, and the equal rights that women enjoyed
there. Yang felt that couples should marry late rather than early,
and he denounced the practice of arranged marriages. He also
criticized the prevalence of concubinage among wealthy
Chinese. Mao must have met Kaihui - whom he was later to
marry - fairly often on the visits to his teacher's home, though
there is no evidence of any romantic attachment at this time.
At the meetings of the New People's Study Society, Mao
was beginning to meet a number of other vivacious and
politically radical woman, and by 1919 one of them, Tao Yi,
became his girlfriend. She was three years younger than
Mao, and also from Xiangtan county. Tao Yi graduated from
the Changsha Zhounan girls’ normal school and was eager
29
to go on for advanced study in Beijing, but she was too poor
to do so. She made enough money to live on by a combin-
ation of schoolteaching, cooking, tailoring, and crocheting,
while she continued to study on her own. She was especially
interested in psychology, theories of teaching, and the
English language. As she told a group of friends in the New
People's Study Society, she had ‘long thought about finding
a partner for self-study, but several attempts [had] been
unsuccessful.' Though the two met often, and also cor-
responded, we know no details of their personal relations;
but we do know that at this time there was a strange
combination of emotions in the air for young men and
women like Mao and Tao, a feverish sense of excitement that
fused with a wish for chaste and enduring friendship built
on a solid intellectual base of moral commitment. Even in
the absence of any personal revelations, some sense of Mao's
mental state as far as women were concerned can be gleaned
from a passage of his 1918 commentary on the Paulsen text
that he was then studying. When Mao came across this
profoundly pessimistic sentence: "The natural man would ...
annihilate the whole universe merely for the sake of preserv-
ing himself, he erupted in protest. Mao's anguished
marginal comment included the sentence: 'For example,
since I cannot forget the feeling I have toward the one I love,
my will desires to save her and I will do everything possible
to save her, to the point that if the situation is desperate I
would rather die myself than let her die.’
Mao completed his courses successfully at the middle
school and graduated in June 1918. He was twenty-four. That
same summer, his teacher Yang Changji received the offer of a
30
professorship at Beijing University, the most prestigious
institution of higher learning in China and the center of the
intellectual excitement generated by New Youth and a host of
other innovative magazines and journals. Not surprisingly,
Yang accepted, left his home and job in Changsha, and
traveled with his wife and daughter to Beijing. Mao initially
stayed on in Changsha after graduation, but he felt aimless
and listless. In a letter of 11 August 1918, to a former
schoolmate, Mao wrote that he and his closest friends felt ‘our
future is rather empty, and we have no definite plans.’ Some of
them were getting local teaching jobs, while others were
wondering whether to go to France on the newly announced
work-study fellowships that would enable them to pay for
their education by working in French factories. This program
had been the brainchild of a group of prominent Chinese
intellectuals. Some of these sponsors were self-professed
anarchists living in Paris and studying the anarchist theories
concerning the abolition of private property and restrictive
personal bonds, and they believed in the ideal of mutual help
as the way to solve social problems. Another sponsor of the
program was Cai Yuanpei, the translator of the Paulsen
edition that Mao had just been reading and the recently
named chancellor of Beijing University.
The students chosen to go to France were to attend a
training school first, either in Beijing or in Baoding city in
north China, to prepare them linguistically and practically
for the new life ahead. In a cryptic comment in the same
August 1918 letter, Mao remarked, 'I can raise the 200 yuan
[Chinese dollars] for travel to Beijing and France, but the 100
yuan for travel to Baoding I cannot raise.’ He gave no
31
explanation of why he could raise the larger sum but not the
smaller one, but perhaps it was easier to get donations for
foreign travel than for domestic journeys. A significant
example of selective (or distorted) memory in Mao's later
autobiographical reminiscences refers also to this same time.
In the summer of 1936, Mao told his American interviewer,
Edgar Snow: 'In my last year in school my mother died, and
more than ever I lost interest in returning home. I decided
that summer to go to Beijing. Many students from Hunan
were planning trips to France ... [but] I did not want to go to
Europe. I felt that I did not know enough about my own
country, and that my time could be more profitably spent in
China.’ But in fact Mao's mother was alive, though not well,
all through 1918; she was having great difficulty swallowing,
and it was also feared that she had ulcers. One other letter of
Mao's has survived, also written in August 1918, to his
‘seventh and eighth maternal uncles' - that is, to his mother's
brothers from the Wen clan. In this letter, Mao talks of his
mother's illness and of his desire to find her a good doctor.
He already had obtained a 'special prescription' which he
hoped would help her. In the meantime, Mao wrote casually
that he was going to make a boat trip to Beijing with a few
friends: 'Sightseeing is the only aim of our trip, nothing else.'
There was no mention of money problems.
It was in this tangle of prevarications and half-truths, in
August 1918, that Mao took leave of his ailing mother and for
the first time in his life set foot outside his natal province of
Hunan. When he arrived in Beijing he went to call on the
Yangs, and asked the newly appointed Professor Yang to help
him find a job.
32
3 CASTING AROUND
PROFESSOR YANG FOUND Mao a job as a clerical worker in
the Beijing University library. A major part of Mao's duties
was to register the names of all those who came into the
library to read the magazines and newspapers. He was thus in
the middle of everything, yet still somehow on the edge. The
head of the library, Li Dazhao, only four years older than
Mao, was already the center of an extraordinary galaxy of
talented scholars. Li and five professors at Beijing University
had formed a joint editorial board to run New Youth
magazine. Their academic skills ranged easily across literary
studies, philosophy, history, and music; several of them had
studied in Japan, while others had advanced degrees from
universities in the United States or Europe. The newly
appointed Professor Yang shared their scholarly interests, and
had published with them in other progressive journals even
before New Youth was founded in 1915. By 1918, New Youth
was publicly championing the cause of writing in the
vernacular speech of China, rather than in the older classical
norms, or the semi-simplified variants employed by the late
33
Qing reformers. Already as a student in Changsha, Mao had
switched his allegiance to the New Youth writers, but though
he was now living in the midst of the New Youth ferment he
was still nowhere near the inner circle, as the Yangs were.
New Youth magazine, along with the faculty and students
of Beijing University, was at the literal and symbolic centers
of the new China: the University buildings were just
northeast of the Forbidden City, where the last emperor of
the Manchu Qing dynasty, 'Henry' Puyi, still lived with his
eunuchs and retainers under the favorable clauses of the
abdication agreement of 1912. Nearby were the buildings of
the new parliament and the modern government ministries,
and the foreign diplomatic quarter. A small public park had
been formed outside the southern gate of the Forbidden
City, at Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, an area once
home to Qing government officials. Students and towns-
people gathered there under the trees to talk and debate the
political issues of the day, which were legion: the president of
the Republic, Yuan Shikai, had died in 1916, after a disastrous
attempt to establish himself as the emperor of a new dynasty;
in 1917 a pro-Manchu militarist attempted to restore the
emperor Puyi but was foiled by an alliance of rival generals;
the same year, Sun Yat-sen returned from exile in Japan to
form a separatist regime in southeastern China, in Canton;
also in 1917, the new premier of the Republic made a deal
with the British and the French to send over a hundred
thousand Chinese coolie laborers to the World War I battle-
fields in Europe to help unload and transport war materials,
maintain the base camps, and remove the corpses from the
battlefields. The payoff to China was meant to be recovery of
34
the territory previously ceded to Germany in the late Qing,
but through corruption by the Chinese politicians and
special deals with the Western powers, most of these hoped-
for gains had already been mortgaged to Japan. The
parliament of China, with the Guomindang Nationalists still
excluded, was a shadowy forum with little real power, where
all votes were regarded as being for sale.
In the library, Mao saw many of the influential figures of
the new intellectual elite, and his mind must have been filled
with questions. As a contributor and devout reader of New
Youth, he would have seen Li Dazhao's essay describing the
cycles of birth, decay, and regeneration within national
histories, as well as Li's essay on 'The Victory of Bolshevism’
for the October 1918 issue. Here Li did what few if any in
China had yet done, he hailed the revolutionary new order of
the Soviet Union, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and
briefly discussed the Marxist social and economic theories on
which it was based. That same year Li also started a group
that met at intervals to discuss revolutionary theory, which
he named the ‘Research Society for the Study of Marxism.’
Such glimmers of interest in Marxism still had to compete
with numerous other intellectual explorations in New Youth
and within Beijing University at the same time. Li's colleague,
the philosopher and literary critic Hu Shi, for instance,
published the first lengthy analysis of Ibsen and feminist
theory to appear in China, following it up with a lengthy
essay on the emancipation of American women. (Hu, only
two years older than Mao, already had a bachelor's degree
from Cornell and had been a graduate student at Columbia).
Elsewhere in New Youth, and in dozens of other new
35
magazines in Beijing, Shanghai, and smaller provincial cities,
students and their teachers were exploring themes ranging
from Bertrand Russell's mathematical logic and Einstein's
ideas of relativity to Margaret Sanger's birth-control advice
and Rabindranath Tagore's pacifist communalism. It was an
unusually bewildering time to be young.
It was at this time, according to Mao's later candid
comment to Edgar Snow, that he ‘fell in love with Yang
Kaihui,' the daughter of his former ethics teacher. She was
just eighteen, and Mao was twenty-five. Mao recalled those
winter months of early 1919 with unusual lyricism, perhaps
because he still saw it with the aid of her eyes. It was, he said,
‘in the parks and the old palace grounds' of Beijing that he
saw the willows bowed down by 'the ice crystals hanging
from them' and watched 'the white plum blossoms flower
while the ice still held solid over the North Lake.’ Love might
have been blossoming, but he had almost no money and
Beijing was very expensive. Mao was used to the educational
world of Changsha, where in five years of normal school he
had spent a total of only 160 Chinese dollars. Now in Beijing,
with a salary of eight dollars a month, and no hostel for
Xiangxiang natives, Mao lived off a narrow lane in a poor
district called "Three Eyes Well,’ sharing three small rooms
with seven other fellow students from Hunan. And he found
the Beijing intellectuals aloof and self-important: 'I tried to
begin conversations with them on political and cultural
subjects, but they were very busy men. They had no time to
listen to an assistant librarian speaking southern dialect.'
Mao did join at least two study groups, one on philosophy
and the other on journalism, and sat in on some classes. It is
36
possible, too, that Professor Yang, with his belief in late
marriage, found Mao's courtship of his only daughter
premature. For whatever reasons, Mao was not at ease in
Beijing, and when he received a letter from home telling him
that his mother was seriously ill, he decided to leave.
Borrowing money from friends, on March 12 he took a train
to Shanghai, arriving on the fourteenth. There Mao lingered
for twenty days while he said farewell to a number of his
friends and former classmates who were setting off for
France; after they had sailed, he borrowed more money and
made his way back across the country to Changsha, reaching
home on 6 April.
To what extent was Mao the prodigal son returned? He
told his family members that he had been 'a staff member of
Beijing University,’ which left unclear exactly what he had
done in the capital. But for now, with both his ill mother and
his own future to think of, Mao took a job teaching history
in a Changsha primary and middle school (it also had a
teacher-training department) known as the ‘Study School.’
He stayed there until December 1919. As well as teaching,
Mao embarked on a burst of writing, clearly stimulated by
his stay in the volatile intellectual world of Beijing. In his
earlier school days, his classical literature teacher Yuan had
mocked him for being a journalist overinfluenced by Liang
Qichao. Forced to follow the great events of the 4 May
students' demonstrations in Beijing at a distance - the
demonstrations, directed against the corrupt Beijing regime
that had betrayed China to Japan, and against United States
support for Japan's position, led to the designation of this
whole period of intellectual ferment as the 'May Fourth
37
Movement’ - Mao decided to keep the students and citizens
of Changsha up-to-date with the news. He did this through
a journal he edited, the Xiang River Review, which he also
wrote almost entirely himself, producing four issues at
weekly intervals between 14 July and 4 August, until the local
warlord closed the magazine down.
In Mao's 'manifesto' for the new journal, dated 14 July
1919, he gave what we may assume to be an accurate
summary of his political views that summer. It was an
emotional voice, deeply influenced by the rhetoric of Li
Dazhao, that attempted an overarching view of human
destiny and world history. A movement for the ‘liberation of
mankind’ was under way, wrote Mao, and all old prejudices
must be questioned. All old fears must be jettisoned too -
fear of heaven, spirits, the dead, the bureaucrats, the war-
lords, the capitalists. The West had followed a route of
‘emancipation’ that led through the Renaissance and the
Reformation to the formation of representative governments
with universal suffrage and the League of Nations.
‘Democracy,’ however one chose to translate it into Chinese
- Mao offered his readers four variants of acceptable Chinese
renderings - was the central name for the movement against
oppression in all its forms: religious, literary, political, social,
educational, economic, and intellectual. But in fighting
oppression one should not use the tools of oppression - that
would be self-defeating. Instead, one should ‘accept the fact
that the oppressors are people, are human beings like
ourselves,’ and that their oppressive acts are not so much
willed by them, but are more like 'an infection or hereditary
disease passed on to them from the old society and old
38
thought.’ China was facing a revolution that cried out for
bread, for freedom, and for equality; there was no need for a
‘revolution of bombs or a revolution of blood,’ Mao wrote.
Japan was the worst of the international oppressors, and he
felt it should be dealt with by means of economic boycotts
and student and worker strikes. To achieve this, the 'popular
masses' of China - ‘simple untutored folk’ - should be
educated and their minds broadened beyond the shores of
their own Xiang River to grasp 'the great world tides rolling
in.... Those who ride with the current will live; those who go
against it will die.’ As part of his own contribution to this
program, Mao wrote twenty-six articles on Chinese and
world history for the first issue, and printed two thousand
copies, which sold out in a day.
Increasing the print run to five thousand for the sub-
sequent issues, Mao continued to write short essays and also
a lengthy manifesto entitled "The Great Union of the Popular
Masses,’ which took up the majority of issues two through
four. In this essay Mao laid forth a whole range of possible
union organizations to give strength to those waging the
struggle ahead - not just unions of workers, farmers, and
students, but also of women, primary school teachers,
policemen, and rickshaw pullers. To give a sense of the
continuity of the struggle, Mao also published a detailed
history of the various organizations of students in Hunan
since the late Qing period, not neglecting to mention the
role of major athletic meets as opportunities for student
solidarity in the face of the oppressors. For the fifth issue,
Mao promised his five thousand readers a detailed account
of the "Hunan student army'
39
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.
40
Blocked from this new avenue, Mao became a regular contri-
butor 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 extra-
ordinary 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 5 October, and, presiding at the
funeral on 8 October, he gave a loving oration in her
41
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 teach-
ing a full load besides translating two books on Western
ethics and writing educational surveys. Yang died at dawn on
17 January 1920, and on 22 January, 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 23 January, 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
42
(some of it already completed, for Mao to see) along with
more technical works like Karl Kautsky'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 breed-
ing 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
43
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 moder,
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 con-
siderable. 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 n April, 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
44
simplest primer every day.’ Self-study was going to be his
rule from now on: 'I have always had an intense hatred 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 7
July 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 31 July
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
45
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 22 October
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
46
salary as director of the primary school. Furthermore, Mao
began to push the cause of Hunan independence with extra-
ordinary energy after he returned to Changsha in July, and
this was a cause dear to the heart of many wealthy business-
men 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
47
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.
48
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
49
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 constitu-
tion, 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 1919 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 Comintern - was to
50
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
51
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 26 November. 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.
The November 1920 Chinese Communist Manifesto - as if
echoing its Comintern origins - was a formulaic document
couched at the theoretical level, with no roots of any kind in
the realities of Chinese society. The ideals of the Party were
stated as being the ‘social and common ownership and use of
the means of production,’ abolition of the state, and
formation of a classless society. The goals were to overthrow
capitalism through class struggle. The immediate task of the
Communist Party was to strengthen the anticapitalist forces
and ‘organize and concentrate’ the forces of class struggle:
workers, peasants, soldiers, sailors, and students were singled
out as the troops to be mobilized, and a ‘general federation of
industrial associations' was seen as a central tool of this
process. A final general strike would lead to the overthrow of
the capitalists and the formation of the dictatorship of the
52
proletariat, under whose leadership the class struggle would
continue against 'the residual forces of capitalism.
Though the language was vague, the issues here were
major, and we know that even before he saw the Manifesto,
Mao was beginning to discuss such revolutionary issues
through correspondence with several of his Changsha
friends, who were now in France on the work-study
program. In two especially long and detailed letters, one of 1
December 1920, and another of 21 January 1921, Mao
wrestled with the two differing views on China's future that
the Chinese students in France had divided over. One group
pushed for the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat
and the need for violent class struggle. Anarchism, they felt,
would not work, the forces of reaction were just too strong.
A strong Communist Party, they argued, must be the
‘initiator, propagandist, vanguard, and operational head-
quarters of the revolutionary movement.’ The other group
wanted 'a moderate revolution,’ on evolutionary principles,
driven by education, focusing on the people's welfare, and
using trade unions and cooperatives as its means. Mao was
torn: 'In principle I agree with the ideas to seek the welfare
of all by peaceful means, but I do not believe they will work
in reality.’ Mao had listened to Bertrand Russell when the
British philosopher came to Changsha on 1 November 1920,
and argued for Communism but against 'war and bloody
revolutions’; Mao had strenuous arguments about the
lecture with his friends and concluded, 'This is all very well
in theory; in reality it can't be done.’ A Russian-style
revolution was certainly a ‘last resort’ for China, but maybe
it was coming to that.
53
The same issues were being constantly discussed at the
Changsha meetings of the New People's Study Society, where
the members were overwhelmingly involved in education. Of
those who attended regularly in December 1920, according to
another of Mao's neat and meticulous reports, besides himself
there were three teachers at the Zhounan women's school,
three working as editors on the Popular Newspaper for a group
called ‘Popular Books and Papers,’ two teaching at primary
school, and two working in the Cultural Book Society; all the
others were students: six at middle schools, one at the Hunan-
Yale medical school, and one in self-study. None were
workers, farmers, or tradespeople. Mao's own feeling was that
this group as a whole was 'somewhat immature,’ and showed
‘childishness in thought and behavior’; some of them were
‘apt to launch or support causes rashly' He did not entirely
exempt himself from criticism. He knew full well that he was
‘weak-willed,’ he told a friend in January 1921. 'I constantly
have the wrong attitude and always argue, so that people
detest me.’ But when Mao convened a lengthy meeting of the
Cultural Book Society in that same month and called for a
vote on the political options, twelve members, including Mao
and Tao Yi, voted for Bolshevism, one voted for moderate
(Russell-style) Communism, and two for parliamentary
democracy. Tao Yi also spoke out for concentrating on
ideological work within the army, rather than putting faith in
education throughout the society as a whole. (Yang Kaihui is
not listed among the attendants at the meetings.)
Even as the first Comintern agents were exploring the
possibilities in China, Lenin convened the Second Congress
of the Comintern. Despite serious differences over how to
54
interpret the opportunity in China and what organizational
forms would be most suitable, this congress decided to send
the Dutch Communist Sneevliet (who operated under the
pseudonym 'Maring') to China - specifically to Shanghai - to
investigate the situation there and elsewhere in Asia. This
decision was finalized in August 1920, but due to various
organizational problems Maring left for China only in April
1921. His instructions were confusing and contradictory.
Following current Comintern policies, he should encourage
Chinese Communists to unite with the bourgeoisie in the
interests of the national revolution, while at the same time
leaving room for the development of a strong proletarian
organization that could eventually overthrow the bourgeoisie.
For his entire trip to China, Maring was given £4,000
sterling, of which he used £2,000 immediately for his wife's
expenses and some other political obligations. He also lost
£600 of his funds in a bank failure, and was thus left with
funding of exactly £1,400 for the entire revolutionary
journey. Taking a train from Berlin in April 1921, he obtained
his visa for China in Vienna, and traveled from there to
Venice, where a passenger ship was readying to sail for China.
Maring reached Shanghai on 3 June and took rooms with
a Russian landlady in the International Setdement. Within a
few days he made contact with another Comintern represen-
tative, Nikolsky, who had been sent from Irkutsk. Though the
details are obscure, it appears that Maring coordinated with
Communists from the Shanghai and Beijing small groups,
who had already begun to plan a Communist conference,
and that letters were sent to Communists in the other four
cities where small groups had formed, as well as to a
55
Communist living in Japan and one with no fixed affiliation
living in Hong Kong. Thus it was, after various delays and
mishaps, that fifteen representatives (thirteen Chinese and
the two Comintern representatives) convened in Shanghai
for the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party on 23
July 1921. The fifteen were there to represent the complete
roster of fifty-three Chinese Communists who were then
affiliated with the Party in some form or other.
Mao was one of the two invited to come from the
Changsha small group, a fact that was to prove crucial to his
subsequent revolutionary career. But why was he chosen?
There is no absolutely clear answer. As we have seen, Mao
knew the Party founders, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, at
least fairly well, and had made a name for himself in
Changsha educational circles. He also knew the Yangs and a
fairly wide circle of influential Hunanese. But he had
virtually no formal knowledge of socialist ideology, and it
was not until January 1921 that he even mentioned ‘the
materialist conception of history' in his writings. Mao
derived his new interest in Marxism partly from correspond-
ing with his friends in France, some of whom had joined the
Communist Youth League there, and from reading a new
magazine, The Communist, developed by Li Da and the
Communist small group in Shanghai, and published as a
monthly underground Party journal for seven issues
between November 1920 and July 1921. Mao stated that he
admired the journal for its 'clear-cut stand,’ but as far as we
can tell from the surviving records he did not sell it in the
Cultural Book Society's store. Mao knew little about the
proletariat, though he had spoken vaguely of doing some
56
ndustrial work in a shipbuilding yard or factory, and at a
meeting of the Society in January 1921 he had mentioned
that he wanted to ‘learn to do some form of manual labor,
such as knitting socks or baking bread.’ Otherwise he would
continue to be a teacher, and perhaps a reporter as well.
Basically, though, Mao's proven strength was as a business-
man. The operations of the Cultural Book Society had grown
prodigiously, with sales from a vastly expanded list of titles
reaching 4,049 Chinese dollars and expenses of 3,942 dollars
for the seven months from September 1920 to the end of
March 1921. The business had expanded to encompass seven
full county branches of the store, with their own staffs (Mao
hoped to have one in each of the seventy-five Hunan counties
before too long) and there were also four smaller outlets in
local schools, as well as three run by individuals in their own
homes. The main office of the company was still in the rented
Hunan-Yale building, though the premises had grown too
cramped, and Mao was seeking a larger and more central
location in Changsha. Mao now called himself by the
unusual title of 'special negotiator’ for the bookstore, and a
friend of his from Xiangtan was listed as 'manager.' Besides
these entrepreneurial skills, there was the fact that Mao
clearly had remarkable energy and initiative, and a good deal
of physical courage. He was handsome too: lean, tall, and
with large, mournful eyes. Photos of the time show him with
long hair swept dramatically back from his brow. Apparently,
Mao was also never at a loss for words. Perhaps the Beijing
and Shanghai intellectuals, with their sophisticated
knowledge of the world, found something refreshing in this
untutored youth from the Hunan backlands.
57
The July 1921 First Communist Party Congress in Shanghai
was tense. The Comintern agent Maring aroused instant
dislike among many of the Chinese, and his doctrinaire plans
for their future - especially the need to ally with the
bourgeoisie - were hotly contested: two of the Chinese present
flady rejected Maring's request that they give him a ‘work
report.’ Neither Li Dazhao nor Chen Duxiu even attended the
Congress, and the proceedings were further disrupted when
on 30 July a stranger wandered right into the private house
where they were meeting, explaining lamely that he had come
to the wrong place. Experienced in holding clandestine
meetings and in police procedures, Maring at once suggested
the members scatter, which they did, and shortly after that the
police arrived. One advantage of this for the Chinese was that
they could now state that the presence of two Westerners made
their group too conspicuous. Accordingly the last session of
the congress was held in a boat on a nearby Zhejiang lake, and
Maring and Nikolsky did not attend.
The documents of this first congress were never pub-
lished, even for internal distribution within the Party, and
no record of the exact nature of Mao's participation has been
preserved. A brief summary of the congress was filed in the
Comintern archives, though its author and reliability cannot
be ascertained. It appears that each of the local groups gave
a report on their activities and emphasized the small size of
their membership and the need to expand. Maring spoke of
his work in Indonesia and underscored the need to develop
the labor movement in China; Nikolsky described the
founding of the Far Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern in
Irkutsk, and also the situation inside the Soviet Union.
58
The most important discussion seems to have focused on
whether to break altogether with bourgeois society or to find
a link between open work and secret work that would let
the Party operate more openly in society. Congressional
delegates argued that workers should be encouraged to
‘expand their outlook' and take part in 'the struggle for
freedom of publication and assembly' Open propagation of
Communist theories was ‘an absolute condition for success’
- though at the same time it was ‘futile to hope to build a
new society within the old system.' Ultimately the working
class would have to learn how to liberate itself because it was
not possible 'to force it to carry out revolution.’ On the last
day of the congress, without the Comintern representatives
present, the Chinese argued over what exactly was meant by
the proletariat's ‘allying with other parties and factions,’ and
whether the warlords were the most important enemy. After
‘short but intense debate’ it was recommended that for the
immediate future the focus of the Communist Party should
be on organizing factory workers. Organizing the peasantry
and the army should wait until there were more Party
members available - such members should be especially
sought out in the working class.
The final 'program' of the Party, on which all were said to
agree, stated that the capitalist class must be overthrown and
a Classless society established inside China. Machinery, land,
buildings, and other means of production would be under
social ownership.’ Membership in the Party would not be
restricted by gender or nationality. It was enough that each
new member have the backing of a pre-existing Party
member, with background checking of suitability for
59
membership not to exceed two months. Party doctrines and
membership lists were to be kept secret. Any area of China
where there were five members could form its own unit,
called a 'Soviet.' Soviets with more than thirty members
would form their own executive committees. Finances, Party
policies, and publications would all be supervised by the
Central Committee of the Party, of which Chen Duxiu
would be the general secretary.
Mao Zedong was back in Changsha by early August 1921,
having been instructed at the congress to build up the Party
in Hunan. His first response to this order, in line with his
earlier experiences, was to announce on 16 August the
formation of a "Hunan Self-Study University.’ On the surface
this was to run somewhat along the lines of the old dynasty's
Confucian study academies - it literally met on the premises
of one such academy in Changsha that had been founded in
the late Qing to propagate the thought of an earlier Chinese
patriotic thinker opposed to the Manchu conquest of 1644.
This location was made possible by the fact that Mao's fellow
Communist delegate from Hunan, the fifty-one-year-old
scholar He Shuheng, had been named director of the
academy, and the Hunan government had provided it with a
monthly stipend of 400 Chinese dollars. The goal of the new
university, Mao stated, was to get away from the 'mechanical
conformity of teaching methods' still all too common, and
to form a fully ‘democratic’ community that would 'strive to
smash the mystery of learning’ and be affordable for all.
‘Correspondents’ appointed by the university would keep
the students in touch with intellectual developments world-
wide (New York, London, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo were
60
among those places mentioned) and also in schools
throughout Hunan. Marxism was not mentioned in the
roster of courses, but the university formed a convenient
front for recruiting and vetting possible members of the
Communist Party, and students enrolling found they were
given the choice of taking courses in Marxist-Leninist
theory. A similar use was made of a YMCA-sponsored 'mass
literacy’ campaign that happened to be going on in
Changsha at the same time, based in public halls, schools,
churches, and private homes, which allowed Communist
organizers to reach over a thousand potential recruits.
In November, the Party Central Committee specifically
mentioned that Changsha must recruit at least twenty new
‘comrades' to form ‘district executive committees,’ and
combine with other areas to get at least two thousand young
socialist league members. (It was probably around this time
that Yang Kaihui joined the Communist Party formally.) The
Changsha district was also told to get ‘more than one labor
union under its direct control’ and to establish 'solid relations’
with other labor unions. The short-term goal was for all the
districts to unite in forming a national union of railway
workers. In line with such specific directives, Mao had already
(in September) traveled to the massive Anyuan coal mines just
across the border in Jiangxi, pretending to be a tourist, and
even went down the colliery shafts. That November, Mao
issued a particularly lavish eulogy on the Labor Association of
Changsha, which had launched a major strike the previous
April, although he had not been involved in its work and it was
in fact controlled by Hunanese anarchists.
The Labor Association was bound to become the focus of
61
Mao's attentions, now that his goals had been defined so
dramatically. The association already had a following among a
wide variety of Hunan operations and laborers - spinning mills,
the mint, lead-smelting plants, construction workers, tailors
and barbers, machinists and railway workers. In January 1922 it
spearheaded a major strike against a Changsha spinning mill,
and the military governor of Hunan - the same man who had
been Mao's commanding officer after the murder of the secret-
society revolutionaries in 1912 - responded by sending troops
with machine guns to break the strike and also beheaded two
student leaders believed to have aided the strikers.
Mao's scale of activities was now broadening swiftly. In the
midst of the endless organizational work and the addressing of
the somewhat contradictory calls of the Party center, he had
managed to spend enough time with Yang Kaihui for them to
start a family. Despite the absence of any formal ceremony
they now considered themselves married. Their first son,
Anying, was born in October 1922. But something curious was
happening to Mao. The young man who had struggled so
often against the autocratic nature of his father, who hated and
despised the shackles of bourgeois marriage and had found joy
in a free-love relationship, who detested schools and would
never be a student in one again, and’ who always sought
freedom of spirit and the chance to grow and change had
willingly accepted, at the age of twenty-eight, a much greater
degree of disciplined control from the Communist Party than
any he had encountered in his life before.
62
5 WORKERS AND PEASANTS
IN EARLY 1921, Mao was still a political amateur. The
meetings of the New People's Study Society, over which he
often presided, were attended largely by teachers and their
students, who seemed absorbed with such problems as
whether or not to found a restaurant to provide cheap food
for local workers, and whether their goal should be to
‘transform China’ or to ‘transform China and the world.’ By
the end of 1922, however, Mao was becoming a professional
revolutionary organizer and learning how to coordinate
major strikes that affected the lives of tens of thousands of
workers.
The first of these was a strike by construction workers and
carpenters, who hitherto had been organized along tradi-
tional guild lines. At the site of the Hunan Self-Study
University in Changsha, Mao got to know some of the
carpenters repairing the old buildings. He talked to them
about their labor contracts and their pay scales, and per-
suaded one of the carpenters to join the Communist Party.
The choice was a good one, and the chosen carpenter turned
63
out to be a natural leader and a brilliant organizer. Working
along with Mao, who had been given the sonorous title by
the Party of 'Secretary to the Hunan Office of the Secretariat
of the Chinese Labor Organization,’ in September and
October 1922 the carpenter led a series of rallies, demonstra-
tions, and work stoppages that brought a major raise in the
workers’ basic hourly wages.
Another strike, in November 1922, came from the lead-
type compositors and printers, who had formed their own
union in 1920 but had later split apart along the lines of their
specific skills - lithographers, press operators, printers, and
typesetters. That Mao was now well known in Changsha for
his organizational skills but was not yet perceived to be a
dangerous radical can be seen from the fact that in the
settlement of the strike that followed, he was called in by the
newspaper proprietors as a ‘mediator.’ In this role, and with
the strong solidarity of the workers behind him, he was
instrumental in gaining virtually all of their demands.
In one of the careful synopses of current politics, replete
with facts and figures that had become his hallmark, Mao
estimated that by early 1923 there were twenty-three major
workers’ organizations in Hunan, with a membership of
around 30,000 workers. In the same period there had been
ten strikes, involving a total of 22,250 workers, of which nine
were ‘victorious or semi-victorious.' In addition to the two
above, Mao included in his list of workers' organizations
miners (in coal, zinc, and lead mines), railway employees,
machine-shop operators, mint workers, garment workers,
silk factory employees, electrical workers, barbers, boot- and
shoemakers, and rickshaw pullers. Mao himself had been
64
involved in the strategic planning of several of these other
strikes, some of which had been led and directed by his
former Changsha schoolmates, now returned from their
work-study experience in France (where several of them had
already joined the Communist Youth League or the
Communist Party). Mao's two younger brothers were also
active in strike work, one as the organizer of a consumer
cooperative in the collieries, and the other in the workers’
club at the lead mines. And Mao's wife, Yang Kaihui -
though pregnant with their first child - had been working
among the peasants who lived near the areas where the
miners had been on strike, helping to push for women's
rights and better educational facilities. It was an impressive
record.
The world of Hunanese activism, however, was not the
center of Communist Party politics as a whole. Under
instructions from the Comintern, and with Maring still in
China to see that the orders were followed, the Chinese
Communist Party was being pushed into an alliance with
Sun Yat-sen's Guomindang Nationalist Party. Mao was
almost certainly among the Communists who found this a
dangerous policy: he was learning that workers were
building up their own solidarity against the forces of the
bourgeoisie, and even against the foreigners, though the
antagonism of the militarists - who could be the most savage
of strikebreakers - was unpredictable and had already
wreaked havoc in Hunan. Also, as an early member of the
Party, it was hardly up to him to protest publicly. Chen
Duxiu, however, whom Mao had so long admired, had no
such inhibitions. Chen listed a number of reasons for his
65
opposition to Maring's plans that the Communists should
join with the Nationalists, such as the completely different
aims and policies of the two parties, and the fact that the
Nationalist Guomindang was cooperating actively with the
United States and northern warlords, as well as corrupt pro-
Japanese politicians, so that to join them would drive all the
youth away from their 'faith' in the Communist Party. Chen
added that the Nationalists had no tolerance for the ideas of
new members and ‘used lies as power.’
The Second Communist Party Congress, at which these
and other crucial issues concerning the role of the proletariat
in the current struggle were discussed, had convened in
Shanghai from 16 July to 23, 1922. Presumably Mao was
invited to be there, since he had attended the First Congress,
and had been serving ever since as head of the Hunan labor
secretariat, with success. Yet he missed the meetings
altogether. The only explanation that he ever gave, many
years later, was a curious and incomplete one: 'I forgot the
name of the place where it was to be held, could not find any
comrades, and missed it.’ It is certainly true that on some
earlier occasions Mao had admitted to being somewhat
scatterbrained - he once told a correspondent that he had
lost his letter in the middle of reading it - but the explana-
tion remains strange. Mao knew Shanghai fairly well by this
time, after three visits of which two were fairly lengthy, and
had many Party contacts. On the other hand, one could
argue, Shanghai was a huge city subdivided into many
subsections, including two international settlements; Yang
Kaihui was five months pregnant; he had been overworked
for a long time; and several other delegates also missed the
66
meeting, including Li Dazhao and the whole Canton delega-
tion. The twelve delegates attending reached enough consensus
about the need for a Communist alliance with the bourgeoisie
to issue a statement agreeing that they would cooperate with
Sun Yat-sen and other Guomindang Nationalist Party leaders.
There were various reasons for this decision, besides Party
loyalty to the dictates from Moscow. A massive strike of
seamen in Hong Kong in which the Nationalist organizers
had been active had ended triumphantly for the workers in
May 1922, raising the Guomindang's prestige as an
inherently revolutionary organization. Despite the strike
successes the Communist Party itself was still dangerously
small: the twelve delegates in 1922 represented a total China-
ride Communist membership of 195, a fourfold increase
from the year before but hardly an overwhelming number.
Besides, of the 195, only around thirty were workers. Also,
the Communist Party in China had almost no money what-
ever. Most of the members had no jobs or other sources of
income. Expenses for the central organs of the party during
the fall and winter of 1921 to 1922 had totaled 17,500 Chinese
dollars, of which the Comintern provided 16,665 dollars. The
projected budget for the following year was all expected to
come from the same Comintern sources. However, it was
only after another special meeting, convened by Maring at
Hangzhou in August 1922, that it was made mandatory for
all Communists to join the Guomindang Nationalist Party,
as what was called 'a bloc within.’ Many of the Communist
leaders joined right away, including Li Dazhao and even
Chen Duxiu, despite the earlier misgivings. Mao, however,
seems to have delayed joining the Nationalist Party until
67
early in 1923. Perhaps the final spur for him was the savage
suppression in February 1923 of the railway workers' union
by a northern warlord in whose progressive potential the
Communist Party had once believed. Many workers were
killed, and the union leader was publicly beheaded. Clearly
the dangers confronting the workers from militarists were
nationwide, and Hunan was no different from anywhere
else. By the summer of 1923, Mao was definitely a member of
the Nationalist Party. Yet despite this new alliance, growth
for the Communists continued to be slow and difficult, with
the Party membership climbing only up to 420 by June 1923,
of whom 37 were women, 164 were workers, and 10 were in
jail.
Mao's career trajectory now began to change, as he was
caught up in the swirl of official political business. Though
Yang Kaihui was pregnant again by the spring of 1923, Mao
had to leave home in June to attend the Third Congress of
the Communist Party. This one was held in Canton - Mao
did not get lost, though he had not visited the city before -
and he dutifully endorsed the declarations concerning
alliance with the Guomindang. At this congress Mao was
elected to the Communist Party's ruling Central Executive
Committee, and named head of the Party's organization
department. Though a major advancement, the latter post
had its problems for family life, as Mao had to proceed to
Shanghai, which he reached in July. The news from
Changsha was alarming. A new militarist clamped his hold
over the city, new levels of violence erupted in Hunan, many
schools were closed, and several of the unions Mao himself
had helped to found the year before were suppressed.
68
Dramatically reversing the position on Hunan's indepen-
dence he had taken not so long before, Mao as a Party
spokesman now wrote, 'We have always opposed a feder-
ation of self-governing provinces,’ on the grounds that it
would simply be 'a federation of military governors in their
separatist regimes.’
In September, Mao left Shanghai to rejoin his wife and
reached Changsha on 16 September 1923. There he found
two major armies drawn up facing each other along the
Xiang River, and was so nervous for his family that he routed
his political correspondence via a private courier and asked
his political contacts to write to him under an assumed
name. Mao also found he could not afford the new tasks that
had fallen on his shoulders. He told his contacts in the
Nationalist Party that he would need at least 100 Chinese
dollars each month to run the operation they envisioned in
Changsha, and to rent the necessary office space. It was in
these rather dispiriting circumstances that Yang Kaihui and
Mao's second child was born, sometime in November 1923 -
another boy, whom they named Anqing.
Mao stayed with Yang Kaihui through December,
skipping the Communist Central Executive Committee's
meeting that he should have attended in Shanghai. Instead,
he sent the committee a pessimistic report on the Hunan
situation. Mao noted in the report that peasant organiz-
ations - formerly reaching up to ten thousand members in
the area south of Changsha - led by the Socialist Youth
League, had been crushed, partly because of an extremist
policy of ‘economic agitation’ that alienated even the
moderately prosperous middle peasants, and partly because
69
of counterforce from the militarist's troops. Only fourteen
people had joined the Communist Party in Changsha during
the previous four months, and another thirty or so in strike
centers outside the city. Widespread closure of Changsha's
factories due to the incessant warfare had impoverished the
workers, and the workers' clubs had all closed down or
become totally inactive.
But even if Party leaders had excused Mao's absence in
December, new orders from the Comintern to forge a United
Front with the Guomindang made it imperative for him to
attend the first National Guomindang Congress, scheduled
for January 1924 in Canton. Mao must have felt he had no
choice but to go. Yang Kaihui, though a Communist Party
member herself, clearly felt it was Mao's duty to stay with her
and the two children, now aged fourteen months and one
month, trapped in a war-torn city. Though there are no
surviving personal letters between Mao and Yang, Mao had
kept his love of Chinese poetry ever since his schooldays, and
used poems to express his private emotions to his close
friends. It is a poem to Yang Kaihui, dating from December
1923, which, despite its formal meter and cross-references to
other poems from the classical canon, gives us the clearest
view of their tangled emotions at this intensely difficult
moment in their lives:
Waving farewell, I set off on my journey.
The desolate glances we give each other make things worse,
Yet again emphasizing our bitter feelings.
Eyes and brows reflect your tension,
As you hold back hot tears that seek to flow.
70
I know you have misunderstood our past exchanges;
What drifts before our eyes are clouds and fog,
Even though we thought none knew each other as well as
you and I.
When people feel such pain,
Does Heaven know?
At dawn today, thick frost on the way to East Gate,
A fading moon and half the sky reflected in our patch of
pond -
Both echo our desolation.
The sound of the train's whistle cuts straight through me.
From this time on I'll be everywhere alone.
I'm begging you to sever these tangled ties of emotion.
I myself would like to be a rootless wanderer,
And have nothing more to do with lovers' whispers.
The mountains are about to tumble down.
Clouds dash across the sky.
January 1924 in Canton was frenetic for Mao. He took an
active part in the key political debates, became familiar with
the new figures in the political scene, and showed an ability
to concentrate a discussion and bring it to a vote in an
effective yet consensus-building way. After the congress,
Mao was elected an alternate member of the Guomindang's
own Central Executive Committee, and he attended four
successive meetings of the Guomindang Central Party
Bureau, again making substantive suggestions on funding
and administrative procedures. From February through the
fall of 1924, Mao was stationed in Shanghai, working both in
senior Guomindang positions (where he also kept the
71
minutes) and in his Communist Party positions; much of his
work centered on making the United Front a reality, by
defining the role that members of each party should play in
the proceedings of the other, a delicate and demanding job,
and one with dangers of misapprehension by both sides. In
June 1924, Yang Kaihui came to join him in Shanghai, at least
for a time. (They had a nanny now, to help them with the
two children.)
By July, Mao was growing convinced that the Guomindang
alliance with the Communists might not be tenable much
longer, and with Chen Duxiu he cosigned a position paper to
the Communists, urging them to consider the contingency of
withdrawing. The Guomindang right wing was gaining
ground, they argued, and intent on placating the militarists
and the merchants by suppressing movements of the workers
and peasants. Mao signed a second important circular on 10
September, concerning warlords in central China, and a third
in November on party work and policies toward Sun Yat-sen.
Then suddenly, in December, Mao pulled out altogether and
went home to Changsha. In February 1925 he traveled deeper
into the countryside, back to his native village of Shaoshan in
Xiangtan county. For almost a year he attended no meetings
of either political party, and was dropped from his important
committees one by one.
Mao told his Communist superiors that he was exhausted,
and there is no need to doubt it. He also, one may assume,
wanted to spend time with his family. A third reason -
though where to place it in terms of the other two is unclear
- was that he wanted to work with the peasants on his own
former home turf, where he knew their ways and their
72
dialects, their tragedies and their hopes. A corollary to that
reason would be that Mao wanted to build a base of his own,
in a region and among people he trusted and understood.
Even though, in a rather abstract way, the Comintern and
the Communist Party (and even the Guomindang) had
espoused the cause of peasant liberation with various
degrees of rhetoric, those pronouncements were no sub-
stitute for trying to understand rural China on the ground
that one knew best. Elsewhere in China, especially on the
southeast coast, a few other pioneers had embarked on the
formation of peasant associations and cooperatives or had
begun to push for some release from harsh tenantry terms,
or even for redistribution of land. Yang Kaihui may have
shared this interest, and certainly there had been several
experiments in Hunan - their extent, as well as their
collapse, had been reported by Mao (in absentia) to the
Communist Central Executive Committee in late 1923.
During this time, Mao did not write about his experiences
in the countryside, and his usual spate of journalistic
reportage came to a complete halt. He seemed to have at last
abandoned the roles of reporter and teacher that he had
declared to be his lifelong ambitions back in 1921 at the New
People's Study Society meetings. The silence is complete from
December 1924 through October 1925; but that October he
returned to Guangzhou suddenly and took up work once
again, this time in the Guomindang propaganda department.
His pronouncements were once again in favor of the United
Front, against imperialism and the militarists, and for the
social revolution of the proletariat. In January 1926 he was
asked to include his views on the peasantry within the context
73
of a joint report to the Guomindang Congress, but there is
still little indication of his recent thinking on the topic, or of
his own experiences in Hunan. Then on 14 February 1926,
Mao sent a brief note to the Guomindang secretariat stating
that his 'mental ailment’ had ‘increased in severity,’ and
requesting two weeks’ leave. His stand-in was to be Shen
Yanbing (later, under the name Mao Dun, to be one of China's
most celebrated Communist writers).
Shen later noted that Mao took this brief leave to go back
to Hunan to check on the potential of the peasant movement
there. If that was accurate, it shows Mao's 'mental ailment’
was a specious excuse, and his political focus beginning to
coalesce. From this time forward, Mao's rural activism
manifested itself in numerous ways, starting with propa-
ganda work for the Communists and the Guomindang,
continuing with his summaries of the role of the Chinese
peasants in various revolutionary settings of the past, and on
to his own return to teaching, this time as the director of the
classes in the Peasant Training Institute between May and
September 1926, in which role his passions for exposition
and research could be combined. Mao's field notes from one
of his research trips back to his birthplace of Xiangtan
county in 1926 show his amazing grasp of detail: in assessing
a peasant family budget he calculated not only land acreage
and usury rates but also the price and use of lard, salt, lamp
oil, tea, seed, and fertilizer, as well as costs and maintenance
of draft animals and farm tools. (He subdivided hoes into
three categories according to their weight and cost.)
Firewood and fuel, clothing and home weaving, winnowing
fans and rice sifters - nothing was unimportant to Mao.
74
This period of Mao's deepening interest in recording -
and ultimately changing - the realities of rural China over-
lapped with momentous changes in Chinese politics. The
United Front of the Communists and the Guomindang
seemed to be working, and to hold firm even after Sun Yat-
sen's death from cancer in 1925. Massive popular movements
against foreign imperialism in China came into being in
mid-1925, sparked in part by the shooting of civilian Chinese
demonstrators by British forces seeking to protect foreign
lives and property. Workers began to take a prominent part
in politics, and Communist Party membership expanded
dramatically: still under a thousand in early 1925, the
Communist Party had expanded to over 57,000 members by
the spring of 1927.
Aided by Comintern advisers, and by the well-trained
junior officers graduating from the military academy that the
two parties had established at Whampoa near Canton, both
the Communists and the Guomindang rapidly expanded
their military base as well. Chiang Kai-shek, a former trusted
aide to Sun Yat-sen, and the commandant of the Whampoa
military academy, swiftly emerged as a dominant force in the
Guomindang armies and built up his own fanatically loyal
following among the recently graduated young officers.
Despite some inevitable ideological tensions, the combined
Guomindang and Communist armies moved out of Canton
under Chiang Kai-shek's overall command in the spring of
1926, in a concerted drive to break the power of the various
militarist regimes in China and to reunify the country.
Mao was one of those called on by the United Front to
organize peasant forces in the countryside to help this
75
northern expedition on its way, and by August 1926 the
United Front armies had swept into Changsha. That fall they
routed the remaining Hunan militarists and reached the
Yangtze River. Mao partook of these sweet tastes of victory.
Surely few occasions in his political life could have rivaled
the moment on 20 December 1926, when he stood on the
stage in the Magic Lantern Theater in Changsha before a
cheering audience of over three hundred, as a bell rang at
two PM to announce the beginning of a speech by 'Mr Mao
Zedong, born in Xiangtan, Hunan province. Mr Mao is a
leader of the Chinese revolution, and he has paid particular
attention to the peasant movement.’ Such an experience,
Mao told the audience, as he launched into his analysis of
the class components of revolution, would have been
inconceivable a year before.
On 4 January 1927, Mao began a month-long trip through
the Hunan countryside he knew best, including the two
counties of Xiangtan and Xiangxiang, birthplaces respectively
of his father and his mother. In a forty-page report of sus-
tained passion and excitement which he submitted to the
Communist Party in mid-February, Mao described the
seizures of power in the area by the poorest of the peasants and
the humiliations of the landlords as they were forced to walk,
wearing tall conical paper hats of mockery, through the
villages they once had dominated. He spoke of the women
who seized the chance for independence from their husbands,
of the secret-society members and even the petty criminals
who found their strength through this new form of rebellion,
of the joys of violence and the joys of righting ancient wrongs,
and of the children's games now politicized in allegorical form.
76
It is perhaps the most passionate piece of writing Mao
ever did, but even here, as if he could not resist it, he
included careful tables with neat rows of figures on the size
and location of each peasant association. Xiangxiang county
he judged to be the most radical, with 190,544 peasant
association members in 499 village groupings; Xiangtan
county was fourth, with 120,460 members in 450 village
groupings. The only close rival in rhetorical excitement to
this report had been Mao's 'Great Union of the Popular
Masses,’ written in the summer of 1919. There Mao had
written: 'From Lake Dongting to the Min River, the tide
rides ever higher. Heaven and earth are aroused by it, the
wicked are put to flight by it. Ha! We know it! We are
awakened! The world is ours, the state is ours, society is ours.
If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will
act? We must act energetically to carry out the great union of
the popular masses, which will not brook a moment's delay!’
Now in 1927 it was the peasantry of his former home who
held China's destiny: 'All revolutionary parties and all
revolutionary comrades will stand before them to be tested,
to be accepted or rejected as they decide. To march at their
head and lead them? To stand behind them, gesticulating
and criticizing them? Or to stand opposite them and oppose
them? Every Chinese is free to choose among the three, but
by force of circumstances you are fated to make the choice
quickly'
77
78
6 THE LONG RETREAT
IN THE SPRING OF 1927 it all came crashing down. The labor
unions in Shanghai were gutted first, in April, by Chiang
Kai-shek and his allies among the warlords, who had all
grown alarmed over the mounting power of the Communist
Party. Working with local secret-society and criminal
organizations, and with the open connivance of the
Westerners in the international concessions, Chiang ordered
a roundup of Communists and labor leaders. Thousands
were killed and the Communist movement in the city was
almost wiped out. Communist theorists in the Comintern,
and Stalin himself, claimed that the terror was a positive
development, since it ‘proved’ that the right wing of the
Guomindang had shown its counterrevolutionary nature;
they insisted, however, that the Chinese Communists con-
tinued to work with the 'left' wing of the Guomindang,
which was based in the industrial tri-city area of Wuhan,
inland up the Yangtze. After leaving Changsha, Mao was sent
to Wuhan so he could continue working in his capacity as an
alternate member of the Guomindang Central Committee;
79
and in an attempt to placate the left Guomindang, the
Communist Central Committee ordered Mao to dampen the
enthusiasm of the peasant masses he had just been writing so
enthusiastically about. By midsummer of 1927, the Wuhan
Guomindang leaders had decided to throw in their lot with
Chiang Kai-shek and abandon the Communists. At this
stage, a new wave of terror and repression of the Communists
took place in the Wuhan region, and against the peasant
associations there and in Hunan. It was in this grim situation
that the Communist Party Central Committee - again react-
ing to orders from Stalin and the Comintern - ordered Mao
to re-fan the flames of peasant insurrection, so as to move the
revolution to a higher stage.
Not surprisingly, Mao found the task impossible. In his
excited Hunan report of February 1927 he had tallied up a
total of 1,367,727 members of the peasant associations in the
province of Hunan alone. Now, in August 1927, away from
the base area he knew best, and in the midst of massive
military repression, Mao could raise only a few thousand
followers. Most of them were killed or routed by local
militarists after brief campaigns.
One thing that Mao did learn at this time was the
importance of having adequate military force to back up
one's political goals. There had been hints of his thinking on
this matter before, but it was in a report on 7 August 1927,
that he first gave it concrete expression. Mao opened by
commenting on the now defunct Guomindang alliance, in
terms that unmistakably echoed his feelings about the young
Changsha bride whose suicide in 1919 had prompted some of
his finest early writing. All of the Communists had been
80
mistaken, he wrote, in thinking ‘that the Guomindang
belonged to others. We did not realize that it was an empty
house waiting for people to move in. Later, like a maiden
getting into the bridal sedan chair, we reluctantly moved into
this empty house, but we never made up our mind to play
the host there.’ Only when it was too late did the Communist
leadership try to get the peasants and workers to join the
Nationalists. His Hunan report ‘had its impact in Hunan,’
Mao continued, ‘but it had no influence whatever on the
center. The broad masses inside and outside the Party want
revolution, yet the Party's guidance is not revolutionary;
there really is a hint of something counter-revolutionary
about it.' Chiang Kai-shek had the right idea - he 'rose by
grasping the gun.’ Now it was time for the Communist Party
to do the same: 'From now on, we should pay the greatest
attention to military affairs. We must know that political
power is obtained from the barrel of the gun.’
By mid-September, Mao and what peasant forces he had
been able to muster were narrowly surviving in eastern
Hunan. He was still hoping to launch an attack on
Changsha, as a prelude to wider uprisings throughout
Hunan province, though true to his new insight he was also
hoping that two regiments of Communist troops might be
dispatched to help him. His tone remained optimistic, but
the details of his report did not suggest much hope for the
success of a major rising against the strong local militarists
who now dominated the region. ‘Preparations’ had been
made to cut electric power lines and interdict railroad travel
in the area, said Mao, but he gave no specifics of what they
were. "The peasants of the suburbs' outside Changsha would
81
constitute the 'main force,’ and they would be supported in
turn by the rickshaw pullers in the city, and by ‘about five
hundred wounded soldiers' who were billeted in the city. It
was a hopeless scheme and it went nowhere.
In early October, Mao, completely trapped on the border
between Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, with nowhere else to
go, began discussions with two veteran secret-society leaders
who had created their own protected base area about a
hundred miles south in the border mountain ranges of
Jinggangshan. By late October 1927, the three men had
worked out an agreement, and Mao marched south with his
remaining peasant forces to join them in their mountain lair.
The retreat meant that Mao lost contact with Yang Kaihui
and their children. They had just had their third child,
another boy, whom they named Anlong. Through one of his
younger brothers, however, Mao was able to stay in touch
with other Communist leaders in southern Jiangxi, some of
whom later brought their own surviving forces to join him
at Jinggangshan.
The following year of 1928 marked yet another turning
point in Mao's life. He was now cut off from virtually all the
sources of authority and all normal career tracks that he had
experienced before. He had lost his Party titles from both the
Communists and the Guomindang, and a member of the
Hunan Communist Party provincial committee who made
his way into the Jinggang mountains in March even told
Mao - wrongly, it turned out - that Mao had been deprived
of his Party membership. He was with peasants, but few of
those he was with can have come from his home region of
Xiangxiang or Xiangtan, and the harsh mountain terrain was
82
indescribably different from the lusher valley rice-growing
regions in which he grew up. His secret-society allies may
have had some Communist sympathies, but the rules with
which they ran their mountain world were their own. When
Mao was forced, on Party orders, to lead some of his troops
down into the plains, they suffered serious reverses and he
soon pulled back to his mountain base. On at least one
occasion he flatly rejected an order that he make another
such military sortie. In a brief report of May 1928 to the
Jiangxi provincial committee, Mao gave his ‘permanent
mailing address' as being care of the secret-society leaders in
the border mountain region - there was no other way to
reach him.
In that same report, Mao mentioned that he and his forces
were using the Jiangxi county town of Yongxin as their new
‘center,’ and as a base for organizing ‘insurrections' in the
neighboring counties. They needed such a base to bring
some order to their motley forces - Mao described his
followers as being 'a mass often thousand messy people with
very poor discipline’ - and also to develop Party organiz-
ation, raise money, and make clothes. Yongxin had been a
rural revolutionary center since April 1927, when a
Communist government was established there. Among well-
known local radicals elected to the revolutionary county
committee were three younger members of the prominent
scholarly and landlord He family, two sisters and a brother,
who had all joined the Communist Party the year before,
when the Northern Expedition forces were seeking to
reunify China. Later the He family joined up with the
bandits in Jinggangshan. One of the sisters, He Zizhen, now
83
nineteen, and as famous for her looks as for her spirit, met
Mao in the mountains. Mao was thirty-four, lean from
privation, rich with experience from his organizational work
among the peasantry, and a storehouse of knowledge about
Communist and Guomindang Party leaders. He was now
living to the fullest - if not entirely by his own choice - that
heroic wandering knight-errant life of which he had written
to Yang Kaihui in his poem of 1923. Apparently his memories
of his wife and small children were fading; in any case, he
was trapped in the mountains by opposing armies and had
no way of getting to Changsha, nor had Yang Kaihui any way
of leaving home and coming to the mountains to join him.
A poem Yang Kaihui wrote to Mao in October 1928 reflected
her sorrow and frustration at their separation, and at the
impossibility of getting messages through to him. She hoped
that he had adequate winter clothes, and worried over a foot
injury he had sustained before going up into the mountains.
She worried, too, over his sleeping far away, uncherished and
alone. But by the time she wrote her poem, He Zizhen and
Mao were lovers, and their first child was born in 1929.
Contradictory instructions from the Party center and from
the Hunan provincial network continued to reach Mao, and
the poverty of the Jinggangshan region, its instability, and the
shifting numbers of not always reliable troops, made
consistent policy difficult. But in the mountains Mao
followed an extremely radical policy, one fully attuned both
to the insights he had gathered in examining peasant violence
in Hunan and to those aspects of Comintern policy that
emphasized peasant extremism (as they often but not
invariably did). The ‘land law’ of Jinggangshan, as
84
promulgated by Mao in December 1928, stipulated that all
land should be confiscated from the wealthy, with most of it
being distributed directly to the individual peasants, some
tilled in common, and some kept for 'model farms.’ After the
land redistribution, except for the old, the very young, and
the sick, 'the rest of the population must be compelled to
work.’ (So had Lord Shang ordered for the subjects of Qin,
twenty-five hundred years before, as Mao had written in his
first surviving schoolboy essay.) Hillsides with edible-oil
plants were to be divided among the peasants, but the
evolutionary government would control all bamboo forests.
A flat land tax of 15 percent would be levied in most cases.
Members of the Red Army would get the same land
distributions as other peasants, but in their case the
evolutionary government would hire laborers to work the
and for the soldiers on duty. Problems among the troops,
lowever, were omnipresent and almost overwhelming. There
was no cold-weather clothing, no drugs or medicines to treat
he wounded, almost no money for food, and very little arms
or ammunition. It was only through the spirit of 'democracy'
- sharing the hardships equally, across all levels - that the
situation could be maintained. Guerrilla action against the
enemy was the most successful - to attack only when in
superior strength and to avoid needless ‘dispersion’ of the
troops at all costs.
The Jinggangshan period of Mao's life ended in January
i929> when he decided to find a new base area with greater
resources and less constant pressure from militarist or
Guomindang counterattacks. Mao's final decision was to
move to a new base area in the border zone between eastern
85
Jiangxi and western Fujian provinces. Down from the
mountains, Mao found himself once again subject to
pressures from the Party leadership and assaulted for the
survival policies he had followed. One particularly sharp
injunction told Mao to ‘leave the army' and report to
Shanghai for instructions. Mao prevaricated, and in an
unambiguous response to the Party center told them it
would be a serious mistake 'to fear the development of the
power of the peasants lest it outstrip the workers’ leadership
and become detrimental to the revolution.’ A series of
crucial Party meetings were held in western Fujian (Mao had
still not gone to Shanghai, as instructed), and Mao's
positions on the rural revolution and the role of military
force came under fierce criticism.
Mao was ill at this time, once again; this does not seem to
have been a 'diplomatic' illness, as on occasions in his past,
but a debilitating combination of poor food, exhaustion,
and malaria. It was also at this time, in Fujian, that their first
child, a baby girl, was born to Mao and He Zizhen. Mao's
illness continued through November, and it was in that
month that he wrote a brief letter to his schoolmate and
friend Li Lisan, now a powerful member of the Politburo
and soon to be head of the Party. 'I have been ill for three
months,’ wrote Mao, ‘and although I am better now, my
spirits are not yet fully recovered.' One explanation for this
flatness, Mao went on, was that despite the company of He
Zizhen he missed his first wife and children: 'I often think of
Kaihui, Anying, and the others, and would like to communi-
cate with them, but I don't know their mailing address.' Mao
asked Li Lisan to seek out Mao Zemin, his younger brother,
86
in Shanghai, and to get Yang Kaihui's address, so that Mao
could write to her.
There is no surviving letter from Mao to Yang Kaihui, so
we do not know if he ever wrote. What we do know is that
shifts in Communist policy, under what came to be called
the 'Li Lisan Line' of renewed assaults on cities, led in
October 1930 to a Communist assault on Changsha, where
Yang Kaihui was living privately with the three small
children and their nanny. The Communist attack was a
failure, and in the mopping-up operations conducted by the
Guomindang militarists that followed, one of the
Guomindang generals heard of Yang Kaihui's presence in the
city and of her relationship with Mao. He arrested and
interrogated her, and when she refused to renounce Mao,
had her shot. The three children and their nanny were bailed
out by friends and sent back to Shanghai, where the children
were enrolled in a kindergarten. After the school closed
down, they lived hand-to-mouth for years. The youngest
one died, but in 1936 the Communist Party located Anying
and Anqing, by then in their early teens, and they were sent
to the Soviet Union for safety. Mao was reunited with them
only in 1946.
The new base area that the Communists finally estab-
lished, on the Fujian border with Jiangxi, was known as the
Jiangxi Soviet, and it was here that Mao spent most of the
next five years. The Jiangxi base area, though far larger than
Jinggangshan, was also more vulnerable to attack. For
virtually the entire period between 1930 and 1934 it was
subjected to repeated assaults by Chiang Kai-shek, who was
determined to obliterate this main symbol of Communist
87
survival. As had been the case during the period between
1924 and 1927, Mao was again part of a larger political world,
with its own rhythms and imperatives, one that sometimes
followed the logic of local circumstances and at other times
responded to the dictates of the Comintern. Mao was in
partial political eclipse much of this time, though another of
his meticulous local examinations - his third after Hunan
and Jinggangshan - was devoted to exploring the precise
nature of rural life in the Jiangxi county of Xunwu, and
constitutes one of the major documents of Communist
social analysis for this period. In this report Mao assembled
information not only on land relations and class structures
in Xunwu, but also telegraph and postal services, the flow of
business products (both local and foreign), butchers and
wine sellers, herbal medicines and tobacco use, lodging
houses and barber-shops, the wearing of jewelry, the
numbers of prostitutes and their clients, literacy rates, and
the handling of adultery.
Mao's career and Party standing fluctuated violently
during these years. Much of the time, as titular 'chairman' of
the provisional Soviet area government, he was the signatory
of major Party documents and the convener of meetings,
which now had to deal not only with land, labor, and the
problem of the militarists, but also with the emerging
menace of Japan, which had attacked Shanghai in early 1932
and had taken over the whole of Manchuria. Anti-Japanese
nationalism was a potent factor in the Communist Party's
recruitment drives, particularly among the patriotic
students. But especially after the senior Communist
leadership were forced to abandon Shanghai because of the
88
unrelenting Guomindang police pressure there, and moved
to the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao found himself on the sidelines, or
else had his recommendations completely overruled. On one
occasion he was removed from a committee chairmanship in
the middle of a meeting.
On several occasions during this period, Mao took 'sick
leave,’ as he had in the past. Undoubtedly, some of these
absences were political ones, and others were more in the
nature of compassionate leave - as when He Zizhen had their
second child in 1932, which was delivered in a Fujian hospital
by a Communist doctor who had once worked with Mao in
Jinggangshan. This child, a boy, they named Anhong. Mao and
He Zizhen had left their first child, a daughter, with a rural
couple in Fujian, so that she would be safe from the fighting,
but she died as an infant. Their third child, born in 1933, seems
also to have died in infancy. Mao had health problems, too. The
malaria that had troubled him before returned for a while, and
in late 1932 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and spent
several months in a Fujian sanatorium in the Soviet area before
the disease was checked. On various occasions, too, he re-
treated to isolated scenic sites in the hills with He Zizhen;
‘bodyguards' were assigned to accompany them, though
whether the guards were meant to protect them in case of
enemy attack, or constituted a thinly veiled type of house arrest
ordered by Mao's rivals within the Communist Party, is not
clear. From April to October 1934, though Mao was technically
still chairman of the border region government, he and He
Zizhen lived together with their baby son in a hillside temple in
what was described as ‘almost complete isolation.’
During this period, the attacks from Chiang Kai-shek's
89
forces became so relentless that the Communist Party-
leadership decided, secretly, that they would have to
abandon their base. Mao was not involved in the planning of
this all-important event in Chinese Communist history, the
first step in what was later to be called 'the Long March.' He
and his wife joined the great column of some 86,000 fleeing
Communist troops and supporters only as it passed near
their residence on October 18. About 15,000 Communist
troops had been ordered to stay behind in the Soviet, to
protect the approximately 10,000 sick or wounded soldiers
who could not make the march and to guard the civilian
population as well as they could. Mao insisted to Party
leaders that He Zizhen - who was once again pregnant - be
allowed to make the march with him. There was only a
handful of other women on the march, mainly the wives or
companions of senior Party leaders, but the couple were not
allowed to take their two-year-old son, Anhong, with them.
So they entrusted him to Mao's younger brother Mao Zetan,
who was among those staying with the rearguard group.
When Zetan in turn had to go away on combat duty, he left
the two-year-old with one of his bodyguards. Mao Zetan was
subsequently killed in the fighting - in 1935 - and the boy
was never heard of again.
The Long March, later presented as a great achievement in
Communist history, was a nightmare of death and pain while
it was in progress. The huge column was bogged down with
equipment, party files, weaponry, communications equip-
ment, and whatever else had been salvaged from Jiangxi to
help them in setting up a new base area. A devastating attack
by the Guomindang artillery and air force as the slow-
90
moving column was trying to cross the Xiang River in
northern Guangxi province, took close to half their number
in casualties. But the march continued, even though there
was no agreement on exactly where they were heading, or
even on which direction they should take. The leaders, how-
ever, had reached a tacit understanding that when they
reached Zunyi, a prosperous city in Guizhou province, they
would pause and take stock.
The 'Enlarged Meeting of the Politburo’ as it was termed,
assembled in Zunyi on 15 January 1935, in a crisis
atmosphere. Party policy had clearly been disastrous, and
the very survival of the revolutionary movement hung in the
balance. It was a time both to apportion blame for what had
gone wrong and - more important - decide what to do in
the immediate future, and who was to lead the Party in
doing it. Present at the meetings were seventeen veteran
leaders of the Party, including Mao, one Comintern
representative, Otto Braun, one interpreter (for Braun), and
a notetaker - the thirty-year-old Deng Xiaoping. In terms of
assigning blame, the meeting faulted Braun and two of the
Chinese Communist leaders for adopting an overly static
defense in the Jiangxi Soviet, one relying often on positional
warfare and the construction of blockhouses, rather than on
swift deployment and mobile warfare, in which superior
Communist strength could have been focused on points of
Guomindang weakness. Lack of imagination by the same
leaders, the majority concluded, made them miss their
chance of linking up with a rebellion of Chiang Kai-shek's
troops that broke out in Fujian during 1933. As to immediate
goals, the Party should drop the idea of having a base in
91
Guizhou, and instead should cross the Yangtze River and set
up a new base in Sichuan province. In terms of Party
leadership, there had indeed been ‘erroneous leadership,’ but
there was 'not a split in the Party.’ The 'Group of Three’ who
had been coordinating the Long March up to this point was
abolished, and Mao was named to the Standing Committee
of the Politburo and given the additional title of ‘military
assistant.’ Otto Braun, the Chinese minutes noted, ‘totally
and firmly rejected the criticism of himself.’
The Zunyi meetings gave a major boost to Mao's prestige,
and it is to this time period that one can date his move
toward a commanding position within the Party leadership.
But many major problems still had not been resolved. It
turned out to be impossible to create the Sichuan base, since
Guomindang troops and local mnilitarists kept the
Communists from crossing the Yangtze, and after circling
aimlessly around Guizhou province for several months,
often under fierce enemy attack, they had to swing far down
into the south before turning north again along the Tibetan
border and heading for their final destination, the sparsely
populated northwestern province of Shaanxi. Also, there
were still many other major Communist military leaders
who were opposed to Mao and saw no reason to risk their
own troops for his protection. Some of these commanders
not only abandoned Mao and established new base areas of
their own, but even lured away some of Mao's finest
commanders, so that Mao's forces steadily shrank despite his
formal rise in Party status. Finally, in personal terms, there
were tragedies. He Zizhen was almost killed in a bombing
raid and was left badly injured, with shrapnel embedded in
92
her body in more than a dozen places. Though she
subsequently gave birth, to a girl, because of the dangers and
pressures of the campaign the baby had to be left with a local
peasant family. The girl was thereafter never found, and was
the fourth of the children He Zizhen had with Mao Zedong
that was lost to them.
During the fall of 1935, Mao's greatly diminished forces
endured a hellish march through the swamplands and
mountains of Qinghai and Gansu, where their main
enemies, apart from grim skirmishes with the local tribes-
people, were intense hunger - there was almost no food to be
either bought or foraged - the constant damp, and freezing
temperatures at night. Many of the remaining 15,000 or so
people in the column died of malnutrition, suppurating
sores, or by eating poisonous weeds and berries. Only
between 7,000 and 8,000 of the column survived, reaching
the village of Wayabao in Shaanxi, just south of the Great
Wall, in October 1935, and joining forces with some other
Communist troops who had already made a base there.
It had been an exhausting and astonishing year since they
left Jiangxi, and now Mao had to chart out in his mind a new
course for the Communists and for his own career. He was
also to be a father again. He Zizhen became pregnant for the
fifth time after the March ended, and their daughter Li Min
was born in the Shaanxi village of Baoan in the late summer
of 1936. "The Maos were proud parents of a new baby girl,’ as
Edgar Snow, the first Westerner ever to interview Mao, jotted
in his notes at that time. As had not been the case with any
of He Zizhen's other children, she and Mao - though
separated - were to see Li Min grow up to maturity, marry,
93
and raise two children of her own. Fate granted them at least
that measure of continuity.
94
7 CRAFTING THE IMAGE
AFTER SOME HUNTING around in Shaanxi for the most
practical and defensible location, by the fall of 1936 the
Communists had decided to make their headquarters in
Yan'an, a fair-sized market town, with good shelter nearby in
the cave dwellings that peasants for centuries had built into
the soft loess hillsides. Such dwellings were cheap to build
and gave good protection from the extremes of heat and cold
that afflicted this arid region. And in a countryside almost
barren of trees, the need for timber was reduced to some
simple framing for a rough screen and door that would
shelter the cave dwellers from wind, dust, and the gaze of the
outside world.
The fact that Mao lived in such a cave struck visitors to
Yan'an as symbolic of his revolutionary simplicity and
fervor. In fact, it was an adjustment to circumstances, of a
kind he had made many times before in his life, and Mao
settled at once into this strangely desolate new home. He had
after all lived for most of his life with none of the amenities
of the modernizing urban world, though he had tasted them
95
in Shanghai and Canton. He had time, too, to enjoy the
company of his new daughter and to relish the news that
Communists in Shanghai had been able to track down two
of the children he had had with Yang Kaihui long before -
Anying, who was now fourteen, and Anqing, who was
thirteen. However, their youngest brother had died some
time in those bleak years, and Angqing's health had been
badly damaged by his privations. The boys would be sent to
Yan'an as soon as it could be safely arranged.
Mao's main preoccupation, inevitably, was preserving
what was left of the Communist organization and deepening
his own hold on Party power. The rhetoric of hostility to
Japan was easy to construct, and sincere. Japan had brought
untold problems to China since the war of 1894-95, and in
the 1930s had been strengthening its grip over the whole of
Manchuria by means of the puppet state ‘'Manchukuo,'
nominally controlled by the abdicated last emperor of the
Qing dynasty, Henry Puyi, but in reality run by the Japanese
army and the huge bureaucracy of the Japanese South
Manchurian Railway and related businesses. But imple-
menting an effective anti-Japanese policy was a far more
difficult problem. Chiang Kai-shek, in a similar situation,
had opted for wiping out the Communists before focusing
his armies on defeat of the Japanese. The Communists
accordingly developed the counterstrategy of urging the
whole of China to unite in opposition to the Japanese, and
to end the fratricidal civil war of Chinese against Chinese.
A heaven-sent opportunity for the Communists occurred
in December 1936. Chiang Kai-shek flew in to Xian - the
capital of Shaanxi province - in an attempt to coordinate a
96
final all-out campaign of annihilation against Mao and the
Communist survivors. To accomplish this, Chiang needed
the total support of the former warlord of Manchuria,
Zhang Xueliang, who had been forced out of his homeland
by the Japanese occupation in the northeast but still
controlled a large and effective military force. In a startling
move, instead of agreeing to fight alongside the Nationalists,
General Zhang orchestrated a secret coup whereby Chiang
Kai-shek was kidnapped in the middle of the night of 12
December and held under arrest, pending the inauguration
of some fully articulated program of unified Chinese
resistance against Japan. The Communists had been wooing
Zhang Xueliang for some time, trying to win him over to
their cause, but there is no evidence that they were privy to
all the details of the coup. Nevertheless the seizure of Chiang
Kai-shek gave them a chance to size up their options: to have
Chiang killed, on the grounds that he had long been their
implacable enemy; to use him as a bargaining chip to buy
time for themselves to push their social programs; to
pressure him to withdraw all his troops from Shaanxi; to
release him after obtaining agreement on a United Front
against Japan.
Mao, who had just been elected to the crucial position of
chairman of the Communist Military Council, in addition to
his position on the Politburo, had a central role to play in
this debate. After tense discussions within the Party Center,
with General Zhang, and with Moscow, the Party decided on
a modified form of the last option: to strengthen the United
Front. Their statement, released on 19 December managed to
combine a tone that was both formally polite and yet slightly
97
mocking. Some of this tone recalls the earlier Mao of the
pre-Jiangxi Soviet days, as it addressed the Guomindang
leaders and their various warlord allies as ‘respected
gentlemen,’ and pointed out that in anti-Japanese actions,
‘the pace of the gentlemen from Nanjing has been rather
slow.’ But the brief heart of the document was all business:
establish a cease-fire line between the Communists and the
Nationalists; immediately convene a peace conference of ‘all
parties, groups, social strata, and armies' - including the
Communists - to meet in Nanjing; let a wide range of views
be heard on 'the issue of making arrangements for Mr
Chiang Kai-shek,' as long as the basic priorities of national
unification and resistance to Japan were adhered to; and
move fast, 'so as to prevent the Japanese bandits from
sneaking in at this time of national confusion!’
Chiang Kai-shek refused to make the formal public
statement supporting a United Front and end to the civil war
that the Communists had hoped for, but he did imply that
he would change his current policies, and his release on
Christmas Day, 1936, was heralded by the Chinese as
evidence that the deadlock was over and that some kind of
new anti-Japanese alliance would emerge. In January 1937,
Mao and the Party Center debated the correct propaganda
line that they should take, and decided to hammer away
publicly at a few major issues: the Communist Party itself
would deny all prior knowledge of the kidnapping and treat
it as entirely 'an internal matter of the Guomindang Nanjing
government.’ The Communist Party had always wanted a
peaceful solution to the impasse and hence did not issue any
formal endorsement of General Zhang Xueliang. It
98
nevertheless hoped Zhang would be appointed to lead his
own troops along with those of other western warlords -
who of course threatened the frail Communist base area -
into a major confrontation with Japan. If Chiang refused to
do this, and civil war resumed, he would be 'solely
responsible.' This remained the basic Communist approach
until Japanese provocations during the 'Marco Polo Bridge
incident’ near Beijing, on 7 July 1937, induced Chiang Kai-
shek at last to order a unified national resistance to Japan, in
which the Communists would also join. In expressing total
‘enthusiasm' for this war, the Communists reminded the
Chinese people - in language that might have drawn both
sighs and sardonic smiles - that ‘our party has long since
shown in word and deed an open, selfless attitude and a
readiness to compromise for the common good, which has
won the commendation of all.’
Mao in Yan'an could hail the war with ‘enthusiasm,’ partly
because his base area was well insulated from the most
desperate areas of the fighting. That took place between the
Japanese army and the regular military forces of the
Nationalists’ Guomindang armies on the north China plain,
in Shanghai, and along the Yangtze River. Especially in
protracted fighting around Shanghai, the Nationalists
suffered immense losses. After the terrible 'rape of Nanjing’
by the Japanese on 7 December 1937, brought a literal and
symbolic end to any myths of Guomindang power in their
own capital city, what was left of the main Nationalist forces
retreated up the Yangtze River, first to Wuhan and then,
when that fell in the summer of 1938, even deeper inland to
Chongqing. Thereafter a good deal of the fighting in central
99
China was waged by scattered units of those Communists who
had been left behind at the time of the Long March, or the
remnants of various other Soviet governments that had
coexisted with the Jiangxi Soviet. In the major cities (including
Shanghai) the Communist Party fought a clandestine under-
ground war against the Japanese, often at the same time as
Nationalist secret agents and their secret-society allies.
In northern China, after the Nationalist retreat, the main
brunt of anti-Japanese action was borne by a sprawling
Soviet region to the east of Mao's Yan'an base, which covered
parts of the provinces of Shanxi, Chahar, and Hebei. This
base was within the reach of aggressive Japanese com-
manders, and fighting there was vicious, with no quarter
given by either side. In both north China and central China
(as previously in Manchukuo) the Japanese set up puppet
regimes under nominal Chinese control, with collabor-
ationist troops and police to control the local population,
hunt down Communists, and collect taxes. Hundreds of
millions of Chinese had little choice but to live under one of
the collaborationist regimes; of those who chose to leave
their homes and jobs, a majority trekked south and west to
join the Nationalists in Chongqing or in the new ‘United
University’ that had been formed in Yunnan province by the
students and faculty of various prestigious Beijing and
Shanghai colleges. Tens of thousands, however, made the
equally arduous trek to the north, seeing Yan'an as a place
where their talents would be most needed, and Mao as a
leader who could focus China's resistance to Japan more
effectively than Chiang Kai-shek.
Mao's completion of the Long March, and the factional
100
battles he had fought there, had brought him a leadership
position in the Party, but it was by no means unchallenged.
His rivals within the Party were numerous and determined,
and were constantly refighting the ideological battles of the
past in an attempt to apportion blame for prior catas-
trophes. Mao himself had done this on the Long March, in
Zunyi, but in Yan'an the arguments became sharper and
more formal. One of Mao's rivals pointed out that though
there had been successes in the development of the Red
Army, and in the confiscation and redistribution of land, the
negative side of the equation was far stronger: 'In the white
areas, in the cities, and among the workers, we have suffered
great losses. Not only did we fail to build up our own forces
or prepare for the uprising, but we were tremendously
weakened organizationally. Hundreds of thousands of Party
members lost their lives. Moreover, tens of thousands of our
people are still imprisoned by the Guomindang.’ Because of
‘the immaturity and low theoretical level of the Party,’ the
critic continued, the factional struggles within the Party
were deeply damaging. Party behavior was ‘exactly like
someone who, never having drunk before, downs a bottle of
brandy the first time he touches liquor.... The popular term
is overkill.’ Such arguments were historical and technical,
but they focused on many of the kinds of policies that Mao
had followed in his more extreme moments. Only a few
months later, in November, a large group of Russian-trained
Chinese Communists returned to Yan'an, and Mao once
again found himself involved in swirling levels of technical
debate and analysis.
To hold his own in such dangerous eddies, Mao had to
101
sharpen his grasp of Communist dialectic. Though he had of
necessity read some Marxist-Leninist literature, he had never
received any formal training, either in Party schools or
overseas. With his decision, first made in December 1935, to
openly challenge the returnees from the Soviet Union, Mao
would have to undertake systematic study. Visitors to his
cave noted that he was using this post-Long March respite to
read books on economics and philosophy. Mao also took
other steps to increase his self-image within the Party. On 22
June 1937, for the first time in Mao's life, a portrait of him
was published; it appeared in the revolutionary Yan'an
newspaper Liberation. Mao was shown full face, with a
background of troops marching under waving banners.
Mao's face, in the picture, was illuminated by the rays of the
sun, while under the portrait was printed one of his 'sayings,'
calling for liberation of the Chinese nation and society. In
the fall of 1937, young supporters of Mao began to compile a
collection of Mao's short works for publication, with an
adulatory essay. No Chinese Communist leader's works had
ever been published in this way.
Also during that spring and summer of 1937, Mao gave a
short series of lectures on dialectical materialism to students
in the revolutionary university, though he admitted that he
himself had only just begun to study the problem (and later
scholars have shown the lectures were plagiarized from
Chinese translations of some Soviet essays on Marxism).
What is original about the lectures, however, is that they
show Mao beginning to grope for a way to adjust Marxist
philosophy to certain realities in the Chinese situation, just
as Lenin had adjusted it to certain Russian realities. But this
102
idea was presented only in a fragmentary and incomplete
way.
If Mao was to become the accepted leader of his Party, he
not only had to win on the battlefield and have successful
policies for rural and urban revolution, he also had to be
able to hold his own as a theorist. It was as a theorist that he
most needed help, and this is where he got it. In the summer
of 1937, slightly ahead of the main exodus of students fleeing
after the Marco Polo Bridge disaster, a young lecturer named
Chen Boda, from 'China University’ in Beijing, made his way
to Yan'an. Born in 1904, Chen was a decade younger than
Mao, and was raised in an impoverished peasant family in
Fujian province. But he later studied Marxist-Leninist philo-
sophy in Moscow for several years and became fluent in the
Russian language. Returning to China in 1931, Chen became
a teacher of early Chinese history and philosophy before
making his way to Yan'an. Since Chen wrote Chinese with
great elegance and showed extraordinary ability to apply
knowledge of dialectics to the study of the past, Mao made
Chen his secretary, with responsibility for drafting his essays
and speeches. Aware of Chen's ideological skills and strong
Russian background, Mao also named Chen head of
research in the Communist Propaganda Bureau. This was
followed by an appointment at the Yan'an central Party
school, to supervise research there into Chinese problems.
Chen Boda was to become an essential ideological ally and
guide to Mao. The Soviet returnees’ intentions could be
clearly gauged when they pushed for the rapid convocation
of a Seventh Communist Party Congress in China. There
had been no such assembly since the Sixth Communist Party
103
Congress, held in Moscow in 1928. Decisions made at a new
full congress would of course have power to override any
further rapid and ad hoc decisions on Party leadership, such
as those made at Zunyi on the Long March. Such a full
congress could also prove a forum for reopening vindictive
debates about Communist military policy, in which Mao
had consistently argued for (and practiced when he could) a
policy of guerrilla warfare in which the enemy would be
lured deep into Communist-controlled terrain, forced to
fragment their forces, and then attacked with overwhelming
force in swift, isolated engagements. The convening of the
congress was successfully (from Mao's point of view)
delayed, and in July 1938 Chen Boda published the first of
many articles that gave careful ideological support and
justification to Mao's policies. By 1939, Chen was developing
a series of intellectual arguments to show how Mao had
successfully, in his writings, moved from the role of thinker
and activist to the all-important sphere of ‘theorist.’ In this
sense, though of course not in that of overt ideological
content, Chen presented Mao's role as the new theorist of the
Communist revolution as being parallel to the role of
Confucius as the theorist for the 'feudal' Zhou dynasty of the
first millennium BCE. Just as Confucius caught the
ideological heart of his age in his writings, said Chen, so did
Mao in his Hunan report of 1927 catch the ‘essence’ of an
‘entire historical period.’
As Chen Boda was thus helping Mao construct an edifice
of ideological dominance, Mao was also struggling with the
task of keeping Yan'an a viable economic and political base.
Shaanxi was very different from anyplace Mao had lived in
104
before, and its poverty, exacerbated by the Japanese war and
also by a partial Guomindang blockade of the Yan'an region,
stretched Communist ingenuity to the limits. Indeed, at
times the Yan'an leaders brought farmworkers into Yan'an
from outlying areas to work on major irrigation projects and
open up new lands, so that statistically the region could
appear to be making swift strides forward. There was also
the vast influx of new recruits to the Communist camp to be
considered, and ideological techniques had to be devised to
prove - and to develop - their loyalty.
Mao's own personal proclivities exacerbated the tensions
with members of his own Party, which were never far below
the surface. The cave life with He Zizhen and their baby girl,
which to some outside observers seemed idyllic, had grown
tense. In 1937 He Zizhen found that she was pregnant again,
for the sixth time, and told Mao she wished to go to a good
Shanghai hospital, to abort the fetus and also to have the
shrapnel fragments removed from her body. When the
Japanese occupation of Shanghai made that impossible, she
decided to go to the Soviet Union instead. At the same time,
she suspected that Mao was growing interested in other
women. Unable to prevent her leaving - or perhaps not
wanting to prevent it - Mao acquiesced in her decision to
travel to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. In Moscow,
she reversed her earlier decision and decided to keep the
child, who was born early in 1938 but died a few months later
of pneumonia. It was at this stage that Mao sent their
daughter, Li Min, now two, to be with her mother in the
Soviet Union. Earlier, in 1936, Mao's two sons from his
marriage to Yang Kaihui also were sent to the Soviet Union,
105
allegedly for their safety, and for a time at least He Zizhen
looked after all three of the children. Now that she and the
children were gone, Mao set up house with a twenty-four-
year-old actress from Shandong named Jiang Qing, who had
been one of the young people who made their way to Yan'an
as the war began. Their liaison was resented by several
Communist leaders, who had liked and admired He Zizhen.
Mao and Jiang Qing had one child, a daughter named Li Na,
born in 1940. Li Na was raised in Yan'an and grew to adult-
hood, being the last of Mao's four surviving children from
three different women. Six of his other children died young
or disappeared.
Few people dared to criticize Mao directly for such
behavior, but we can see how he was moving on a trajectory
that was pushing him more in the direction of dominance
and power. He seemed less flexible and more determined to
make all those around him conform to his own whims and
beliefs. From living the simple life because he had to, Mao
had moved to choosing to live the simple life, thence to
boasting about living the simple life, and now to forcing
others to live the simple life. At the same time, the
fascination with the more complex sides of Chinese culture
that had informed Mao's youth were being replaced by a
bitterness and irritation toward the educated people and the
aesthetic traditions in China. Part of the cause may have
come from the more highly educated students recently
returned from the Soviet Union who were still trying to seize
power back from him. Or the roots may have gone back far
earlier, to slights in the library at Beijing University, or to
mocking students in the Changsha normal school, when
106
Mao was so dejected for a while that he even advertised for
friends. Maybe Chen Boda showed him how to use an
intellectual against an intellectual, how to open fissures and
explore the wounds. Maybe he met too many people without
integrity, or felt the fugitives from the big cities now arriving
lacked the dignity and courage of simple country folk.
Certainly the deliberate cultivation of a coarse manner was
something he was now eager for visitors to see. In Yan'an,
Mao flaunted his country ways, opening his belt to hunt for
lice in his groin as he talked, or pulling off his trousers in the
midst of an interview as he lay on the bed, to cool himself
down. People began to comment on Mao's ‘intense and
withering fury,’ and one young Chinese critic, braver than
most, wrote of a kind of ‘desolation’ of spirit that was
beginning to spread in Yan'an, and of forces of darkness that
seemed to be pushing back the light.
One thing that power brought to Mao in Yan'an was the
liberty to lecture others at will, as often or as long as he liked.
Perhaps that is the true obverse of honest pedagogy, of the
teacher's life that Mao as a youth always said that he wanted
to pursue. Nor did Mao any longer make his own detailed
surveys of the countryside and its problems - he had others
o do it for him, so that he could develop theory based on
heir results. The long years of war were indeed a triumph
or the Communist Party, which emerged strengthened and
nore numerous, with powerfully effective techniques of
nass mobilization in the rural settings and genuine skill at
the manipulation of belief through well-conceptualized
propaganda - something Mao had learned from his days
with the Guomindang.
107
When Mao lectured the intellectuals now, it was on their
own history and culture from the conceptual insights of his
revolutionary experiences. In a lecture to inaugurate the new
Yan'an Party school, given on 1 February 1942, Mao
addressed the assembled cadres and intellectuals on the
meaning of learning and knowledge. But his opening
premise hardly encouraged frank debate: 'It is a fact that the
Party's General Line is correct and unquestionable,’ said
Mao. From the Marxist-Leninist standpoint, said Mao, 'a
great many so-called intellectuals are actually exceedingly
unlearned’ and they must come to understand that ‘the
knowledge of the workers and peasants is sometimes greater
than theirs.’ It was a sense of humility, Mao urged, that all his
educated listeners must now cultivate. They had to under-
stand that book knowledge in and for itself was worthless,
and that only words born out of the world of experience had
meaning. They should never forget that 'books cannot walk,
and you can open and close a book at will; this is the easiest
thing in the world to do, a great deal easier than it is for the
cook to prepare a meal, and much easier than it is for him to
slaughter a pig.’
Mao was himself becoming fully confident that he knew
what was ‘correct.’ The Soviet returnees and his other
intellectual opponents had been almost routed, and now it
was time to complete the job. In another talk to the intel-
lectuals in May 1942, Mao offered to 'exchange opinions'
with his listeners, but his was the dominant voice, as he
instructed the intellectuals to identify themselves fully with
the proletariat and the masses rather than - as in his own
youth had been his goal - to instruct and uplift them.
108
Turning away from his youthful writings and insights, Mao
spoke now against those who believed in ‘love’ being
separable from class reality, and against those questing for
some kind of ‘love in the abstract,’ or those who felt
‘everything should proceed from love.’ As love was tied to
class, so was ‘popular life' alone the ‘sole source’ for
literature and art, and the 'songs sung by the masses' the true
source for professional musicians. The distance from the
false to the true, from the old to the new, was at once as small
and as vast as the distance from the 'garrets of Shanghai’ to
the 'revolutionary base areas' that so many of the listeners
had just traveled. In the months following the talk,
intellectuals were divided up into small groups, where they
were compelled to criticize themselves and their short-
comings, to learn to understand the past in 'Maoist' terms,
and to follow the correct lines in the future. Those who
balked were punished. Random violence became common,
and the 'struggles' became deadly for many in what was
euphemistically known as the 'rescue campaign,’ supervised
by Mao's growing teams of security personnel.
Mao stayed in Yan'an throughout the war, where he was
sheltered from the direct force of the fighting. In the border
region to the east, terrible conflicts raged, with whole swaths
of countryside laid waste by the Japanese. The Communists
there had to wage a constant struggle to protect the recruited
peasantry from terrible reprisals. Other battles raged in the
Yangtze valley, where the Communist armies were almost
eliminated, not by the Japanese but by the Guomindang.
When American advisory groups came to Yan'an and began
to explore the possibilities of using the Communists more
109
systematically against the Japanese, Mao was able to charm a
new constituency with his earthy ways and his easy laugh. He
also knew how to lobby skillfully for supplies and aid, posing
his ‘democratic’ peasant society against the landlord
tyrannies of Chongqing. And always his reach and his
mandate spread.
By 1943 there was emerging, in Yan'an, what can for the
first time be called a ‘cult’ of Mao. It was in May that year
that Mao received two new titles that no one had held before:
he was to be 'chairman' of the Communist Central
Committee, and chairman of the Politburo at the same time.
China had now, in Mao, a true leader who ‘has stood the test
as a strong and great revolutionary,’ announced the
secretary-general of the Party. It could be seen that Mao
stood ‘as the center’ of all revolutionary history. In future,
the people of China ‘should arm themselves with Comrade
Mao Zedong's thought, and use Comrade Mao Zedong's
system to liquidate [erroneous] thought in the Party.’ Every
Party leader followed with similar praise - it was as if all
moderating voices had been stilled. The man who had most
opposed Mao at Zunyi now called him 'the helmsman of the
Chinese revolution.’ The new unanimity was matched by a
concerted verbal assault on Chiang Kai-shek and any
pretensions he might have to speak for China's people, a
critique guided and often written by Chen Boda. In late 1943,
an inner core of Mao's senior colleagues began to rewrite
Chinese Party history so that Mao would be forever at the
center. One by one the other rivals of the present and the
past were denigrated, their ‘incorrect lines' exposed, and
Mao's own wisdom pushed ever further back in time.
110
The long-delayed Seventh Party Congress met at last in
Yan'an, from late April to mid-June 1945, as the war was
moving to its close. Mao made a speech in which he spoke of
the future for China, though he did also express regret for
the violence to individual Party members, many of whom
had been killed or driven to suicide. But his triumph was
acknowledged in the new preamble to the Constitution of
the Communist Party, presented at the congress. Totally new
in all its senses and its language, it stated with absolute
directness: "The Chinese Communist Party takes Mao
Zedong's thought - the thought that unites Marxist-Leninist
theory and the practice of the Chinese revolution - as the
guide for all its work, and opposes all dogmatic or empiricist
deviations.’ Marxism was now sinified: the leader was the
sage.
111
112
8 TAKING OVER
IN THE MIDSUMMER OF 1945, no one in China guessed that
the war with Japan was just about to end. Because security in
Chongqing was so poor, and the Communists were
politically suspect, the Chinese were not told about the
American development of the atomic bomb. Besides which,
even the Americans could not predict the precise effect of
the atomic bombs they were to drop on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki on the sixth and ninth of August, nor how soon
after that the Japanese emperor would order his armies to lay
down their arms, as he did on the fourteenth. Nationalists
and Communists had contingency plans, of course: the
Nationalists planned for a slow military advance to the east
coast around Canton, spearheaded by their best American-
trained divisions, to be followed by a drive north up to
Shanghai and Nanjing (roughly parallel to the military
advances of 1926 and 1927 in the first United Front); the
Communists planned to deepen the extent of their sprawling
base areas in the north, speed up land redistribution and
mass mobilization, strengthen the Party organizations in the
113
northern provinces of Shandong and Hebei, and endeavor to
set up effective underground organizations in the major
cities. Again, neither side could guess that Manchuria -
where both Nationalists and Communists had weak or non-
existent military and political presences - would turn out to
be the key to ultimate victory. When the Soviet Russian
armies invaded Manchukuo on 8 August, it was in response
to promises they had made to Churchill and Roosevelt at
Yalta that they would enter the China theater war three
months after Germany's surrender - which had happened
on 8 May 1945. But neither Yah an nor Chongqing had been
informed of the Yalta agreements, again for reasons of long-
term strategic security.
It was a chance of geography as much as anything else that
helped the Communists at this stage. From their Yan'an base,
their Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei border region, and their strong
guerrilla units based in Shandong province, they could move
troops into Manchuria far faster than the Nationalists could,
and Mao decided to take the gamble and attempt to occupy
the huge region, so rich in mineral and forestry resources,
though sparsely inhabited compared with the heartland of
China proper. And as soon as the Communists learned of the
Japanese surrender, they began to do so. They were aided
considerably by the Soviet armed forces, who allowed the
Chinese to take over the gigantic Japanese stockpiles of arms
and ammunition in the key railroad city of Kalgan, just
south of the Great Wall in Chahar. In several Inner
Mongolian cities the Soviet troops first subdued and dis-
armed the Japanese, and then retreated, allowing the
Chinese to come in unopposed. In some areas the Russians
114
gave Japanese arms and vehicles directly to the Chinese, and
in at least one case, the Russians and Chinese fought side by
side to seize a key border city. Russian logistical help was
equally great, with as many as 100,000 Chinese Communist
troops and 50,000 political workers being ferried into
southern Manchuria from Shandong and northern Jiangsu
provinces, and these forces were able to seize and hold
several major cities.
From figures released later in Moscow it is possible to
calculate the arms the Russians made available to the
Communists at this time, and they totaled around 740,000
rifles, 18,000 machine guns, 800 aircraft, and 4,000 artillery
pieces. This was roughly the same as the entire total that the
Nationalist armies were able to seize from the Japanese inside
China proper. The Soviet help took place, also, in the face of
a massive air- and sea-lift of Nationalist troops to the north by
the United States, which was anxious to prevent a Communist
resurgence. Two divisions of US Marines, totaling 53,000 men
in all, were deployed on the north China coast by the end of
September 1945, and in addition Japanese troops were left
armed and in position at many points to prevent Communist
takeovers.
Mao showed considerable personal courage, and a certain
willingness to negotiate, by agreeing to accompany the
American ambassador, Patrick Hurley, on a trip to Chongqing
in late August, where he stayed until October. This must have
been Mao's first sight of Chiang Kai-shek since 1926 in
Canton, on the eve of the northern expedition. The two men
agreed to form a unified national army, though the date was
left unspecified, and Mao agreed to pull any remaining
115
Communist forces back from south China. The two sides also
moved to reconvene the joint deliberative body known as the
‘Political Consultative Conference,’ so as to discuss China's
long-range future.
But there was little substantive effort to halt the escalating
hostilities, and in a special report issued in December 1945,
Mao outlined a general strategy for the occupation of all of
Manchuria except the south during the year 1946, though he
noted it would be a ‘hard and bitter struggle.’ He thought
rural base areas should be established across Manchuria,
though away from major cities and communications routes,
to stop possible Guomindang attacks. Mass ideological work
would take place as a fundamental part of increasing the
Party's basic military strength. Land reform should be
moderate initially, to develop a wide basis of support -
limited to ‘struggles to settle accounts with traitors,’ and to
some campaigns ‘for rent-reduction and wage increases.
The Communists must at all costs bring ‘tangible material
benefits to the people in the northeast,’ who otherwise might
‘be taken in for a time by deceitful Guomindang propa-
ganda, and may even turn against our party' But Mao was
firm about keeping options open in the rest of China. When
General George Marshall came to China to speed negotia-
tions, on President Truman's orders, and when the Political
Consultative Conference did in fact meet that same year,
Mao warned his comrades not to let their hatred of the
Guomindang push them to reject all chance of peaceful
settlement: that would be ‘narrow closed-doorism.'
Fighting became fierce in Manchuria after the Marshall
peace talks broke down, and the Communists lost several
116
areas they had controlled in the southern part of the region;
but they held on firmly in the north and successfully carried
out their program of setting up isolated base areas with mass
support, pursuing moderate land reform, and strengthening
their military units. In north China, however, land reform in
the areas the Communists controlled became increasingly
violent, with mass killings of landlords, total seizures of their
land and property, and redistribution of land on an
egalitarian basis to all peasants and their family members.
This 'extremism' was widely debated by the Party leaders, but
not effectively checked. At the same time, any incidents that
could be used among the Chinese as a whole to strengthen
the negative perceptions of the Guomindang and their
American helpers were skillfully followed up by the pro-
Communist propaganda organs. The murder of one of
China's most celebrated poets, Wen Yiduo, a great writer and
scholar, was one such example. During the war, Wen had
lived in Kunming, at the associated university, and had been
a vocal critic of Chiang Kai-shek. His assassination was
nationally attributed to Guomindang secret agents, for Wen
had just given a passionate speech on behalf of a friend of his
- also murdered for political reasons - when he himself was
gunned down. And in Beijing, the rape by two American
servicemen of a Chinese student returning from a nighttime
movie, and clumsy government attempts to cover up the
incident, were exploited in newspapers and at huge student
rallies, to underline the Communist cause. The raped woman
was presented as representative of a victimized China,
helpless in the arms of aggressive capitalist and imperialist
forces.
117
Despite their difficulties in Manchuria, the Nationalist
armies were able to surround and eventually capture Yan'an
in March 1947. This was a major symbolic victory, but no
more than that, for most of the Communist forces, and all
their major leaders still in the region, withdrew in good time
and moved to new bases farther to the north. At this point,
Mao was with Jiang Qing and their daughter, Li Na, and
spent some of the time with his oldest son by Yang Kaihui,
Mao Anying, now aged twenty-four, who had returned from
the Soviet Union in 1946 and joined his father in Yan'an.
Anying was courting a young woman he met in Yan'an
whose father had been killed by warlords, as Anying's
mother had been. They married in 1949. Mao's second son,
Anqing, returned home, too, but to Har-bin, where he
arrived in 1947. He Zizhen also returned in 1947, with her
daughter, Li Min; she did not see Mao at this time, and later
made her own way to Shanghai.
It was from his northern retreat in Shaanxi, in September
1947, that Mao issued what came to be seen as one of his
most important pronouncements on military strategy. He
wrote in the context of the struggle in China as it was being
waged at that time, with the idea of tracing essential military
principles. He had already decided, within a week of
Hiroshima, that the atomic bomb was not the crucial factor
in ending the war with Japan that some people held it to be,
and in August 1946 he told an American journalist that he
considered the atomic bomb a 'paper tiger,’ looking more
terrible than in fact it was. In his September 1947 statement,
Mao announced that the Communist armies were now ready
to launch a ‘nationwide counteroffensive,' to seize the
118
initiative away from the Guomindang by moving from the
‘interior lines' of warfare to the ‘exterior lines.' Each time
they smashed their way into a former Guomindang area, the
Communists would set up bases there, from which in turn
they would launch new campaigns. Despite the need for
such base areas, destroying the enemy and capturing their
weapons always took precedence over ‘holding and seizing a
place.’ Mao's maxims were simple but by this time were the
fruit of long experience: 'Be sure to fight no battle unpre-
pared, fight no battle you are not sure of winning,’ and fight
relentlessly, giving the enemy no time to recoup. Use at once
all the arms and at least 80 to 90 percent of all captured
troops (though not their officers); take supplies from the
Guomindang-dominated areas, not from older Communist
base areas; carry out land reform in both old and newly
liberated areas.
The strategy was astonishingly successful. By the following
year Communist troops had totally routed the Guomindang
armies in Manchuria and were ready to move south. As
Guomindang military morale collapsed, accompanied by
civilian revulsion with the financial chaos caused by rampant
inflation, and the continued harsh repression of all dissent,
the Communists consolidated their gains and advanced with
incredible rapidity, entering Beijing in January 1949, Nanjing
in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August. With
Canton encircled, though not yet captured, on 1 October
1949) Mao and the senior leaders of the Communist Party
then in the region of Beijing climbed to a reviewing stand on
the Great Tiananmen gate, at the south of the Forbidden
City; there, in front of a small bank of microphones, as a few
119
planes of the Chinese air force circled overhead, Mao
announced the formation of the People's Republic of China.
Within weeks, Mao was planning a visit to the Soviet
Union so that he could confer in person with the man who in
so many ways had been his inspiration but also almost his
nemesis, Joseph Stalin. When Mao set off for Moscow in
December 1949, the Communists had won, but China was in
a catastrophic state. Many areas of the country had endured
close to forty years of almost incessant fighting or military
occupation of one kind or another - local warlords,
Communist guerrillas, Guomindang suppression forces,
Japanese occupying armies - and had no effective
administrative structures. The economy was in a shambles,
there was no stable or unified currency, inflation was out of
control, and communications networks were in disarray,
with rail tracks destroyed and rivers and harbors clogged
with sunken ships. Millions of people had been displaced by
the wars, and the Communists’ own armies were bloated by
hundreds of thousands of Nationalist soldiers who had been
admitted to their ranks with virtually no scrutiny. Schools
and universities had decaying buildings, few books, and
many ineffective teachers whose only qualification had been
political loyalty to the Guomindang. The hunt for Japanese
collaborators had soured personal relations, and the
carpetbagging nature of the Guomindang reoccupation of
the formerly Japanese-occupied cities had been accompanied
by corruption, looting, reprisals, and theft of assets.
On the borders, the situation was little better. To the far
west, in Xinjiang, the Muslim population had fought for
many years to gain autonomy from China, and the local
120
warlord had shifted erratically between overreliance on the
Soviet Union and uneasy alliance with the Guomindang. Mao
Zedong's last surviving sibling, his younger brother Mao
Zemin, had been executed there as part of these political
machinations, in 1943. Mongolia had become an independent
republic, but was totally dominated by the Soviet Union.
Tibet had also achieved considerable levels of autonomy in
the 1930s and 1940s - in his own youthful writings Mao had
regularly called for autonomy and self-rule for Mongols,
Tibetans, and Muslims - and the Chinese now had to decide
whether to launch an invasion or allow Tibetan independence
to grow, under the young and ambitious new Dalai Lama. The
French were re-strengthening their colonial empire in
Southeast Asia, and though both they and the British had
been forced to give up their concession areas in Shanghai
during 1943, the British had reasserted their control over
Hong Kong in 1945 - with Guomindang acquiescence - and
once more ruled it as a colony. Taiwan had been chosen by
Chiang Kai-shek as the temporary base for his administration
and his armies, pending his planned return to the mainland.
It was strongly defended, and it would take a massive air- and
seaborne assault to bring it into the Communist camp.
From the Russian transcripts of the personal talks between
Mao and Stalin, preserved in Moscow, we are able to see - free
of any possible Chinese re-editing - how the two world leaders
of the Communists related to each other. Stalin must have been
an intensely formidable figure to Mao - he was a founding
father of the Soviet Revolution, a former close associate of
Lenin's, the builder of the autocratic central power and police
apparatus of the Soviet Union, the guide and inspiration to his
121
people in the terrible years of the German invasion, and the
architect of postwar Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe. His
voluminous historical and analytical works were required
reading for all Communists and fellow travelers - Mao, among
countless other Chinese, had studied them in Yan'an, and tried
to come to grips with many of their arguments in an attempt to
gauge their relevance to China. To Stalin, Mao was an un-
known entity, tenacious but self-educated and undisciplined, a
pursuer of political lines that often ran in direct opposition to
stated Soviet policies. But Mao had won against great odds, and
that certainly commanded respect, as did the fact that he was
now in control of the world's second-largest - and most
populous - Communist state.
Their first meeting was on 16 December 1949. After open-
ing pleasantries, Mao observed to Stalin that what China
needed was ‘three to five years of peace,’ so as to ‘bring the
economy back to pre-war levels, and stabilize the country in
general.’ Given this priority for China, Mao ventured to ask
the Soviet leader what he thought of the chances for the
preservation of peace internationally. Stalin's reply was bland
and elliptical: China wanted peace, Japan was not ready for
another war, the United States was 'afraid' of further war, as
were the Europeans. Thus no one would fight the Chinese,
unless the North Korean Kim II Sung decided to invade
China.
On the question of the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945, which
Stalin had signed with Chiang Kai-shek, both Mao and
Stalin reached tacit agreement: the treaty would be allowed
to stand for now, so as not to give any grounds to the British
and Americans for modifying any of their own agreements
122
with the Soviet Union. But the Russians would withdraw
their troops from Port Arthur when the Chinese wished, and
also yield up control of the trans-Manchurian railways. On
other practical matters, Mao requested Soviet credits of 300
million U.S. dollars, as well as help developing domestic air
transport routes and developing a navy, to all of which Stalin
agreed. But when Mao asked for Soviet help in conquering
Taiwan - specifically, ‘volunteer pilots or secret military
detachments’ - Stalin stalled, offering ‘headquarters staff
and instructors’ instead, and suggesting that Mao send his
own propaganda forces to Taiwan to foment an insurrection.
On the question of Hong Kong, Stalin ingeniously and
deviously suggested that Mao encourage conflicts between
Guangdong province and the British colony, and then step
forward as 'mediator' to resolve them, thus presumably
increasing his international status as a statesman. Foreign
business enterprises in China and foreign-run schools, both
men agreed, should be carefully monitored. China should
speed up its extraction of rare minerals - Stalin specifically
mentioned tungsten and molybdenum - and build oil
pipelines. Mao again reiterated that he needed to know the
long-range prospects for peace if he was to undertake such
projects, since it was on the chances for peace that hinged
such key decisions as whether to concentrate on developing
China's coastal industry, or to move the industrial
development to sites inland.
The final part of their talk hinged on Maoist ideology, and
suggests that Stalin was fully aware of the claims to be a
theoretical leader that Mao had been steadily developing
since 1937. Stalin broached the subject abruptly by asking for
123
a list of Mao's works that Mao felt should be translated into
Russian. Mao, apparently unprepared for the question,
stalled. 'I am currently reviewing my works which were
published in various local publishing houses,’ he countered,
for they ‘contain a mass of errors and misrepresentations. I
plan to complete this review by spring of 1950.' Mao wanted
Soviet help, he continued, not only with the Russian
translation, but also ‘in editing the Chinese original.’ Now it
was Stalin's turn to be surprised: 'You need your works
edited?’ 'Yes,' Mao replied. 'It can be arranged,’ responded
Stalin, 'if indeed there is such a need.'
At this December 1949 meeting, Mao was the only
Chinese present except for his own interpreter, so he had
only his wits to rely on. At the subsequent meeting with
Stalin on 22 January 1950 - the only other one Mao ever had
- a small but high-powered Chinese delegation was with
Mao, which included Zhou Enlai and Chen Boda, Mao's
ideological assistant from Yan'an. Along with a stream of
polemical and historical works, Chen had just published a
book on Stalin's contributions to the Chinese Revolution.
Clearly his presence in Moscow was partly to reassure Mao
about ideological matters if the going got difficult, but also
perhaps to temper Mao's exuberance and make sure that he
did not go out on any limbs that might later upset his
powerful colleagues back in China. In the presence of such a
delegation, the discussion remained at a technical level,
about details of aid, its nature, and the interest to be paid.
The most frank exchange was over Tibet. Mao asked Stalin
directly to continue the loan of a Soviet air regiment to
China, which had already helped move more than 10,000
124
troops inside China; the regiment was needed, said Mao, to
help transport provisions to the Chinese troops ‘currently
preparing for an attack on Tibet.’ 'It's good that you are
preparing to attack. The Tibetans need to be subdued,’ was
Stalin's reply, though he added that he would have to talk the
matter over with his military experts.
While various negotiators stayed in Moscow to iron out
the details of the 'Sino-Soviet treaty of friendship,’ Mao
returned home to oversee the reconstruction of the country,
n his blunt way, Stalin had told Mao directly that the Soviets
assumed 'the Chinese economy was practically in ruins.
Mao had not disagreed. In 1950, the Communist leaders
confronted the immense task of planning a politically stable
and economically viable regime. Among the tactics used
were the crash-training of students and young Party
members in the principles of land reform, and their dispatch
across China to implement and oversee a program of land
redistribution; the establishment of a countrywide govern-
ment structure, subdivided by regions, each of which would
be supervised by a combine of Party ideologues, civil
bureaucrats, and military personnel; the development of a
new group of ministries in Beijing, with their staffs, to
oversee national defense and industrial development; the
state supervision and reconstruction of the school and
college system, along with a state-controlled system of news-
papers, journals, and radio broadcasts to induce ideological
consistency and obedience; a program of railroad repair and
expansion; the initial planning for state ownership of the
larger industrial plants, and the concomitant negotiations
with their domestic or foreign owners; and the disarming of
125
the civilian population and the hunting down of alleged
‘counterrevolutionaries.'
On other moral fronts the Party leadership moved with
comparable energy: brothels were forced to register, prior to
their phased closures, and the prostitutes were sent to special
training schools for 'reeducation'; drug addicts were also
ordered to register with the state authorities and to undergo
phased rehabilitation programs under state and family
supervision, while opium poppy-growing was checked and
distributors of drugs were imprisoned or executed. In terms
of the preservation of the old China, Mao made one fateful
decision. In late 1948, on the eve of the attack on Beijing,
Communist artillery commanders had asked for - and
obtained - lists of national treasures in the city, so that, if
possible, they would not be destroyed by artillery fire. This
seemed a good omen to preservationists and art historians,
one of whom presented to the Communist leadership a
master plan to create the world's most beautiful system of
parks, to run along the tops of the immense and beautiful
systems of old walls that encircled the city of Beijing. These
parks would be combined with the designation of old
Beijing as an industry-free zone, the construction of a new
industrial quarter farther out in the countryside, and the
building of an entirely new administrative city to house the
personnel of the swiftly growing Communist bureaucracy.
Mao vetoed the plan, suggesting with a sweep of his arms
across the old city that he would rather see it lined from end
to end with smokestacks as a symbol of China's economic
rejuvenation. So, over the following years, with the single
exception of the Forbidden City palace itself, Beijing's entire
126
system of magnificent walls and gates was destroyed to create
ring roads for the city; industry grew rapidly within the city
itself; and the area south of the Forbidden City - which
remained, as it had been under the Republic, a museum for
the people - was leveled to make a colossal square in which
a million people could assemble for political rallies, and
which was bordered by the huge block-like assembly halls
and bureaus of the new government.
Mao, along with the other senior Communist Party
leaders, moved into the old walled complex of buildings
adjacent to the southwest corner of the Forbidden City,
nestled around the ornamental South Lake and bordering
on the North Lake park where he had courted Yang Kaihui
thirty years before. In this sheltered and closely guarded
area, known as Zhongnanhai, he and Jiang Qing made their
home, establishing the first general semblance of a conven-
tional family life that Mao had known since perhaps 1923.
Here he had a chance to swim once again - a covered pool
was soon built, so he could pursue his favorite form of
exercise - and to read with his two daughters, Li Min and Li
Na, who were enrolled at a nearby school. His elder son,
Anying, was married and working in a Beijing machinery
plant, though he and his wife had not yet had children. The
younger son, Anqing, who had never been fully well since his
dark days in Shanghai, was sometimes hospitalized for
treatment, and had not yet married. Once a week, in the
evening, there was dancing, to the nostalgic sounds of old
Western foxtrots and waltzes, along with occasional film
shows. Mao got his books together in one place and read
widely.
127
With so many things of such importance to be done, it is
almost inconceivable to imagine that Mao wanted the
Korean War. He had specifically asked Stalin about the
chances for long-range peace at their December 1949 meet-
ings, and at the January meeting he urged Stalin to always
have ‘consultation regarding international concerns’ with
China. In retrospect, we can see that Stalin lied to Mao, for
Stalin was already secretly discussing the plans for an
invasion of the South with North Korea's leader, Kim II
Sung. And yet, we know that by March 1950 Mao was alerted
to the possibility of a North Korean attack on the South, and
that he told the North Korean ambassador in Beijing that he
encouraged such an attack, and that the Chinese might even
intervene to help North Korea. Mao's estimate of the
military situation was colored by his own experiences of
people's war, and the effectiveness of his lightly trained and
equipped guerrilla peasant forces against the Japanese. Mao,
who had already declared the atomic bomb a paper tiger,
had at first told the Koreans that he was sure the Americans
would not intervene. When they did so, in late June, right
after the North Korean attack, Mao shared with many of the
Communist commanders a sense that the Americans were
not politically motivated and were too tightly bound by their
military codes and regulations, so that 'their tactics are dull
and mechanical.’ Americans were also ‘afraid of dying’ and
were overreliant on firepower. By contrast, Chinese troops
were tactically flexible and politically conscious, needed little
equipment, ‘and are good at close combat, night battles,
mountainous assaults, and bayonet charges.’
Although contingency plans were made to send in large
128
numbers of Chinese troops under the guise of volunteers, all
through the summer and fall the Chinese troops did not
enter Korea. Mao was locked in an intense debate with his
senior colleagues and military commanders over which was
the best course to follow. His colleagues wanted guarantees
of Soviet air support and supplies of Soviet vehicles,
weapons, and ammunition; some of them also pointed out
that the war would wipe out China's economic reconstruc-
tion, and the Chinese people would grow disaffected. They
also pointed to the gross disparities in industrial potential.
The previous year China had produced 610,000 tons of iron
and steel; the United States produced 87.7 million tons in the
same period. Lin Biao, the victorious coordinating com-
mander of the Manchurian campaigns two years before,
pointed out that the narrow Korean peninsula was parti-
cularly bad ground for the Chinese to choose, since they had
neither air- nor seapower. Mao's argument that China had to
intervene, to secure its own borders as well as to save its
neighboring Communist ally, reinforced by his own
optimism concerning the Chinese soldiers’ potential, finally
triumphed over his advisers’ misgivings. After further delays
- this time by Stalin, who agreed to use Soviet planes only to
protect China's coastal defenses, not in Korean combat, and
who hesitated over the amount of supplies to be made
available - the Chinese 'volunteers' finally began to enter
Korea on the night of 19 October, under the command of the
veteran Communist general Peng Dehuai, maintaining total
radio silence, using no lights on their vehicles, and with
advance units dressed in the uniforms of North Korean
troops.
129
An early casualty of the war was Mao's recently married
oldest son, Mao Anying, age twenty-eight. Unlike most of
the Chinese combat troops, he was indeed a ‘volunteer,'
whose service in Korea Mao had agreed to. Anying had
requested an infantry command position, but fearing for the
young man's safety, General Peng Dehaui assigned him to
headquarters, as staff officer and Russian interpreter. Mao
Anying's position was hit by a US/UN incendiary bomb
during an attack on 24 November 1950, and he was killed. At
first no one dared to tell his father, and his body was buried
in North Korea like any other Chinese casualty. When Mao
was finally told of his son's death by Peng Dehuai in person,
he agreed to let the body remain in Korean soil, as an
example of duty to the Chinese people. His two recorded
public pronouncements on his loss were brief: 'In war there
must be sacrifice. Without sacrifice there will be no victory.
There are no parents in the world who do not treasure their
children.’ And again, "We understand the hows and whys of
these things. There are so many common folk whose
children have shed their blood and were sacrificed for the
sake of the revolution.’
For the whole early part of the war, while the fighting was
heaviest, Mao followed the campaigns with meticulous
attention, intervening countless times with his own orders
or tactical suggestions. But at the same time, with his acute
sense of effective propaganda, he saw the advantages of the
war as a political rallying cry inside China itself. Aware for so
many years of the intense emotional and political fervor that
could be generated among workers, students, or peasants by
skillfully orchestrated campaigns, Mao and the Chinese
130
propaganda organs spread the word through massive ‘Aid
Korea, Resist America’ campaigns. The Chinese people were
called upon to sacrifice more, to impose greater vigilance on
themselves and their communities, to pledge themselves in
deeper loyalty to the Communist Party. As the Korean War
entered a protracted stalemate period that lasted until 1953,
the domestic campaigns were extended to include all-out
hunts for domestic counterrevolutionaries and foreign spies,
and they began to target capitalists or corrupt bureaucrats.
Mao himself, as instigator and manipulator of the war on
Korean soil, slowly began to assume the same total roles in
his supervision of the Chinese people. Though such
campaigns were focused on individuals, they also had an
abstracted quality, a certain tokenism and quota-meeting
aspect that promised harmony for the majority if the correct
percentage of victims could be found. In such an aura of fear,
it was hard to keep one's sense of moral balance. Mao was
still surrounded by powerful, intelligent, and experienced
revolutionary colleagues, but it was becoming ever harder
for them to cut through the protective coating with which he
was encasing his inner, visionary worlds.
131
132
9 THE ULTIMATE VISION
AS SOON AS the Korean War ended with the Treaty of 1953 -
which left the dividing lines between the two halves of the
country close to where they had been before the war began -
China embarked on an ambitious program of coordinated
national reconstruction. The Communist leaders modeled
their scenario along the lines of the Soviet Union's Five-Year
Plans, with the goal of giving maximum growth to industrial
development, especially steel production and mining, with
secondary growth planned for consumer goods and the
agricultural sector. Compulsory purchases of grain from
peasants at below market price would help fuel the industrial
growth, and at the same time enable the government to
subsidize the food prices in the larger cities to prevent major
unrest there. Workers in state-controlled industries had
what was termed an ‘iron rice bowl': they were almost never
fired, not even for poor performance or tardiness, and the
state provided a massive safety net for them through cheap
subsidized housing, free medical care, and access to schools.
Thus, though incomes were low, the standard of living was
133
adequate for most workers, and their ‘work unit' became the
source of their social and economic identity.
Mao knew the countryside better than he knew the cities,
and hence it is not surprising that peasants had a more
varied range of economic options than urban workers,
depending on their wealth before 1949 and on the amount of
land they might have received through land redistribution.
Ever since the Jiangxi Soviet days, but especially since the
mass-mobilization periods of World War II, Maoist ideology
had made ‘class labeling’ a central factor in peasants’ lives. To
be labeled a rich peasant or landlord was to face the risk of
losing everything, including all one's savings and even one's
life. To be labeled a middle peasant was of marginal danger,
and might well subject one to mass criticism and partial
confiscation of property. To be classified as a poor peasant or
landless laborer was the safest. The exact way that these
labels were applied, and the precise amount of land or other
property, tools, and draft animals that each individual or
family controlled were drawn up in exhaustive
investigations, a prototype of which had been the kinds of
investigations carried out by Mao in Hunan during 1926, in
Jinggangshan in 1928, and in Xunwu in 1930. Facing such
investigations, wealthy peasants often sought to ‘lower' their
class status by killing off livestock or destroying stored grain,
and by selling off cheaply, or even giving away, surplus land.
There was much settling of old scores in this process, along
with great social violence, often exacerbated by struggles
between formerly married couples once the Communists’
liberal divorce laws became effective in 1950.
Sometimes the inequities were patent, as with the case of
134
poor peasants who had joined in various types of co-
operative organizations at the urging of the Party during the
civil war period, and had done well enough out of the new
socialist organization to be later classified as middle
peasants. In the early 1950s, great areas of the countryside
were still desperately poor, and private ownership of land,
even after redistribution, was still the norm. The preferred
form of socialism was through low-level producers’ co-
operatives, in which some labor, land, and draft animals
would be pooled, and peasants would withdraw in income
amounts commensurate with their original input. An
effective registration system tied peasants to the area where
they worked the land, transposing the former rural village
organizations into ‘work units.' In an attempt to prevent a
flood of migrant laborers from the poorer areas of country-
side into the cities, the Communist Party only in exceptional
circumstances granted permission to travel away from the
work unit. Under this system many hardworking peasants
indubitably got richer, while others were pushed to the
margins of subsistence.
As the recognized leader of the new China, presiding over
close to 600 million people and an immense stratified
bureaucracy, Mao was forced to spend much of his energies
on national planning. Yet at the same time, from the
preserved files of Mao's correspondence in the early 1950s it
is possible to see how news reached him across space and
decades from three groups of people that he had known at a
much more intimate level: the family of his previous wife,
Yang Kaihui; the residents of his native village of Shaoshan
or the adjacent market town of Xiangtan; and those who
135
taught Mao or studied with him in Changsha. These letters
gave him an intimate view of how the revolution was affect-
ing individuals he knew well, and enabled him to place the
larger national criteria in a smaller-scale series of contexts.
The Yang family were quickest off the mark. The first of
their letters reached Mao just a week after he formally
announced, from his rostrum atop ‘Tiananmen, the
formation of the People's Republic of China. It came from
Yang Kaihui's brother, Yang Kaizhi. Kaizhi asked permission
to come to the capital with some of his relatives. His mother
- Mao's previous mother-in-law - was not well, and she
needed assistance. Kaizhi also wanted a job. In a frank but
courteous reply, Mao told his brother-in-law not to come to
the capital and not to put Mao 'on the spot' by requesting
special favors. Let the Hunan provincial committee of the
Communist Party find him appropriate employment.
But the mere fact that Mao replied at all gave the Yang
family recipients prestige and a major lift in their communi-
ties. By the following April, Yang Kaizhi could report that he
was working for the provincial government of Hunan. An
uncle of Yang Kaihui's also wrote to Mao and received a
courteous if guarded reply. Mao was more forthcoming
when he got a letter from Li Shuyi, Yang Kaihui's closest girl-
hood friend in the Fuxiang girls’ school of Changsha. Li
Shuyi's husband, a close boyhood friend of Mao's, had been
shot by the same warlord who killed Yang Kaihui, giving the
two surviving spouses an unusual kind of bond from the old
days, which they relived by sharing poems. Li Shuyi desired
to come to Beijing so that she could ‘study Marxism -
Leninism with greater seriousness.’ Mao dissuaded her from
136
coming, but she later wrote again, asking Mao to help her get
a job at the Beijing Literature and History Museum. Mao
demurred, but offered to help her with some of the money
he made from his publishing income. Presumably he was
being well paid for his ‘Selected Works.
A different voice from the intimate past was that of the
nanny, Chen Yuying, whom Mao and Yang Kaihui had hired
to look after their three children in the late 1920s. Writing on
18 December 1951, she reminded Mao of her loyalty to his
children and requested permission to come and visit him.
He gently deflected her, using ‘thrift’ as his reason. She
should stay in Changsha and work there, but if she needed
assistance, Mao would try to see that she received it. Other
letters show that Mao was sending, through his personal
secretary, two payments every year to the Yang family as a
‘subsidy’ The payments were large, each one being at least
ten times more than a well-off peasant's annual income at
that time. Mao also arranged for visits to the Yang family
graves, and for special celebrations in honor of Yang Kaihui's
mother, who was still alive in the early 1950s.
Other correspondents, evoking Mao's past, had stranger
tales to tell, One classmate of Mao's from the Changsha
normal school had gone on to become an assemblyman
under the Beijing militarists and later a member of the
Guomindang. Now he was in financial straits. Mao arranged
for him to be given some help. Another schoolmate of Mao's
from an even earlier time, when they attended the
Xiangxiang primary school, reported that his two sons had
been shot as counterrevolutionaries during the land reform
of 1952. Because of his children's crimes, the father was put
137
under surveillance for a year and forbidden membership in
the local peasant association. His only crime was to have
worked for the Guomindang for five months in 1928. He now
claimed poor-peasant status. Mao suggested he continue to
reform and ‘listen to the cadres.
Pushing Mao's memories back to the fall of the Qing
dynasty, two of Mao's Changsha normal-school teachers
wrote, one a former principal and the other a history
instructor. Now in their seventies, both were in dire financial
need. They also reported that Mao's revered classical
literature teacher, 'Yuan the Beard,’ had died, leaving his
seventy-year-old widow starving. Mao suggested a small
subsidy from local Party funds for all three. The daughter-
in-law of Mao's math teacher from the same school (he had
hated mathematics) wrote, trying to get three (of her eight)
children into a school for Communist cadre relatives. Mao
was not sure it would be possible, but he gave her some
names to try and said she could use his reply letter to vouch
for her. A spate of other letters came from army men he
knew in 1911, Shaoshan and Xiangtan residents, staff of the
1919 magazine New Hunan, and members of the New
People's Study Society, of which Mao had been the diligent
secretary in 1920. Some of these pointed out grave local
abuses in the way the Party was now operating, especially in
grain requisitioning and bandit suppression.
But such personal village and family voices tailed off as
Mao's obligations increased. By late 1953, when he celebrated
his sixtieth birthday, Mao was not only chairman of the
Communist Party, which now had more than five million
members, and chairman of the military commission that
138
controlled the armed forces, he was also chairman of the
People's Republic of China itself. In addition to the maze of
the ministries in Beijing - there were already thirty-five, and
the number was soon to double - the Party had its own
organization in every province and rural township, while the
military were subdivided into regional zones, each of which
had to integrate its operations with the administrative and
Party structures. The small Standing Committee of the
Politburo, over which Mao presided, thus had to supervise
the ultimate integration of all these subunits. With all these
demands on Mao's time, the growing array of private secre-
taries and bureaucrats around him began to process and sort
his letters for him, and those that criticized the government
or the Party were often returned - without Mao's knowledge
- to the very local leaders who were being criticized.
Furthermore, the end of the Korean War and Stalin's death
in 1953 left Mao in a virtually unchallengeable position
within the world Communist pantheon. Mao's 'thought' was
specified as being the inspiration for the country's economic
growth and political energies. Yet at the same time Mao
himself often felt isolated from events, as expert organizers
like Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi coordinated the multifaceted
layers of foreign and economic policy.
In 1953 and 1954 Mao used his personal prestige to purge
two of the formerly most powerful Party political bosses, one
m Manchuria and one in Shanghai, whom he suspected of
being disloyal to his overall revolutionary goals. In 1955, he
began to call for sharper levels of radical reorganization in
the countryside and for the formation of larger cooperative
units, in which more of the land would be worked in
139
common by peasants and the use of private plots and
informal markets would be strictly limited. This so-called
Little Leap was intended to generate more income for the
industrial sector, as well as to tighten the revolutionary
fervor of the people. The cooperative idea was paralleled by
the mass mobilizations of tens of thousands (sometimes
hundreds of thousands) of rural workers to undertake major
projects such as reservoir building or digging canals and
terracing hillsides. Such projects were customarily hailed in
the state-controlled press as proof of the ‘higher stage’ of
socialist organization, and if they were not given intensive
coverage Mao suspected disloyalty on the part of the
editorial staff.
These huge ventures were either orchestrated by Mao in
person or implemented by local Party leaders who sought
thus to ingratiate themselves with the ‘chairman,’ as Mao
was now generally addressed. But many senior leaders in the
Party found these methods ideologically distasteful and
economically unsound. They felt that the bulk of rural
wealth was generated by the ablest and hardest-working rich
peasants, who therefore should be encouraged to increase
their holdings and their crop harvests, so that the state could
extract the surplus for the industrial sector. In a forceful
speech of July 1955, Mao struck back at such theorists: 'An
upsurge in the new, Socialist mass movement is imminent
throughout the countryside. But some of our comrades,
tottering along like a woman with bound feet, are complain-
ing all the time, "You're going too fast, much too fast.’ ' Of
course there were minor problems, said Mao: sometimes
poor peasants were kept out of co-ops despite their poverty;
140
sometimes middle peasants were forced into cooperatives
against their interests. Also, though there were around
650,000 cooperatives in China, containing a total of
16,900,000 peasants, they averaged out at only about twenty-
six households in each, and tended to be bunched in north
China. Unless they could be consolidated in larger units and
spread more widely, rapid growth was out of the question.
This expanding co-op movement, Mao believed, had two
distinct kinds of problems. One was overoptimism, which
caused cadres and peasants to be ‘dizzy with success.’ This
could be considered a ‘leftist deviation.’ The other was to be
‘scared of success’ and eager to cut back the movement. That
was a ‘rightist deviation,’ and was currently the main
problem.
The phrase 'dizzy with success' in such an agrarian con-
text was drawn from the works of Stalin, as Mao's listeners
would have known well. It referred to the early stages of
Soviet collectivization, when many officials moved too fast,
alienating millions of farmers and causing widespread
suffering. Yes, said Mao, there had been 'impetuosity and
rashness' in the Soviet Union, but 'on no account should we
allow these comrades to use the Soviet experience as a cover
for their idea of moving at a snail's pace.’ In many rural areas
in the Soviet Union there had been inadequate preparatory
work, and the peasants were not at a high level of political
consciousness. China was already rectifying both areas, and
Mao intended the full plan to implement ‘socialist co-
operative agriculture’ to take eighteen years in all, from the
founding of the People's Republic in 1949 to the end of the
Third Five-Year Plan, in 1967-8.
141
Mao had already, in fact, decided to move considerably
faster than that, but before he did so, he had to woo over
foot-draggers in the Party, and also be sure of the
enthusiastic support of the writers and intellectuals who
fueled the Party's propaganda campaigns and educational
work. The situation was complicated by Nikita Khrushchev,
First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, whose
totally unexpected denunciation of Stalin in 1956, in a speech
that not only denigrated the Soviet Union's core leader, in
Mao's eyes, but also by implication criticized Mao himself,
for his 'cult of personality’ was by this time well orchestrated
and perfectly obvious to any informed outside observers.
Ever since the Yan'an days, Mao had been determined to
play a leading role as a cultural critic and arbiter. After 1949,
Mao often intervened in discussions on film, literature, and
philosophy to emphasize the need for vigilance in rooting
out negative aspects of the old society, and he supported
ordinary people, whom he sardonically referred to as 'the
nobodies,' whenever they had the courage to attack well-
known artistic works in the name of revolutionary purity.
In late 1956 and early 1957 these various tracks converged
in Mao's mind: the ability of the nobodies of China to trans-
form their society, the obstructionism of the Communist
Party's own new establishment, the possibilities of vast
economic strides forward if those with 'bound feet’ would
get out of the way, the need to deepen the channels of
criticism and the flow of information and to keep the
brightest flames of socialism burning. All of these played a
part both in the outpouring of criticism during the middle
of 1957, and the launching of the Great Leap Forward in
142
industry and agriculture later that year.
A long text by Mao gives a sense of his thinking in
February 1957. These are the rough notes to an informal
four-hour speech that Mao gave in a rather formal setting -
that of the Supreme State Conference, attended by leaders of
the bureaucracy, the cultural and propaganda spheres, and
selected non-Party intellectuals.
The topic of the speech was ‘contradictions,’ within
Chinese society and within the Party, and this evoked the
theme that Mao had first broached in his earliest attempts to
have himself seen as an expert in Marxist dialectical
materialism back in 1937. ‘Contradictions,’ to Mao, were of
two kinds, those between 'the enemy and ourselves,’ which
were to be called ‘antagonistic,’ and those ‘among the
people,’ which were 'non-antagonistic' The 'enemy,' in the
Chinese context, would include landlords, ‘imperialist
elements’ (presumably those with foreign connections), and
the Chinese refugees in Taiwan. Such people were correctly
deprived of their civil rights under people's dictatorship and
democratic centralism. This was what constituted Chinese
democracy: it was ‘democracy with leadership,’ or ‘class
freedom,' more genuine in China than the bourgeois ‘facade’
of parliamentary freedom in the West. But though the logic
of class war would suggest that the Chinese national
bourgeoisie would also be the enemy of the Chinese working
class, that was not in fact so. 'Antagonistic contradictions, if
properly handled, can become unantagonistic,’ and that was
just what happened in China due to the joint struggle against
foreign imperialism. Care was needed in defining enemies
and working out when to exercise compassion, or to decide
143
when transformation was completed. 'The American moon
and the Chinese moon are the same moon,' noted Mao; the
American moon was not better. In other words, each society
looks up to the sky from its own class vantage point.
Mao had decided that the process of unity-criticism-unity
should be seen as the correct way to resolve contradictions
among the people or contradictions within the Communist
Party itself. Such a method was better than the ‘ruthless
struggle and merciless blows’ approach used by Stalin, for Mao
now felt that when Stalin was in power, he often 'did things
badly’ The Seventh Party Congress of 1945 was an example of
the correct process at work. Looking at the Chinese counter-
revolutionaries who had been killed - according to Mao, some
700,000 ‘local bullies and evil gentry’ between 1950 and 1952 -
one saw there were no errors. All of them deserved to die. But
when Hong Kong papers claimed twenty million had died they
were obviously wide of the mark. 'How could we possibly kill
twenty million people?’ Mao asked.
Throughout his talk, Mao inserted the kinds of statistics
that he had loved to gather in his youth. Though impression-
istic, they reveal the sense he had of China's continuing
problems: the dissatisfaction rate of peasants with the co-ops
was 2 to 5 percent; households lacking adequate food
constituted 10 to 15 percent of the population; 40 percent of
children in China had no schools to go to; state grain
procurement was around 22 percent of the total produced;
7,000 students in twenty-nine schools demonstrated against
the government during 1956; labor unions launched at least
fifty strikes, some involving over a thousand workers. In
such circumstances, why not ‘let a hundred flowers bloom,
144
and a hundred schools of thought contend’? That would be
an excellent aid to socialist transformation. As for the
leaders, being misunderstood in one's own time was no bad
thing, said Mao: it had happened to Jesus and to Confucius,
to Sakyamuni Buddha and to Charles Darwin, to Martin
Luther and to Galileo.
This curious speech did indeed encourage intellectuals
and critics to speak out with great frankness that summer in
the spirit of 'a hundred flowers,’ just as the seeds Mao had
sown in terms of adventurousness in agricultural policy were
to germinate later in the year into the Great Leap Forward.
Each was followed - as indeed dialectical thinking might
have forewarned Mao - by its total negation. The intel-
lectuals who spoke out boldly against abuses in the Party
bureaucracy, against pointless constraints on creativity, and
even against the relevance of Marxism itself to China's needs
became themselves the victims of a colossal countercritical
campaign. Known as the ‘antirightist campaign’ and
orchestrated in its details by the newly appointed secretary-
general of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, this harsh
counteroffensive destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives,
leading those found guilty to lose their Party posts and
writers' jobs, and to be sent to remote rural areas or to
‘reform themselves through labor' in some form of deten-
tion center. In many cases they were not rehabilitated until
the 1970s or later. The cost to China's scientific and economic
establishment was as high as it was to the creative arts,
literature, and education generally. It was often foreign-
educated scholars with advanced intellectual skills who had
been lulled into speaking out the loudest, and their attempt
145
to truly make a hundred flowers bloom led to their being
condemned as ‘poisonous weeds' for life.
Though infinitely more complex in its origins than the
Hundred Flowers Movement, and unfolding on a far greater
scale across the whole of China, the Great Leap Forward
ended in catastrophe and famine, a famine that between
i960 and 1961 cost at least 20 million lives. The Great Leap,
in Mao's mind, would combine the imperatives of large-scale
cooperative agriculture with a close-to-utopian vision of the
ending of distinctions between occupations, sexes, ages, and
levels of education. By compressing the hundreds of
thousands of existing cooperatives - the number had passed
700,000 by late 1957 - into around 20,000 giant communes,
with all land owned by the state and worked in common,
Mao believed that China as a whole would reap the immense
benefits of scale and of flexibility. Communal kitchens and
laundries would release women from chores to perform
more constructive agricultural tasks; rural laborers would
learn to build backyard steel furnaces and supplement
China's iron and steel production in the urban factories;
local militia would increase the combat effectiveness of the
People's Liberation Army by allowing them to concentrate
on high-priority military matters; communal schools would
end the literacy gap; barefoot doctors would bring health
care within the reach of every peasant; and collections of
people's poems would swell the national cultural heritage.
An organizational ladder, moving up from the individual
and family to the work team, the team to the production
brigade, and the brigade to the commune and thence to the
county and provincial Party secretaries, would speed the
146
flow of orders from the top to the bottom of society and
bring the Party's message effortlessly to all.
It was in the summer of 1958, at the seaside resort of
Beidaihe - where the Communist leaders held an annual
summer retreat in the beachside homes built long ago by the
foreign imperialists - that Mao's euphoria reached its
pinnacle. The occasion was an enlarged meeting of the
Politburo, the inner core of China's leaders, and Mao's
remarks were scattered in separate speeches spread out over
two weeks. In these musings, Mao shared with his senior
colleagues a hope for China's future that had little contact
with current reality. Referring to the Great Leap as a con-
tinuation of the previous blooming and contending among
the Hundred Flowers, Mao professed to see in it the promise
of a China without hunger in which the Chinese themselves
would no longer pay for food and the surplus would be given
away free to the poorer people elsewhere in the world. An
extra billion or so added to China's population would make
no difference. Deep plowing, close planting, reforestation,
and the economies of scale made possible by enthusiastic
massed labor power would produce this surplus, in which a
third of China's land would lie fallow every year. The sprouts
of Communism were already present, said Mao. Hard work
and discipline would bring better health to everyone, just as
Mao had experienced it in the cave dwellings during the civil
war, and physicians would have nothing left to do except
research. Mental labor would fuse with manual labor, and
education would be merged with production. Nobody would
need to put on airs - clothes would be indistinguishable in
cut and texture, and would be as free as food. Differentiated
147
wage systems would vanish, as would any need for private
housing. Morality would improve so much in the new society
that no supervision would be required, and all would have
the inspired and selfless spirit that had been such a force in
the past revolution, when 'people died without asking any-
thing in return.’ The whole of China would be a lush and
landscaped park so that no one would even need to travel
anymore to see the sights.
Whatever the listeners thought, none of them raised
voices in protest, and the Great Leap, with all its wild visions,
became the policy of the nation in late 1958 and well into
1959. The peasants and workers performed prodigies of
labor, working with almost no respite in the fields. Mao
suggested the peasants might take off two days in every
month to avoid overwork; industrial workers should sleep at
their work sites, next to their machines, to save time wasted
in commuting. All this was possible, as Mao had said,
because the Chinese ‘people are very disciplined; this has
impressed me profoundly. During my visit to Tianjin, tens of
thousands of people gathered around me, but at a single
wave of my hand everybody dispersed.’ Now, almost at a
single wave of his hand, they had come together again. The
future seemed to be Mao's for the taking.
148
10 BLEAK HARVEST
BOTH THE HUNDRED FLOWERS movement and the launching
of the Great Leap show Mao more and more divorced from
any true reality check. His scientific speculations, philos-
ophical musings, and economic projections - when
unmediated and unpolished by his own private secretaries
and the outlying teams of party ideologues - seem in the raw
to be extremely simple, if not simpleminded. And he himself
seemed to care less and less for the consequences that might
spring from his own erratic utterances.
For the strange fact was that Mao had created a world in
which things could hardly be otherwise. With the world
outside China, Mao had virtually no contact. In his con-
versations with Stalin in December 1949 and January 1950
there had been some fairly sharp exchanges, and there is no
doubt that the Soviet leader had the domestic power and
global prestige in the Communist movement to say whatever
he liked to Mao. But Stalin died in 1953, and Mao made only
one more trip to the Soviet Union, in late 1957. That was a
formal occasion, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the
149
Bolshevik Revolution, and Mao's speeches gave nothing
away about his true feelings. Mao was not close to
Khrushchev, who had angered him by giving the Chinese no
warning before his denunciations of Stalin; and though Mao
was critical of Stalin, too, in several of his off-the-cuff talks
to Chinese cadres, his relations with Khrushchev were never
cordial, and the two countries drifted steadily apart until
their cultural and political ties were totally severed in i960.
Mao saw numerous other foreign leaders in Beijing, but the
meetings were generally shrouded in protocol, and visitors
were unlikely to point out his shortcomings. Mao had never
been to any foreign country except the Soviet Union, and he
never visited any other place outside China until he died. As he
had said in his 1958 Beidaihe speech, 'Why tour the four
continents,’ when China itself contains so much? Many of
Mao's senior Communist colleagues had lived and studied
abroad for considerable periods, and spoke one or more
foreign languages. Mao, by the late 1950s, seems to have given
up on the study of Russian, though his surviving son, Anqing,
and his eldest daughter, Li Min, because of the war years they
spent in the Soviet Union, were as at home in Russian as in
Chinese. Though he continued to struggle away at English
lessons, Mao found them tiring and would use minor illnesses
as an excuse to give up on his English reading. When he wanted
to read Lenin - as he did with What Is to Be Done, at the time
of the antirightist campaign - he specifically asked his secretary
to get him a Chinese version, not one in Russian or English.
Personal observation of social conditions was also a
natural way to gather information about China, and as a
youth Mao had excelled at this, compiling careful notes on
150
the minutest gradations of economic strata and drawing bold
conclusions from closely watched moments of violence and
self-assertion by the poor. In the first few years after 1949 he
enjoyed wandering around in the Chinese countryside and
revisiting his home province of Hunan. The informal letters
people sent from Shaoshan and Xiangtan in the earlier 1950s
showed they were not yet overawed by their famous native
son, and on the various swims Mao made in the Xiang River
of Hunan, or the Yangtze just to the north, he seems to have
lad time for relaxed talks with villagers and a chance to get at
east a nodding acquaintance with their concerns. But from
the late 1950s onward, Mao traveled in his specially equipped
rain, with personal attendants and bodyguards always
>resent, which further increased his isolation from the
outside world. In the spring of 1956, when villagers living on
the Xiang River near Changsha came to Mao with their
problems, he told them to speak to the Hunan Communist
cadres. At the same time he wrote a poem in classical meter
extolling the joys of floating free with the current.
In normal circumstances, a further source of information
for Mao about the true situation might have been his current
wife, Jiang Qing. She was twenty years younger than Mao,
and with her Shandong upbringing and early adulthood
acting in films and theater in Shanghai, in addition to her
long years in Yan'an and forced marches under extreme
danger during the civil war period, she was certainly not
without varied experience. But whereas in the early 1950s
Mao would often mention her well-being casually in letters
to friends, implying a reasonable level of intimacy, by 1956
the couple were growing estranged, though both were still
151
living in Zhongnanhai. That same year Jiang Qing went to
the Soviet Union for treatment of cervical cancer; according
to later reminiscences by her Soviet physician, she told him
that she and Mao were no longer sleeping together.
It may have been this ending of his third long personal and
sexual relationship that turned Mao's thoughts back so
incessantly to Yang Kaihui. In January 1958, a poem that Mao
had written the previous year in memory of his former wife
- dead now for almost twenty-eight years - was published in
People's Daily. Mao wrote it in response to a poem his friend
Li Shuyi sent him about the death of her husband in a battle
with the Guomindang in 1932, and both poems, especially
his, were to receive over the next few months an outpouring
of effusive critical acclaim in Chinese literary magazines.
Mao's is indeed a moving poem, especially the second stanza:
Chang E in her loneliness
Spreads her billowing sleeves,
As through the vast emptiness of space
She dances for these virtuous souls.
Suddenly word comes that down on Earth,
The Tiger has been subdued.
And the tears that they shed
Fall like a torrent of rain.
According to Chinese legend, familiar to Mao's readers,
Chang E stole the elixir of immortality from her husband and
fled to the moon with it. But once there, she had no one to
share her gift of immortality with and found herself living in
the most intense loneliness. After receiving the poem from Li
152
Shuyi - in answer to which he penned his own - Mao asked
her to visit Yang Kaihui's grave at her birthplace in Banchang,
outside Changsha, on his behalf. (He could, of course, have
gone himself, but there is no record that he did.)
Other family members probably could give little frank
advice to their country's chairman. His companion from the
jinggangshan and Jiangxi Soviet days, He Zizhen, was living
on her own in Shanghai, and had had a breakdown in 1954
(according to one source, after hearing a broadcast made by
Mao over the radio). Mao offered to pay for her neurologist
from his publishing royalties, but his revolutionary comrade
Chen Yi, then Shanghai's mayor, said that he would pay out
of city funds. Similarly, it would have been impossible for
Mao's children to voice unease over the political direction he
was taking, though they were in touch with him in Beijing.
The one surviving child of Mao and He, their daughter, Li
Min, lived with Mao in Zhongnanhai and was attending
Beijing Teachers College - she had already graduated from
the attached girls' secondary school. Li Na, Mao's daughter
with Jiang Qing, was also living in Zhongnanhai and
attending school. (She entered Beijing University as a history
major in 1961 and graduated in 1965.) Anqing, the surviving
son from the marriage to Yang Kaihui, was hospitalized
much of the time, and had not yet married. (In 1962 he wed
the half sister of his late brother's widow.) Mao's brothers,
his sisters, and his parents were all long since dead.
A further source of information for Mao on current needs
and politics might have been the press or the radio, but these
were controlled and administered by the Communist Party,
and all items included there had undergone careful prior
153
scrutiny for their political correctness. Such battles as raged
in the press were between competing factions outside the
press arena, who sought maximum publicity for their own
point of view. Being an editor was both a risky and a high-
profile job, bringing handsome perks but the promise of a
speedy fall if one gauged the political currents wrongly. One
can see such pitfalls clearly in the relationship between Mao
and Deng Tuo, who served as the editor of the official
Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, in the crucial
early years of the People's Republic, from the fall of 1949
until February 1959.
Deng Tuo's education, background, and political experi-
ence would have made him an invaluable source of advice to
Mao, had such a relationship been possible within the
existing Party environment of the time. Deng Tuo was the
son of a Qing official and received an intensive education in
both classical Chinese scholarship - including art connois-
seurship and calligraphy - and in the new Western subjects
of study. Drawn to the radical currents of the day, he joined
the Communist Party in 1930, while a student in Shanghai.
When the Japanese routed the Chinese armies in late 1937,
Deng Tuo made his way north to the Communist base area
adjacent to Yan'an known as the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei
region. Once there, he showed immense courage and ability
in running a series of clandestine Communist newspapers,
and in keeping a secret radio station on the air. Fluent in
English, Deng Tuo frequently served as interpreter and
publicist for Western journalists, doctors, or liaison
personnel of various kinds, and his charm, immense
learning, and dedication to the revolution deeply impressed
154
his own superiors in the Party. No one can have been
surprised when Deng Tuo was named editor of People’s Daily
once the Communists came to power.
Deng obviously was uneasy over many of Mao's new
policies, but as editor of the most authoritative public voice of
the Party he could not control the content and ideological slant
of what he published, nor could he express his worries openly.
The only way he could express his views was to delay putting
items in the newspaper, to juggle the placement of stories
inside the paper, or to hint at hidden truths by the
juxtapositions of items. Deng survived his early years as editor
well, but the events of the Hundred Flowers and the Great Leap
stretched his tact and evasiveness to the breaking point. The
first colossal dilemma Deng faced as editor was how to handle
criticism from senior Party members opposed to Mao on the
agricultural and industrial policies of the 'Little Leap.’ In the
summer of 1956, Deng printed the slogan announced by no less
a dignitary than the finance minister himself that China should
‘oppose impetuosity and adventurism.' He followed this up
with an editorial - drafted by him, revised by the director of the
Communist Central Committee's propaganda department,
and reviewed by the senior Politburo member, Liu Shaoqi, in
person - in which he repeated the call to 'oppose impetuosity'
and added that 'in our actual work we should carefully and on
the basis of facts consider what can be done more and more
fast, and what cannot be done more and more fast.'
For polemic, the words seemed muted enough, but the
whole thrust against Mao's thinking was clear. Mao's reac-
tion illustrated his own growing jumpiness about any
challenges to his own ideological authority: he scrawled
155
across his own copy of the editorial the three characters bu
kan le, meaning literally ‘not read,’ though an alternative
translation would be something like 'not to read,’ or ‘not
worth reading.’ The attempt to propagate the Hundred
Flowers Movement also brought Mao into conflict with
Deng, as did the newspaper's dilatoriness in publishing any
version of Mao's February 1957 speech on contradictions.
Even when Mao stumped Tianjin and Shanghai in late
March and early April of 1957 to push the Hundred Flowers
Movement, the paper gave his speeches minimal coverage.
The result was a showdown between Mao and Deng Tuo
on 10 April 1957. Recalled in detail by one of Deng's
colleagues present at the scene, it showed how far Mao now
was from being willing to entertain alternate interpretations
of policy. Deng and his staff were summoned after lunch to
see Mao in his residence inside Zhongnanhai. When the
editors entered the room, they found Mao sprawled on his
bed, wearing just a pajama jacket, with a towel draped
around his waist. The bed was piled with books, and he
chain-smoked as he talked. Mao at once launched into a long
diatribe against the People's Daily editorial policy, accusing
Deng of running a ‘factional paper,’ not a ‘Party paper.’ He
continued: 'In the past I said you people were pedants
running the paper. Wrong, I should say you're dead men
running the paper.’ Deng tried to explain the complex Party
mechanisms that cleared material for publication in People's
Daily, but Mao snapped back, 'Why make a secret of Party
policy? ... If Party papers are passive, Party leadership also
becomes passive. There is a ghost in this. Where is the
ghost?’
156
Turning to the other junior editors, who sat in a nervous
semicircle around the bed, Mao asked them why they had all
been so silent: 'If you want to raise criticism with Deng Tuo,
the most he can do is fire you. How come not even a breeze
got through, how come not one of you wrote a letter to the
Party Center reporting the situation?’ When Deng re-
sponded by offering his resignation, stating that he had acted
sincerely and in good faith, Mao erupted with the bathroom
language that he employed often in his speeches now, as if to
emphasize his rough-and-ready rustic background: 'I don't
believe that sincerity and good faith of yours! You only know
the comings and goings of limousines, you live in luxury.
Now, shit or get off the pot.’
In the long, almost-four-hour harangue that followed,
Mao accused the paper of hiding the achievements of the
Chinese people by lowering the figures reported of their
good harvests. Mao was determined to make the intellectuals
serve the proletarians, he said, just as he had already cowed
the national capitalists. Any use of Marxism to dismiss his
own ideas he rejected as 'dogmatism.' He was going to resign
the state chairmanship soon, said Mao (he actually did so in
the spring of 1959), and he would then start writing his own
regular column in the paper. When one of Mao's confiden-
tial secretaries, who had been present throughout, reminded
the chairman that he had personally approved many of the
policies and procedures he was now attacking, Mao
responded, 'Well, if it was like that, I was confused.’ Deng
was dismissed as editor that June.
The intervention of the confidential secretary highlights
another of the groups that might have brought Mao detailed
157
knowledge of what was going on around the country. These
secretaries were a high-caliber group, with proven revolu-
tionary credentials. Some of them did funnel information to
Mao when they felt he needed it, but they could go on
inspection tours only when specifically instructed to do so.
The same was true of Mao's elite guardsmen, many of them
former peasants, who had a rough practicality and an
absence of education that appealed to Mao. Many in Mao's
entourage were simply overwhelmed by his formidable
reputation and his famous rages - the doctor Li Zhisui, for
example, who wrote a long and apparently frank appraisal of
Mao after the chairman's death, makes it clear that he never
risked alienating his master by raising unpleasant subjects.
Thus the extraordinary and ultimately disastrous experiment
of the Great Leap was continued across China.
What is most bizarre about these years is that one side of
Mao was deeply skeptical about the path onto which he had
guided the country. When people he liked and trusted asked
him to spare them the rigors of laboring in the countryside on
Great Leap projects, he was willing to write letters in their
behalf to have them excused. He did just that for the nanny
who had looked after his three sons with Yang Kaihui back in
the 1930s, when local cadres ordered her to report for a work
assignment at the end of 1957. Yet his other side would not
tolerate direct criticism of the Great Leap at any level. This
profound and disastrous ambiguity was matched by his own
senior colleagues, all veterans of the revolution and deeply
experienced in social organization and economic planning,
who had been nervous about the ventures of both the Hundred
Flowers and the Great Leap, but in their eagerness to promote
158
the country's growth and to shelter their own careers, never
took decisive action to check the headlong course of events.
This can be seen in a transcript of Party meetings held in
Wuchang, on the Yangtze, in November 1958. Here, in a self-
contradictory maze of comments and responses, Mao
showed he was fully aware of the incredible levels of violence
in the mass campaigns, the dangers of famine sweeping the
country, the need to send investigative teams out to check the
reality of production, the impossibility of reaching the steel,
grain, and earth-removal quotas, the falsified reporting at all
levels that was riddling the entire venture with contradic-
tions, and the faked compliance with which millions of
peasants greeted the Party center's impossible demands. As
Mao told his assembled cadres, poetry was not the same as
economic reality, and this was not a 'dream' from which one
would simply 'wake up.' And yet when in the summer of 1959
the distinguished marshal of the Red Army and minister of
defense Peng Dehuai made similar points at the Lushan
meeting of the Central Committee, which had convened to
discuss all aspects of the Great Leap, Mao exploded with rage.
At the conference, Peng presented his critical views in a
circumspect way, not by grandstanding but by submitting a
personal letter to the chairman. In that letter, written during
the night of 12 July and hand-delivered to Mao on the
thirteenth, Peng pointed out that despite many increases in
production during the Great Leap so far, it had been a story
of both ‘losses and gains' (he reversed the normal phrase
gains and losses’). Exaggeration had run through the whole
campaign, and in steel production especially there had been
a host of mistakes. Slogans and projections had been faulty,
159
and there were clearly many ‘leftist’ mistakes - mistakes one
could also describe as ‘petty-bourgeois fanaticism.
Peng had intended his letter to be private, but Mao
determined to strike back. Mao's entire reputation was at
stake, for Peng was known to have traveled earlier in 1959
through many areas of China, checking things out for
himself, including Mao's own home village of Shaoshan. Mao
had just fulsomely praised the Great Leap in Shaoshan in a
poem that linked the heroic Hunan peasant uprisings of 1927
to what he saw as the equally heroic reality of the present:
Cursed by the flow of memories,
I am back in my native place thirty-two years ago.
Red flags flutter from the spears of the enslaved peasants,
As the landlords raise their whips in cruel hands.
It took many sacrifices to make us so strong
That we dared tell sun and moon to bring a new day.
In delight I watch the waving rows of rice and beans,
While all around the heroes return through the evening haze.
By contrast, Peng, having been in the same village at
almost the same time, had likened the Great Leap experi-
ments in Hunan to ‘beating a gong with a cucumber.’ And,
though he had not put this in his letter, during one of the
opening small group discussions at Lushan, Peng had
reported on his own visit to Shaoshan (now converted into a
commune), saying that though indeed production there had
risen by 14 percent, this increase was achieved ‘with much
assistance and large loans from the state. The Chairman has
also visited this commune. I asked the Chairman what was
160
his finding. He said that he had not talked about the matter.
In my opinion, he had.'
Mao's response was tactically bold and totally successful. He
ordered his staff to make multiple copies of Peng's letter, and
had it distributed to the 150 senior cadres present. Then in a
series of face-to-face meetings, he challenged them either to
accept his version of events or to side publicly with Peng. If
they did side with Peng, said Mao, he would raise another
army, a truly red one this time, and would start the guerrilla
wars in the hills all over again. Confronted by this stark choice,
not a single cadre sided publicly with Peng, even though it is
possible that some of them - in prior conversation - might
actually have primed Peng to write some of the things that he
had. At the close of the Lushan meetings, Mao dismissed Peng
from all his posts and relegated him to political limbo.
The result of the Lushan plenum was thus not only that
Peng's warnings were totally rejected but that the principles of
the Great Leap were reaffirmed by Mao and by all his senior
colleagues. They did this despite the knowledge that all the
previous figures for production had indeed been gross
exaggerations, pointing to totally unrealizable levels of
achievement. By branding anyone who criticized the concept
of the Leap as being a 'right opportunist’ (by implication in
league with Peng Dehuai), Mao made it impossible for any of
his Party colleagues - junior or senior - to publicly call the
Leap into question. Mao himself ringingly endorsed the huge
public dining halls: "The moral is that one must not capitulate
m the face of difficulties. Things like people's communes and
collective mess halls have deep economic roots. They should
not nor can they be blown away by a gust of wind.’ The need
161
for active support of the Leap ideology was given a new twist
in an editorial in the now totally obedient People's Daily of
August 1959. The paper argued that a failure to identify and
criticize the 'rightists' would be tantamount to willing the
failure of the Leap. By the end of the month, the paper
editorialized that 'the hostile forces within the country and
abroad’ and the ‘right opportunists within the party’ had
clearly failed to derail the Leap: "The people's communes have
not collapsed. We have therefore the right to say that the
people's communes will never collapse.’
Thus it was that, as Mao yielded up the position of head
of state to his fellow Hunanese Liu Shaoqi, giving up much
wearisome protocol that he had never much relished, and
‘retired to the second line’ as he put it, to devote more time
to theoretical work, the Leap was pushed to new heights. In
the face of mounting evidence of poor harvests, and with
China being hit by colossal floods - some of them the worst
in a century - crops almost ready for harvest were uprooted
in favor of new planting plans, deep plowing to a level of
three meters or more was pushed at Mao's behest, and
hundreds of millions of peasants, many exhausted by a year
of ceaseless projects, were pushed into the same pattern of
totally unrealistic expectations. By i960 famine began to
strike large areas of the country. Peng Dehuai was kept out of
sight, his criticism ignored. For two years the crisis deepened
as the Party continued to enforce the laws on grain
procurement from fields where almost no crops grew. The
Maoist vision had finally tumbled into nightmare.
162
11 FANNING THE FLAMES
IN 1960 THE FAMINE tightened its grip across the country,
exacerbated not only by a devastating drought that ruined
crops on almost half of China's farmland, but also by an erratic
pattern of south-to-north typhoons that brought violent wind
damage and murderous flash floods. In many areas for which
accurate figures became available, between a fifth to a half of
all the villagers died, with Anhui province perhaps suffering
the most. And yet, so pervasive was the force of Mao's words at
Lushan, that many of the fundamental principles of the Great
Leap were maintained. Communes continued to be run on the
radical and egalitarian principles enunciated in 1957 and 1958.
Extraction of rural 'surpluses' continued, to support industry
and subsidize food prices in the cities. Many peasants were
taken from the land to boost the industrial labor force in the
cities, where urban communes were now introduced widely, to
bring the same principles of mixed and intensified production
to factories, schools, and offices.
Especially during i960, however, the focus of the leaders’
attention was not on the exact details of the domestic crisis.
163
Instead, they were compelled to focus on the Soviet Union,
which had mocked the extravagant claims put forward in the
Great Leap and continued with its own policies of de-
Stalinization. In particular, the leaders had to work out how
to find the funds and personnel to continue the various
projects abandoned by the Soviet advisers when they were
pulled out of China that year. These included China's
atomic-bomb program, and also the oil fields in China's
northeast. Mao's own writings were focused on polemics
against Khrushchev and on attempts to express his interpre-
tation of China's place in the pattern of world revolution.
Only rarely did he comment specifically on Chinese
economic matters.
In 1961 this began to change. Early in the year, Mao
acceded to his colleagues' arguments that the Leap be rolled
back, that productive laborers be returned to their com-
munes, and that peasants be allowed to raise some food and
livestock again on small private plots near their homes. Most
aspects of communal living were canceled. Though Mao
rejected Khrushchev's unexpected offer of Soviet grain
shipments to reduce the stress of hunger, the Central
Committee planners decided to buy large quantities of grain
from Canada. And in late January, Mao summoned one of
his confidential political secretaries, Tian Jiaying, who had
worked with him since 1948, to organize and dispatch three
teams - each consisting of seven men - to undertake an
intensive investigation of the exact situation in sample
communes in three different provinces: Guangdong, Hunan,
and Zhejiang. Apparently recalling his previous experiences
with rural investigations in the early days of the revolution,
164
Mao had returned to the realization that there was no
substitute for hard facts in trying to come to grips with harsh
reality.
We do not know whether Mao specifically turned over in
his mind the contrast between his languid days in Shaoshan
during the summer of 1959 - chatting to elderly peasants over
a banquet, lolling in the warm, shallow waters of the new
mass-labor-generated Shaoshan reservoir, and poetically
praising the peasants’ triumphs - with Peng Dehuai's hard-
hitting questions and bleak statistics on the same area. But
clearly Mao was now trying to find out what had gone wrong.
The team sent to Guangdong province was to be led by Chen
Boda, his trusted aide since the two men's dialectical-
materialism discussions of 1937; the Hunan team was led by
Hu Qiaomu, another close political aide and secretary to Mao
(he had been present at the meeting where Deng Tuo was
called 'a dead man’). Others in the groups included members
of Liu Shaogi's staff, propaganda specialists, economists, and
statisticians.
Each group of seven was instructed to focus on two
production brigades: one well-off, one poor. Secretary Tian
pooled their conclusions and summarized them for Mao.
His summary was bold and unambiguous: private plots
should be allowed and compensation paid for wrongly
confiscated property, the scale of the communes should be
cut back, peasants should follow their own views on
communal living or cooking, and cadre corruption should
be addressed directly. This time Mao appeared to see that a
reversal of policy was essential. He drafted - again with Tian
a document in sixty sections that addressed the main
165
perceived problems in the communes. After Mao - who now
felt he had the facts at his command - had taunted other
leaders for their ignorance of the real situation in the
countryside, they, too, began to undertake their own
intensive explorations and were indeed horrified by what
they found. Liu Shaoqi and his wife carried out their
investigation in person, not through surrogates, focusing on
Hunan for over a month (they also visited Mao's old home
village of Shaoshan). Everywhere they found a pattern of
evasion, a reluctance to speak out, for fear of the con-
sequences, and serious abuses of authority by the brigade
officials, even those who were from poor peasant back-
grounds themselves. Over the following year, Liu and his
senior colleagues slowly moved China back to a more
rational level of planned allocations in agriculture and
industry, which would make the household or 'team' the
basic economic unit of accounting, though the commune
system survived, with communes subdivided into smaller
units.
During this entire period, Mao was smarting under an
additional series of slights: a calculated move by many in the
Party to downplay the role of the "Thought of Mao' in the
fabric of the People's Republic. It was at the 1945 congress
that the Constitution of the Communist Party had been
altered to include Mao's thought as its guiding principle. Mao
had acquiesced in dropping the phrase from a revision of the
Constitution that was promulgated in 1956, which made
sense in light of the denunciations of Stalin in the Soviet
Union and a general nervousness about the ‘cult of
personality.' But Mao had not intended his acceptance of that
166
formal change to herald a change in the general status of his
writings. But that is just what began to occur after the Lushan
meetings, as statements were issued by the Communist Youth
League that the phrase "Thought of Mao,' though sometimes
essential, should not be overused. Fewer copies of Mao's
works were now available; a shortage of paper due to the
Great Leap and the pressing needs for printing more school
textbooks were both cited by Mao's colleagues as the reasons.
A report of the Party Center's propaganda department in
March i960 warned against 'vulgarization' of Mao's works by
attributing various triumphs to their beneficent effect -
breakthroughs in medicine, for example, or triumphs in table
tennis competitions. Liu Shaoqi, now head of state,
instructed that the phrase "Thought of Mao' not be used in
propaganda directed at foreign audiences. Other senior Party
leaders commented publicly that Mao's thought could in no
way be said to surpass Marxism-Leninism, indeed that after
the definitive analyses of political economy and imperialism
by Marx and Lenin there was really no need for further
discussion of those topics.
Two key Party figures, however, decided to risk their
colleagues' irritation by publicly reaffirming their faith in
Mao's thought; they were Mao's public security chief, Kang
Sheng, and the army general Lin Biao, whom Mao had
appointed as minister of defense to replace the disgraced
Peng Dehuai. Lin Biao was especially fulsome in talking with
his own military officers, continuing to refer to Mao's
thought as the 'pinnacle of Marxism-Leninism in the present
era. And in an enthusiastic accolade when the volume of
Mao's Selected Works which included the period of World
167
War II and the civil war was published late in 1961, Lin Biao
wrote that the victory in that war was also the victory of
Mao's thought; for the army as a whole ‘our present
important fighting task [is] to arm our minds with Mao
Zedong's Thought, to defend the purity of Marxism-
Leninism, and combat every form of ideological trend of
modern revisionism.
The ground was being laid for a new kind of division
within the Party, one that pitted those who were truly 'red' -
the believers in Mao's thought and the purifying power of
trusting the masses - against those who based their prestige
and policies on their specific expertise, whether that lay in
precise economic planning, advanced education, or mastery
of bureaucratic procedures. Between 1962 and 1966 this
struggle was fought out, sometimes in public and sometimes
silently, as Mao worked to prepare for the kind of renewed
assault from the moral guerrilla high ground of which he
had spoken in his attack at Lushan on Peng Dehuai.
To double-check his sense of how the peasants were
reacting to the changes in rural policy, Mao turned again to
his trusted secretary Tian Jiaying. This time Tian was to
concentrate his work on three places in Hunan: Mao's own
village of Shaoshan, Mao's grandparents' village, and Liu
Shaoqi's home village, which was not far away from the
other two. In a farewell party for Tian and his colleagues,
held at a guest house in Wuchang, Mao urged them not to
boss people around but to listen carefully and carry no
preconceptions with them - except their belief in Marxism
and knowledge of the historical context of what they saw. To
his surprise, Tian found that while the peasants in Liu's
168
home village were comparatively content with the improve-
ment to their current situation brought by the return of
private plots and the shrinkage in the units of organization,
those in Mao's village were in favor of two policies that
would be far to the 'right' of the current line: these were
either to apportion out production on the basis of each
household (rather than any larger unit whatsoever), or else
to go back to the pre-cooperative phase altogether and to
divide the fields once again among the households. Nervous
about the findings, Tian left Shaoshan for Shanghai, where
Mao was currently living in another guest house. Though
Tian sent his report in advance, Mao had clearly not read it.
Instead he listened to Tian's oral report in silence, and then
made a revealing comment: 'We want to follow the mass
line, but there are times when we cannot completely heed
the masses. For example, if they want to distribute produc-
tion on the basis of the household, we cannot listen to them.'
Tian also got phone calls from the head of the Central
Committee's organization department in Beijing, who was
eager to discuss his findings, and met with Deng Xiaoping
and Liu Shaoqi. He found that virtually all the leaders except
for Mao favored some kind of redistribution of production
based on the household.
It was clear that there was now little meeting of the minds
between Mao and his own senior colleagues, apart from the
small group of those boosting his thoughts. As Mao got
older, he had apparently further increased his isolation from
his own people, even as he claimed to speak in their name.
The Mao who had so often praised the virtues of living in
caves, now stayed at a series of luxurious guest houses -
169
provided for him by Party officials - in different parts of
China. It was people like Tian who now acted as his eyes and
ears.
In addition, it seems clear that Mao's lifestyle had not
endeared him to his revolutionary colleagues. At the now
more frequent dances in Zhongnanhai, in his private room
aboard his own personal railway train, and in the numerous
guest houses he visited, Mao entertained a succession of
young women. News of these liaisons helped spread an aura
of moral vulnerability around the chairman, which was con-
firmed when his private railroad car was bugged by overly
zealous security officials. They were not discreet about what
they learned, enraging Mao when he heard what they had
done. Mao's entourage of guards were also, at least in some
cases, exploitative of their power, often corrupt, and
involved in sexual liaisons of their own.
Somewhat paradoxically, it was at this very time that Mao's
own family began to settle down, apparently constructively,
into the society around them. His only surviving son,
Anqing, whom as recently as 1956 Mao was still describing to
friends as crippled with illness,’ was married at last in 1962 at
the age of thirty-nine. Anqing's wife was the half sister of his
elder brother Anying's widow. Fluent in Russian, like Anqing
himself, she entered Beijing University's department of
Chinese the same year, and graduated in 1966. Urged on by
Mao, Anying's widow remarried around the same time. Li
Min, He Zizhen's surviving daughter, graduated from
teachers college and married a graduate of the air force
academy. She subsequently worked in the military defense
bureau, while her husband taught in the academy. Jiang
170
nine's daughter, Li Na, entered Beijing University's history
department in 1961 and graduated in 1965. She was to be a key
link between Mao and the student community in 1966.
Mao seems to have encouraged his immediate family to
lead as ordinary a life as possible and not to take an active
part in politics, but he was not so protective of his brothers'
families. Mao Yuanxin, for example, the son of Mao's
younger brother Mao Zemin (executed in Xinjiang in 1943)
was enrolled in the Harbin Institute of Military Engineering
in 1964, and Mao used him as a foil for many of his own
ideas. Their exchanges were later published. From Mao's
questions to his nephew, we can see that he was feeling out a
field for himself, in which the next round of the battle could
be fought to his advantage. The fact that there was a definite
enemy - the forces of ‘bourgeois revisionism’ inside China
determined to undermine the revolution - was already
firming up in Mao's mind. These enemies might be found
anywhere: in rural production brigades and urban factories,
in Party committees and public security departments, and in
the ministry of culture and the film industry. They were even
among the students in Mao Yuanxin's own institute, listen-
ing secretly to overseas radio broadcasts and filling their
diaries with subversive material. "They' were also behind the
rote system of lecturing and the pointless examinations that
schools used to judge a person's performance.
Now, at the age of seventy, Mao was clearly obsessed with
revolutionary continuity and his belief that the young people
like Yuanxin would have to bear the standard forward. Five
elements were essential in this succession, Mao told his
nephew: one must be a genuine Marxist-Leninist; one must
171
be willing to serve the masses wholeheartedly; one must
work with the majority and accept their criticisms, even if
the criticisms seemed misplaced at the time; one must be a
model of obedient discipline under the strictures of demo-
cratic centralism; and one must be modest about oneself,
always ready to indulge in self-criticism. Looking at his
nephew, Mao added the harsh judgment: "You grew up
eating honey, and thus far you have never known suffering.
In future, if you do not become a rightist, but rather a
centrist, I shall be satisfied. You have never suffered, how can
you be a leftist?’
With these last words, Mao had posed a question that was
to obsess him and many of China's youth into the early years
of the Cultural Revolution. His answer was to be based on
the idea that waning leftist revolutionary activism could be
regenerated by identifying the enemies correctly, and then
using all one's ingenuity in rooting them out and destroying
them. Mao had stated in the past that it was necessary to 'set
fires' every few years to keep the revolution alive. But doing
that could also frighten people: 'It's certainly not easy to set
a fire to burn oneself. I've heard that around this area there
were some people who had second thoughts and didn't set a
big fire.’ Mao came to see his mission as partly to set the fire,
but also to teach the young to do it for themselves.
In this strangely apocalyptic mission, Mao found a loose
association of allies. One was the defense minister, Lin Biao,
who was willing to lead the People's Liberation Army
forward into revolution, via the ‘little red book' of Mao's
thought, which Lin commissioned in 1964 and ordered every
soldier to read. A year later Lin Biao ordered the abolition of
172
insignia, Soviet-style uniforms, and other signs of officer
status throughout the army, re-creating - at least in Mao's
mind - an image of the simpler guerrilla aura of military life
with which Mao had so long been associated. A second
group of allies consisted of certain intellectuals and cadres,
many of them based in Shanghai, who had a strongly leftist
orientation and were genuinely dismayed by what they saw
as the backward-looking direction of industrial and rural
policy- A third was centered on Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who
for twenty years after their marriage in Yan'an had not been
active in politics. But in 1956, after returning from her
medical trip to the Soviet Union, she began to take a lively
interest in the current state of film and theater in China.
Gradually she formed a nucleus of fellow believers who
sought to reinstill revolutionary attitudes into the cultural
world and to root out those revisionist elements that - she
agreed with Mao - were lurking everywhere. A fourth ally
was Kang Sheng, a revolutionary Shanghai labor organizer
and spymaster in the 1920s, later trained in police techniques
in the Soviet Union. He had introduced Mao to Jiang Qing
in Yan'an, and later became head of the Central Committee's
security apparatus and of the Central Party School. Kang
Sheng had been a pioneer in orchestrating a literary
inquisition to prove that rightists were ‘using novels to
promote anti-Party activities.
It was natural for these disparate forces to gradually
coalesce, to find novelists, dramatists, historians, and philo-
sophers on whom to pile their criticisms, and to use Shanghai
as a base for mass campaigns that could also be coordinated
with the army's various cultural departments. Once the
173
apparatus of leftist criticism was in place in the cultural
sphere, it could easily be switched to tackle problems of
education in schools and universities, the municipal Party
committees that were technically in charge of those cultural
realms or educational systems, and the individual Party
leaders to whom those committees reported. If galvanized
from the center, a remarkable force might be generated.
By late 1965 this was exactly what began to happen. Mao
was frustrated with the laggardly implementation of
revolutionary policies, and genuinely suspicious of his own
bureaucracy. He had grown to distrust the head of state, Liu
Shaoqi, and to be skeptical about Liu's ability to guide the
revolution after Mao. Mao also had grown more hostile to
intellectuals as the years went by - perhaps because he knew
he would never really be one, not even at the level of his own
secretaries, whom he would commission to go to the
libraries to track down classical sources for him and help
with historical references. Mao knew, too, that scholars of
the old school like Deng Tuo, the man he had summarily
ousted from the People's Daily, had their own erudite circles
of friends with whom the pursued leisurely hours of classical
connoisseurship, which was scarcely different from the lives
they might have enjoyed under the old society. They wrote
elegant and amusing essays, which were printed in various
literary newspapers, that used allegory and analogy to tease
the kind of 'commandism' that had been so present in the
Great Leap, and indeed in the Communist leadership as a
whole. It was surely of such men that Mao was thinking
when he wrote: 'All wisdom comes from the masses. I've
always said that intellectuals are the most lacking in intellect.
174
The intellectuals cock their tails in the air, and they think, "If
I don't rank number one in all the world, then I'm at least
number two."
Mao did not precisely orchestrate the coming of the
Cultural Revolution, but he established an environment that
made it possible and helped to set many of the people and
issues in place. In November 1965 a new round of polemics
appeared in a Shanghai journal, attacking the historian Wu
Han, who was the direct subordinate of the powerful Party
boss Peng Zhen, controller of a five-man group that was the
arbiter of the Beijing cultural realm. Peng Zhen was unpre-
pared to handle the onslaught, though publication of the
article in Beijing was blocked by his staff. Seizing on the
chance disruption as a good trigger for action, Mao moved
swiftly to remove the head of the Central Committee's
general office, which controlled the flow of crucial infor-
mation for senior Party leaders. It must have been an added
inducement to Mao that this man was Yang Shangkun, who
had ordered the bugging devices planted in Mao's personal
train and in the guest houses where he stayed. In Yang's
place, Mao appointed the head of the central Beijing
garrison, whom he knew to be fiercely loyal.
At the same time, Lin Biao began to replace key personnel
at the top of the military, including the current army chief of
staff and former minister of security Luo Ruiqing. In March
1966, after months of relentless questioning about his
political loyalties and his attitudes toward political in-
doctrination in the army ranks, as well as a major series of
struggle sessions’ with his inquisitors, Luo tried to commit
suicide by jumping from a building. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing,
175
joined the fray by briefing army commanders on the
bourgeois decadence and corruption in the arts, which led to
the publication of a joint ‘army forum on literature and art
work.’ Mao had already, in a meeting with his secretaries,
shared with them his conviction that the works of the
historian Wu Han were intended to be defenses of Peng
Dehuai in his earlier struggle at Lushan, and he proceeded to
deepen the attacks on the Beijing party and cultural
establishment. Lin Biao sharpened the tension by warning
that the 'right' was planning a coup against Mao. Security
was tightened in the Zhongnanhai residential area. Two men
knew, as well as any in China, what all this must portend.
They were Deng Tuo, the former editor of People's Daily, and
Tian Jiaying, Mao's confidential secretary for eighteen years,
who had reported negatively on the peasants' feelings about
communes. In the last weeks of May, both men committed
suicide.
Much of this struggle had taken place in secret, or at least
in the well-insulated world of the Party hierarchy. But in late
May, some Beijing University teachers put up wall posters
denouncing the rightists, or '‘capitalist-roaders,' in their
campuses and in the cultural bureaucracy; Mao endorsed
the posters, and students began to follow suit, with attacks
against their own teachers. People's Daily editorialized in
favor of the dissidents, and the movement spread to other
cities in China, and from colleges to high schools. Groups of
students began to wear paramilitary uniforms with red arm-
bands and to declare themselves Red Guards and defenders
of Chairman Mao. Mao himself, who had been watching
these events from the security of a guest house in the
176
celebrated beauty spot of Hangzhou, traveled in July to
Wuhan and took a leisurely swim down the Yangtze, which
is rapturously publicized across the nation as proof of the
airman's energy and fitness.
Returning to Beijing, Mao reconstituted the Politburo
Standing Committee, to remove or demote those he had
identified as his enemies. As for himself, Mao wrote in a brief
editorial comment that appeared in People's Daily. 'My wish
is to join all the comrades of our party to learn from the
masses, to continue to be a schoolboy’ In August, with the
oracular pronouncement that 'to rebel is justified,’ and that
it was good 'to bombard the headquarters,’ Mao donned
military uniform and from the top of Tiananmen reviewed
hundreds of thousands of chanting students, accepting from
them a Red Guard armband as evidence of his support. By
September, several of the rallies were attended by a million
people, who began to flock to Beijing from around China.
The students from Beijing, in turn, began to travel the
countryside in squads - free train travel was made available
to them - to spread the word of what was now called the
Cultural Revolution.
The violence of the Cultural Revolution was manifested at
two levels. One of these was orchestrated from the political
center, which was now controlled by a small group totally
loyal to Mao, through what was called 'The Central Case
Examination Group,’ chaired by China's premier Zhou Enlai
but directly accountable to Mao. In its heyday this group was
composed of eleven Party members, including Jiang Qing,
Chen Boda, and Kang Sheng. Under this leadership group
were three bureaus that were assigned their own cases and
177
worked closely with the Beijing garrison command, the
army general staff, and the Ministry of Public Security. They
investigated 1,262 ‘principal cases’ and an unknown number
of 'related case offenders.’
The job of the three bureaus was to prove the correctness of
‘rightist’ charges - including being Taiwan or Guomindang
spies, or 'Khrushchev-type persons' - and to use whatever
means were necessary to achieve that goal. Torture, sleep
deprivation, round-the-clock group interrogations, with-
holding of food, and many types of mental and physical
pressure were used by the case investigators - in virtually all
cases their victims were prominent or even once-revered
revolutionaries. Peng Dehuai was brought back from Sichuan
to face his own group of investigators. Incarcerated in high-
security prisons (of which Qincheng was the most terrifyingly
notorious), the victims could not write letters home or see
family. Letters they wrote to Mao or Zhou Enlai requesting
more compassionate treatment were filed away, unread. Only
‘confessions’ were considered a tolerable form of writing.
These political prisoners only encountered the outside
‘revolutionary masses’ at carefully orchestrated occasions.
Red Guard groups would use printed forms to apply to
‘borrow' one of the victims, as long as they were ‘returned
promptly.’ Red Guard units might have to pay the cost of
renting a place for these confrontations, which would then
be advertised in advance. Certain 'struggle rallies' were post-
poned in case of rain, and some victims were in such
demand that their appearances had to be limited to three de-
nunciations a week. Liu Shaoqi died from these experiences,
as did Peng Dehuai. Deng Xiaoping survived, perhaps
178
because Mao only intended to intimidate him, not to destroy
him altogether. This system of case investigation was spread
systematically to the provinces, and by the end of the
Cultural Revolution in 1976 as many as two million cadres
had been investigated by these or similar means.
The second level of cultural revolutionary violence was
unorchestrated, coursing down its own channels in an only
vaguely designated direction, in search of rightists or ‘feudal
remnants,’ 'snakes and monsters,' or ‘people in authority
taking the capitalist road' An announcement from the
‘Beijing Number 26 Middle School Red Guards,' dated August
1966, gave the kind of program that was to be followed by
countless others. Every street was to have a quotation from
Chairman Mao prominently displayed, and loudspeakers at
every intersection and in all parks were to broadcast his
thought. Every household as well as all trains and buses,
bicycles and pedicabs, had to have a picture of Mao on its
walls. Ticket takers on trains and buses should all declaim
Mao's thought. Every bookstore had to stock Mao's quota-
tions, and every hand in China had to hold one. No one could
wear blue jeans, tight pants, 'weird women's outfits,’ or have
‘slick hairdos or wear rocket shoes.’ No perfumes or beauty
creams could be used. No one could keep pet fish, cats, or
dogs, or raise fighting crickets. No shop could sell classical
books. All those identified by the masses as landlords,
hooligans, rightists, and capitalists had to wear a plaque
identifying themselves as such whenever they went out. The
minimum amount of persons living in any room could be
three - all other space had to be given to the state housing
bureaus. Children should criticize their elders, and students
179
their teachers. No one under thirty-five might smoke or
drink. Hospital service would be simplified, and ‘complicated
treatment must be abolished’; doctors had to write their
prescriptions legibly, and not use English words. All schools
and colleges were to combine study with productive labor and
farmwork. As a proof of its own transformation, the 'Number
26 Middle School’ would change its name, effectively
immediately, to "The Maoism School.'
The number of victims from the uncoordinated violence
of the Cultural Revolution is incalculable, but there were
many millions. Some of these were killed, some committed
suicide. Some were crippled or scarred emotionally for life.
Others were tormented for varying periods of time, for an
imprecise number of ‘crimes,’ such as having known
foreigners, owned foreign books or art objects, indulged in
classical studies, been dictatorial teachers, or denigrated
Mao or the Party through some chance remark. Children
suffered for their parents’ or grandparents’ deeds, or sought
to clear themselves of such charges by exhibiting unusual
‘revolutionary zeal,’ which might include trashing their own
parents' apartments, beating up their schoolteachers, or
going to border areas to ‘serve the people’ and ‘learn from
the masses.’ Many families destroyed their own art objects,
burned or shredded their family photographs, diaries, and
letters, all of which might be purloined by roving Red
Guards. Many Red Guards units fought each other, some-
times to the death, divided along lines of local allegiance or
class background, or by occupation, as in the case of some
labor union members, construction workers, even prison
wardens.
180
The tiny figure atop the rostrum at Tiananmen, waving
his hand in a slow sideways motion to the chanting sea of red
lags and little red books spread out before him as far as the
eye could see, had only the faintest inklings of the emotions
passing through the minds of the weeping faithful. It was
enough that they were there, chanting and with tears in their
eyes. It was enough that to them he had become, at last, the
Great Helmsman, great teacher, great leader, and the Red,
Red sun in their hearts.
181
182
12 EMBERS
AT A WORK CONFERENCE with the Party leaders in late
August 1966, Mao told his colleagues that matters seemed to
be developing satisfactorily: 'In my opinion, we should let
the chaos go on for a few months and just firmly believe that
the majority is good and only the minority bad.' The best
thing would be to wait four months and see what happened.
Let the students take to the streets, let them write ‘big
character posters.’ And ‘let the foreigners take pictures’ of all
this if they wanted to. It was of no importance what the
imperialists thought.
Yet before the four months were up, Mao felt a touch of
apprehension. At a follow-up meeting of the Central Work
Conference on 25 October 1966, Mao reminded his
colleagues that he was formally only ‘in the second line,’ and
hence did 'not take charge of day-to-day work' anymore. He
had taken this second place deliberately, to build up their
prestige, so that 'when I go to see God there won't be such a
big upheaval in the State.’ The result of this policy, however,
had been that 'there are some things I should have kept a
183
grip on which I did not. So I am responsible; we cannot just
blame them.’ With this elliptical apology over, Mao admitted
that he had been swept away by the pace of events, like
everyone else. 'The time was so short and the events so
violent’ that the Red Guards had erupted and taken things
into their own hands. 'Since it was I who caused the havoc,
it is understandable if you have some bitter words for me.'
Yet, as he had done in 1959, after being criticized by Peng
Dehuai, Mao continued to pursue the policies that he knew
might not be working in the short term, but from which he
still expected great things. The early stage of the revolution
lasted twenty-eight years, he reminded his listeners, from
1921 to 1949. It was now only five months since the first
moments of the Cultural Revolution - 'perhaps the
movement may last another five months, or even longer.’ In
the earlier stage of the revolution, ‘our path gradually
emerged in the course of practice.’ The same would be true
again, for 'things can change, things can improve.’ They
would all have to work together, to benefit from the new
world of change into which events had plunged them.
Students, however, were one thing, and workers and
People's Liberation Army troops were another. In the course
of those next few months, through which Mao had said they
must watch things develop, two issues surfaced that had to
be addressed. One was whether the industrial workers
should be allowed to exploit the situation by uniting (or
even striking) to achieve higher pay, more autonomy, and
better working conditions. With few exceptions, the opinion
of even the radical Cultural Revolutionary leaders was that
they should not be allowed to do so, and steps were taken to
184
curb the power of those workers' groups that had begun to
emerge. The second issue was what the role of the army
should be, now that under Lin Biao's enthusiastically pro-
Maoist rhetorical guidance many Red Guard units were
bringing economic and political chaos all across the country.
Again, the ultimate decision was a conservative one (though
it was given a leftist-sounding air): the political leadership
vacuum that had now formed in many areas should not be
filled by student or other Red Guard groups alone. In every
workplace and community new ‘revolutionary committees’
should be formed, each of which would be a ‘three way
alliance’ with three constituent parts: the People's Liberation
Army; experienced party cadres who had been screened and
cleared of any charge of being counterrevolutionaries or
‘capitalist-roaders'; and representatives of the radical mass
organizations who had been recently 'steeled' in revolutionary
experience.
Mao himself never wrote a single, comprehensive analysis
of what he intended to achieve by the Cultural Revolution,
or of how he expected it to proceed. It does seem to have
been a case of allowing theory to grow out of practice, as he
had always interpreted the revolutionary process to be.
Indeed he issued very few statements at all after the fall of
1966, and he did not speak to the masses in any public
forums, with the lone exception of a few words he uttered
over a microphone fitted to the rostrum on Tiananmen at
the seventh mass Red Guards rally in November. The speech
in its entirety ran as follows: 'Long live comrades! You must
let politics take command, go to the masses, and be with the
masses. You must conduct the great proletarian Cultural
185
Revolution even better.’ Even in the inner circles of Party
leaders, where some of his words were transcribed and later
circulated, his words and thoughts were far more condensed
than they had been earlier. To the new leaders who had
emerged from the literary wars of the Shanghai left, he
reiterated the theme that in the Cultural Revolution one
class was ‘toppling another,’ which constituted 'a great
revolution.’ He added that 'many newspapers ought to be
suspended,’ acknowledging in the same breath that ‘there
must be newspapers.’ The key point, therefore, was who
should run them, for 'to revolt, one must first of all create a
public opinion.’ Mao illuminated this thought with a
personal flashback to the early 1920s, when he was running
his journals in Hunan and also working on the early strikes
of the printers: 'We had no money, no publishing houses, no
bicycles. When we edited newspapers, we got on intimate
terms with printing workers. We chatted with them and
edited articles at the same time.’ Mao had always loved the
idea that political power could be strengthened through such
informal and unstructured means.
Even these truncated ruminations were exceptions, how-
ever. From early 1967 onward, Mao let his thoughts be
known mainly in the form of aphorisms or comments, just a
few characters in length. These were printed as boxed
editorials in People's Daily, usually on the front page. Thus
after only a few seconds of reading, people all around the
country could gauge their chairman's current thoughts. And
probably these were his thoughts - there was no need to
submit such brief and simple comments to Party scrutiny
and to watch for possible deviations from the correct line.
186
Mao was the line. As he observed in April 1968: 'Except in the
deserts, at every place of human habitation there is the left,
the center, and the right. This will continue to be so 10,000
years hence.’
Mao's own staff and family were not exempted from this
process of struggle and violence, even though Red Guard
units were not allowed into Zhongnanhai itself, or into the
top-secret military installations such as those where
scientists were working to develop the H-bomb (they had
successfully constructed and detonated their own atomic
bomb in October 1964, despite the refusal of the Soviets to
help them). Indeed, Mao's nephew Mao Yuanxin tried to
lead a group of Red Guards into just such a location, in
Manchuria, but was prevented by the army force on duty.
Having decided to ally himself with Jiang Qing, Yuanxin had
become an important figure in the Cultural Revolution by
this time, and Jiang Qing engineered his promotion to be a
political commander in the Shenyang (Mukden) region. He
even set up his own office inside Zhongnanhai. Mao's sur-
viving son, Mao Anqing, seems to have been left alone, and
his wife, Shaohua, joined the People's Liberation Army in
1966, on graduation from Beijing University, providing
liaison between the family and the two key institutions in the
Cultural Revolution. (They had a son, Xinyu, in 1971, Mao's
second grandson.) Mao's eldest daughter, Li Min, was work-
ing in the Military Defense Bureau and came under harsh
criticism for at least five months. Mao refused to help her in
any way (he had refused to use his influence to help Jiang
Qing also, when she came under criticism in the Yan'an
rectification campaign), and Li Min and her husband had a
187
difficult time. They had two children, a boy and a girl; the
girl spent at least some of this bleak period living with her
grandmother He Zizhen in Shanghai.
Mao's younger daughter, Li Na, graduated from Beijing
University in 1965, and she kept her father abreast of student
and faculty sentiment there in the early stages of the Cultural
Revolution. She was working then as an editor of the People's
Liberation Army newspaper, while living in Zhongnanhai.
But in 1970 she was sent - perhaps on Mao's instructions - to
one of the rectification institutions, known as 'May 7 cadre
schools,’ where hard agricultural labor was combined with
ideological study. This particular ‘school’ was in the
Jinggangshan region, where Mao had led his guerrilla forces
in 1928 and 1929. Now, in an odd echo of Mao's relationship
there with He Zizhen, Li Na fell in love with one of the men
who were supposed to be guarding her, and married him.
The couple separated a few years afterward, but at the time of
the separation Li Na was already pregnant, and she bore a
child in 1973, providing Mao with his third grandson.
There is no logical way to date the ending of the Cultural
Revolution. For many the height of its political fury was
during 1966 and 1967, but in many of its aspects - the feuds
between rival groups, the long years spent living with
peasants in poor areas of the countryside, the fears of sudden
raids on home and property, the insistent rhetoric against
any aspect of the old society, the disruption of schools, and
the management of most institutions through revolutionary
committees - the extremist policies endured. The cultural
sphere, where Jiang Qing had the strongest hold, was strictly
regimented, and the content of art was intensely monitored
188
until the mid-1970s. Also, the ongoing tensions in the
country were exacerbated by the continuing bad relations
with the Soviet Union. In 1969 these erupted into armed
clashes along the northern Sino-Soviet border, leading to
new mass-mobilization campaigns and the spread of war
scares and a fresh hunt for traitors and 'revisionists.'
Mao was restless, and traveled widely during this period.
Perhaps because he wished to get away from what he found
was the oppressive atmosphere of Beijing, or to distance him-
self from Jiang Qing, he lived for long periods on his special
train or in the various guest houses around the country that
were always at his disposal. Though his health was not good
and his eyesight was deteriorating rapidly, he seems to have
kept up liaisons with various young companions.
Mao had always had irregular sleep patterns - he told
friends that this was because his sleep naturally followed
lunar phases, rather than the rhythms of the solar time to
which most other people responded - and he took either
Seconal or chloral hydrate for insomnia, getting the drugs
through his physicians from a pharmacy where they were
prepared for him under a code name. He also ate erratically
and had poor teeth, which sometimes abscessed. In 1970,
Mao had a serious case of pneumonia.
What seems to have weakened Mao's health far more than
his irregular habits and wayward lifestyle was the extra-
ordinary shock caused to him by the defection of Lin Biao in
1971. Though the details of exactly what occurred remain
elusive, it seems that Lin Biao had come to suspect that Mao
was losing faith in him, and that Mao hence had abandoned
any idea of making Lin his revolutionary successor. In anger
189
and desperation, Lin and some close army confidants
conceived a plan to assassinate Mao by blowing up his train,
and then to take over the government. When the plot was
discovered on 13 September 1971, Lin fled from China in an
air force plane, with several of his family members. The
plane crashed in Mongolia, and all aboard were killed. It was
the most bizarre of stories, with countless loose ends, but
certainly Lin Biao was dead and Mao felt betrayed. After he
received the news, Mao spent days lying in bed or shuffling
around his room in Zhongnanhai. His insomnia worsened,
his speech slurred, and his lower legs and feet swelled up. In
January 1972 he was diagnosed as having congestive heart
failure, and the swelling of his limbs had grown worse,
extending to his neck.
This growing physical weakness coincided with the last
internationally significant act in Mao's life: his decision to
invite the president of the United States to China. Such a
visit would be a first step toward repairing the diplomatic
relations that had been severed since the outbreak of the
Korean War in 1950, and that were now freeing up some-
what, since in August 1971 the United Nations had voted to
give Taiwan's seat to the mainland regime, and the United
States had not resisted. It would also lead to a realignment in
global power, as the United States would be called in as a
counterbalance to the Soviet Union, which Mao now saw as
the greater threat. A detente with the United States might
also hasten a settlement of the Vietnam War and prevent any
further Soviet meddling there. It would also reassert Mao's
own power as a major foreign-policy decision-maker.
The preliminary negotiations between Henry Kissinger
190
and Zhou Enlai took place in complete secrecy during 1971,
because so much was at stake for both sides. But on 18
February 1972, all preparations smoothly completed,
President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger walked
together into Mao's study in Zhongnanhai. The president
noticed that Mao had to be helped to his feet by a ‘girl
secretary,’ and his first words to Nixon were 'I can't talk very
well.’ During their informal conversation, moreover, Mao
was self-deprecatory. Praised by the two Americans for the
power of his political writings and his effect on the world,
Mao replied that 'there is nothing instructive in what I
wrote’ and that he had no effect on changing the world: 'I've
only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of
Beijing.’ In a similar vein, when his own words that one
should 'seize the day' were quoted to him by the president,
Mao responded, 'I think that, generally speaking, people like
me sound like a lot of big cannons.’ Such phrases, said Mao,
had no more significance than things like "The whole world
should unite and defeat imperialism, revisionism, and all
reactionaries, and establish socialism.’ As they walked to the
door, Mao was shuffling and said he had not been feeling
well. "You look very good,’ Nixon responded. 'Appearances
are deceiving,’ answered Mao. Kissinger, too, while noting
Mao's strong grasp of international politics, and the wit and
appropriateness of his responses, observed that Mao needed
‘two assistants’ help' to rise from his armchair, and that Mao
‘could move only with difficulty and speak but with con-
siderable effort.’ Mao's doctor mentioned later that because
of physical weakness Mao 'practiced sitting down and
getting up' for days before his meeting with Nixon.
191
It had been an extraordinary shift in policy by Mao, to
upend the strident attacks on United States imperialism that
had flooded China's airwaves and newspapers for decades,
and it is proof of the extraordinary power that Mao knew he
had over his own people. But it is one of the last times we can
see that power being utilized to the full.
The last important example was Mao's 1973 decision to
allow the purged Deng Xiaoping to return to power. Deng
had been ousted in the early years of the Cultural Revolution,
but had never been mistreated as savagely as Liu Shaoqi or
Peng Dehuai, and had spent the years of his disgrace living in
Jiangxi and working - at least some of the time - in a tractor
plant. Mao had even said that 'if Lin Biao's health should fail
him, I will let Xiaoping come back.’ Deng had laid the
groundwork for his return by writing a correctly abject self-
criticism, in which he admitted all the charges against him
and announced that he would 'sincerely and without any
reservations accept the denunciations and accusations
directed at me by the Party and the revolutionary masses.
Deng expressed a willingness to die for his misdeeds, but
added that his greatest hope would be to have 'a trivial task of
some sort that will provide me with an opportunity to make
up for my past mistakes and to turn over a new leaf.’ Mao's
1973 order that Deng Xioaping be recalled for active duty in
Beijing deepened the rift - already long-standing - between
Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing, for she and Deng loathed each
other. By 1973 Mao was open about his dislike and distrust of
Jiang Qing, and it is possible that Mao's recall of Deng was
done partly to infuriate her. Her attempt to stall Deng's
return could have been the trigger for a harsh letter Mao
192
wrote her in 1974, which contained the sentences: 'It would be
better for us not to see each other. For years I have advised
you about many things, but you have ignored most of it. So
what use is there for us to see each other?’
Though Mao's health had improved during 1973, and he
seemed alert and even spritely at times, the debilitating
symptoms that the Americans had noticed in 1972 were
confirmed in July 1974 by medical tests that showed Mao had
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the motor-neuron condition
known as 'Lou Gehrig's disease.’ By this time he was having
great trouble reading, and sometimes eating and talking,
since he could not fully close his mouth. Also, the muscles
on the right side of his body began to atrophy. That fall and
winter, Mao took extended trips in his special train, against
his doctors’ objections: one to Wuhan and one to Changsha,
scene of so many of his youthful revolutionary activities.
There he tried for a last time to swim, but it turned out to be
impossible. He took mainly liquid food and spent much of
the time lying in bed on his left side. Yet he still followed
political events enough to stop a new attempt to prevent
Deng's rise, for he knew that Zhou Enlai was dying of cancer
and Deng would be the only major check to Jiang Qing and
her inner circle. And Mao was able to sustain his end of the
conversation when Kissinger returned to China with
President Gerald Ford in 1975, even though Mao's words
were mumbled and indistinct, and he often wrote out his
responses on a pad of paper held by his nurse.
But in the main, Mao was restricted to following the
political dramas through intermediaries. One of his contacts
with the Politburo was his nephew Mao Yuanxin, whom
193
Mao trusted, even though the young man was close to Jiang
Qing. For those seeking to communicate with Mao himself,
the main route was now through his female confidant and
attendant Zhang Yufeng, who could transform his mur-
mured sounds into intelligible words for others, and was the
one who read many of the policy documents aloud to him.
Fifty years younger than Mao, Zhang had been born in
Manchuria in 1944 while it was still the puppet Japanese state
of Manchukuo, and after finishing high school she got a job
in i960 serving on the trains used by senior cadres and
foreign dignitaries. In 1962 she was assigned to Mao's private
train, and by the end of that year, on a journey to Changsha,
she became one of the young women who regularly joined
Mao for dance parties. Although she had married a worker
in the railway bureau in 1967, and bore him a daughter,
Zhang Yufeng began to accompany Mao on all his long trips,
including a three-month journey along the Yangtze in 1969.
The following year she joined him as a personal attendant in
his home in Zhongnanhai. They separated for a while, after
an argument, but she was ordered to return. Thereafter she
became Mao's secretary and nurse, and as his sight failed, she
read key documents to him. From 1972 onward, the two of
them regularly ate together, and she began to control access
to Mao by deciding how and when his health made it suit-
able for visitors to be with him. She had become Mao's main
conduit to the outside world.
A cataract operation in the summer of 1975 and the fitting
of special glasses gave Mao back some reading ability, and he
was even able to watch movies with Zhang Yufeng in his
study. Invited members of his staff were allowed to watch the
194
same movies in a special screening room nearby. But Mao
sometimes needed oxygen to breathe, and his right side was
virtually paralyzed. His doctors decided, over his objections,
to give him amino acids intravenously. When Zhou Enlai
was dying of cancer in the hospital in January 1976, Mao was
considered too ill to visit him. Through his nephew Mao
Yuanxin, Mao did receive news of the great crowds that
assembled to mourn the dead premier in Tiananmen Square
on the tomb-sweeping day of 5 April. Through the same
source he heard of the swift and violent military and police
suppression of the demonstration. Though Mao had pre-
viously backed Deng Xiaoping's return to power, he appears
to have agreed with the argument made by some senior
colleagues that Deng Xiaoping's scheming lay behind the
demonstrations, and that Deng should be again dismissed. It
seems to have been Mao's personal decision to appoint Hua
Guofeng, formerly the Party secretary in Hunan province, to
be the new premier, and Party first vice chairman. This
remarkable promotion transformed the previously almost
unknown Hua into Mao's probable successor. Though an
odd and risky decision, the appointment of Hua was a delib-
erate compromise, to balance off Deng Xiaoping supporters
against those of Jiang Qing.
Mao suffered a major heart attack on 11 May 1976, and the
Politburo decided - without informing him - that they
would choose on a case-by-case basis whether to share their
deliberations with him. At the same time they began to hold
some of their meetings in the swimming-pool area next to
Mao's rooms, so they could be present swiftly in any
emergency. On 26 June, Mao had a second heart attack. A
195
third came on 2 September, more serious than the previous
two, leaving him weakened and comatose. On 8 September,
he was alert enough to spend some short periods reading
reports, but he dozed off repeatedly. Around 11:15 PM, he
drifted into a coma. Ten minutes after midnight, on 9
September 1976, Mao died in the presence of the ranking
members of the Politburo, who had been summoned to his
room, and his attendant physicians.
The nearest thing that we have to Mao's thoughts about his
approaching death comes from notes of a meeting he held,
with several members of the Politburo, in Zhongnanhai on 15
June, shortly before his second heart attack. Mao told his
colleagues that reaching the age of seventy was unusual, and
passing eighty inevitably made one think about funeral
arrangements. It was therefore time to implement the old
Chinese saying that, when appropriate, one should 'seal the
coffin and pass the final verdict.' Mao had done two things
that mattered, he said. He had battled Chiang Kai-shek for
years and finally chased him off to 'that little island’ of
Taiwan. And in the long war of resistance he had ‘asked the
Japanese to return to their ancestral home’ and had fought
his way into the Forbidden City. Few people would argue that
those were achievements. But what about the Cultural
Revolution, where he had few supporters and ‘quite a few
opponents’? That revolution remained unfinished, said Mao,
and all he could do was pass the task on to the next genera-
tion. If he could not pass it on peacefully, then he would have
to pass it on in turmoil. 'What will happen to the next
generation if it all fails?’ he asked. "There may be a foul wind
and a rain of blood. How will you cope? Heaven only knows!’
196
NOTES
The most important Western guide to the life and works of Mao Zedong
is Stuart Schram, whose The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung was
published in 1963 (Paris and New York), and was soon followed by his
closely researched biography, Mao Tse-tung, (New York, 1966). Over the
last few years, Schram has been occupied with an immense project to
assemble and translate all the works that can reasonably and reliably be
attributed to Mao, under the general title Mao's Road to Power:
Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949. To date, four volumes have appeared,
all published by M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y.: vol. 1, The Pre-Marxist
Period, 1912-1920 (1992); vol. 2, National Revolution and Social Revolution,
December 1920-June 1927 (1994); vol. 3, From the Jinggangshan to the
Establishment of the Jiangxi Soviets, July 1927-December 1930 (1995); and
vol. 4, The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Soviet Republic, 1931-1934 (1997).
Many intriguing details, though one needs to sift through them with care,
were provided by Mao himself in his celebrated 1936 interview with Edgar
Snow, conducted after the Long March and published by Snow to great
acclaim as Red Star Over China (New York, 1938). Another useful earlier
study was Jerome Ch'en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution (Oxford, 1965).
A lively biography, based on wide reading but also with much recon-
structed dialogue, is Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography (New York, 1980, and
subsequent revisions). In 1993 a group of scholars in China, under the
general editor Pang Xianzhi, compiled a detailed chronological biography
of Mao, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893-1949, 3 vols. (Beijing, 1993). Another
immensely useful translation containing many of Mao's personal letters, is
Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung, eds., The Writings of Mao Zedong,
197
1949-1976, of which two volumes have appeared to date: vol. 1, September
1949-December 1955 (Armonk, N.Y., 1986), and vol. 2, January
1956-December 1957 (Armonk, N.Y., 1992). Scores of volumes of remi-
niscences and anecdotes about Mao, and of memoirs by those who
worked for him, have been appearing in China in recent years. Some are
referred to below.
Chapter 1
Mao's account of his childhood to Snow in Red Star Over China, especially
pp. 122-34, remains a basic source. Other invaluable backup sources from
Mao's early letters and writings are in Stuart Schram, Mao's Road to Power,
vol. 1, The Pre-Marxist Period, 1912-1920. Here, I draw especially on pp. 59-65
for two 1915 letters by Mao to friends, and for a reminiscence from his
teacher, and on pp. 419-20 for Mao's euology at his mother's funeral.
Details on the Luo family and Mao's first wife are given by Xiao Feng, in
Mao Zedong zhimi (Beijing, 1992), pp. 128-29. On the 1911 revolution and
the events in Hunan, admirable background books are Mary C. Wright,
China in Revolution: The First Phase (New Haven, 1968), and Joseph
Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan
and Hubei (Berkeley, 1976), especially pp. 155-58 and 204-10 on Jiao and
Chen.
Chapter 2
On Mao's formative school years, the information Mao gave to Snow in
Red Star Over China, especially on pp. 139-50, can now be supplemented
with a mass of newly available Chinese material, translated in Schram,
Mao's Road to Power. These include Mao's earliest surviving schoolboy
essay on Lord Shang (vol. 1, pp. 5-6), his 1913 reading notes on classical
Chinese texts (vol. i, pp. 40-43), a friend's account of their outings and
swims (vol. 1, pp. 137-40), and the complete run of Paulsen study notes
(vol. 1, pp. 175-310). The Hunan study-group meetings and Ms. Tao's
comments are in Schram, vol. 2, especially pp. 18-19, 25, and 80-85.
198
Chapter 3
A detailed study of Hunan in this period of Mao's life is Angus W.
McDonald, The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution: Elites and the Masses in
Hunan Province, China, 1911-192/ (Berkeley, 1978). The best study about
‘The May Fourth Movement’ is still Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth
Movement, Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, (Cambridge, Mass.,
i960). Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 1, has key material on Mao's
mother's illness (p. 317), the July 1919 manifesto (pp. 319-20), the critique
of General Zhang (pp. 476-86), Mao's Russian- and English-language
forays (p. 518), and the Cultural Book Society (pp. 534-35). Schram, ibid.,
vol. 2, pp. 56-58, has the bookshop investors’ list. In Snow, Red Star Over
China, the main details for Mao at this stage of his life are on pp. 148-51.
Andrew Nathan, Peking Politics, 1918-1923: Factionalism and the Failure of
Constitutionalism (New York, 1976), bravely tackles the tangled politics of
the capital at this time.
Chapter 4
For the detailed background history of the early Communist Party, an
essential work is Tony Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist
Party (Armonk, N.Y., 1996), which gives the full texts of the documents
mentioned here, and careful background on the First Congress. The same
author's The Origins of the First United Front in China: The Role of
Sneevliet (alias Maring), 2 vols. (Leiden, 1991), gives meticulous details on
the early Comintern in China. About the Chinese in France, many of them
Mao's friends from Changsha, the finest source is Marilyn A. Levine, The
Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe During the Twenties
(Seattle, 1993). Mao's early strike activities are well covered in Lynda
Shaffer, Mao and the Workers: The Hunan Labor Movement, 1920-1923
(Armonk, N.Y., 1982). For the details from Mao's correspondence, see
Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 1, pp. 546-47, on the references to
Lenin, and pp. 608-9 for the references to marriage and rape. The book-
shop expansion is in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 46-53; the letters to France on Marxism
are in vol. 2, pp. 7-8; the New People's Study Society is explored in vol. 2,
pp. 28-32 and pp. 68-70; and the Confucian Academy as a front in vol. 2,
pp. 89-96.
199
Chapter 5
The basic source on the Hunan strikes is Shaffer, Mao and the Workers,
which details the work of the returned students Liu Shaoqi (from
Moscow) and Li Lisan (from France) in the mining strikes at the Anyuan
collieries and railyards, and the Shuikoushan lead and zinc mines; she
covers Mao and the carpenters on pp. 119-42, and Mao and the printers on
pp. 148-61. Saich, Rise to Power, gives full documentation for Chen Duxiu's
negative views on the United Front, Chen's 1923 Party figures, and Mao's
1923 description of Hunan's problems. Snow, Red Star Over China, p. 159,
gives Mao's statement on the missed 1922 Party Congress. Schram, Mao's
Road to Power, vol. 2, has Mao's 1923 strike tables (pp. 172-77), the report
of his 1926 Changsha speech (pp. 420-22), the 1926 Xiangtan report (pp.
478-83), and the entire Hunan report of 1927 (pp. 429-68). The Hunan
tables are on p. 442, and the cited passage is on p. 430. The cited passage
from the Great Union of the Popular Masses is from Schram, vol. 1, p. 386.
The Chinese transcript of the original version of Mao's poem of 1923 to
Yang Kaihui is given in Xiao Yongyi, ed., Mao Zedong shici duilian jizhu
(Changsha, 1991), pp. 10-13; I have used this version, and especially the
original closing four lines of the poem as given there, to amend the
translation of the revised later version of the poem in Schram, vol. 2,
PP-195-96.
Chapter 6
The basic documentary history of the period is given in Saich, Rise to
Power. A powerful earlier account of the events of 1927 is Harold Isaacs,
The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford, 1961), which can be
supplemented with Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement,
1919-1927 (Stanford, 1968), and with Elizabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike:
The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, 1993). The period after 1928 is
covered in S. Bernard Thomas, Labor and the Chinese Revolution (Ann
Arbor, 1983). Mao's 1927 writings on the need for grasping the barrel of the
gun are given in Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 3, pp. 21-31 and 35-36,
his Changsha campaign dreams in vol. 3, p. 44. The Jinggangshan material
is in Schram, vol. 3, pp. 51-130. Schram, vol. 3, pp. 192-93, gives the text
about Yang Kaihui in Mao's letter to Li Lisan. Yang Kaihui's October 1928
200
poem for Mao is printed in Xiao Yongyi, ed., Mao Zedong shici, pp.
99-100.
Details on the birth of Mao and Yang's third child, Anlong, and the
various children born to Mao and He Zizhen, are discussed in Bin Zi, Mao
Zedong de gangqing shijie (Jilin, 1990), pp. 32, 95, and 124-30, and in Ye
Yonglie, Jiang Qing zhuan (Beijing, 1993), pp. 163-68. The subsequent fates
of Anlong, Anying, and Anging are given in Xiu Juan, Mao Zedong Yuqin
zhuan (Beijing, 1993), pp. 42-43 and 83-84. The text of Mao's entire Jiangxi
investigation is translated and analyzed by Roger Thompson, Mao Zedong:
Report from Xunwu (Stanford, 1990). The politics of the Long March and
the Zunyi meetings are studied in detail by Benjamin Yang, From
Revolution to Politics: Chinese Communists on the Long March (Boulder,
1990). Edgar Snow noted the birth of Mao and He's daughter Li Min in Red
Star Over China, p. 72.
Chapter 7
The texts of the main Xian discussions and Yan'an political debates can be
found in Saich, Rise to Power, pp. 769-87, and the protest made by Wang
Shiwei against Mao in ibid., p. 1107. The Yan'an talks are translated and
explicated in Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong's 'Talks at the Yan'an
Conference on Literature and Art' (Ann Arbor, 1980). The various policies
in the northern Communist base areas are finely analyzed in Pauline
B. Keating, Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative
Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 1934-1945 (Stanford, 1997). The most
thorough review of the growth of the Mao cult is that by Raymond
F. Wylie, The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch'en Po-ta, and the
Search for Chinese Theory, 1935-1945 (Stanford, 1980). Snow's Red Star
Over China nicely depicts Mao's carefully honed self-presentation at this
time. Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in
Eastern and Central China, 1937-1945 (Berkeley, 1986), shows the realities
of life in the other main border areas. Gregor Benton, Mountain Fires: The
Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938 (Berkeley, 1992),
explores the lives of those Communists left behind at the time of the Long
March.
201
Chapter 8
Rather surprisingly, there is still no definitive book on the 1945-1949 civil
war in China. The policies of the Soviet Union during the war are
summarized in James Reardon-Anderson, Yenan and the Great Powers: The
Origins of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy, 1944-1946 (New York, 1980).
Saich, Rise to Power, again gives the key Communist policy documents.
The buildup of the Communists’ base in Manchuria is explored by Steven
Levine in Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria,
'945-1944 (New York, 1987). The Mao-Stalin talks have been published in
the Bulletin of the Cold War International History Project, issues 6 and 7,
'The Cold War in Asia,’ Washington, DC, winter 1995/1996, pp. 5-9. The
possibilities of preserving Beijing and its walls as an ideal park-like city
were pushed by Liang Sicheng, son of Mao's erstwhile reformist hero Liang
Qichao. See Wilma Fairbank, Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China's
Architectural Past (Philadelphia, 1994). Two important reevaluations of the
Korean War, using many newly available Chinese sources, are Chen Jian,
China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-Amerkan
Confrontation (New York, 1994), and Shu Guang Zhang, Mao's Military
Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953, (Lawrence, Kan., 1995).
Mao's comments on the death of his son in Korea are given in Michael Kau
and John Leung, eds., The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949-1976, 2 vols.
(Armonk, N.Y., 1986 and 1992), vol. 1, pp. 147-48.
Chapter 9
The personal letters to Mao cited here can be found in Kau and Leung,
The Writings of Mao Zedong, vol. 1, pp. 13-14, 74-77, 233, and 448, on the
Yang family: vol. 1, pp. 121-22 and 141 on former teachers; and vol. 1, pp.
36, 70, and 161 on local abuses. A careful analysis of the roles of Mao's
confidential secretaries is in Dong Bian, ed., Mao Zedong he fade mishu
Tian Jiaying (Beijing, 1989). Background documents on Mao's rural
reforms are given in Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5 (Peking, 1977)>
especially pp. 184-90 and 198-99. The important original draft of the
February 1957 ‘Contradictions’ speech is translated in full in Roderick
MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, and Eugene Wu, eds., The Secret Speeches
of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward
202
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 131-89. The 1957 Beidaihe talks are in ibid.,
PP- 397-441- On the early purges, see Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics at Mao's
Court, Gao Gang and Party Factionalism in the Early 1950s (Armonk, N.Y.,
1990). A useful overview of data and sources on the 1950s is Timothy
Cheek and Tony Saich, eds., New Perspectives on State Socialism in China
(Armonk, N.Y., 1997).
Chapter 10
Several new personal details on Mao's children and their spouses were
released in Beijing Review, 13 December 1993, pp. 20-22, and on Jiang Qing
and Mao in Ye Yonglie, Jiang Qing zhuan, p. 240. On p. 248, Ye Yonglie
gives details on He Zizhen in the 1950s. Mao's village talks are given in
Leung and Kau, vol. 2, pp. 80, 83, and 299. His letter to spare the nanny
Chen Yuying from labor duty is in Kau and Leung, The Writings of Mao
Zedong, vol. 2, p. 803. Mao's poem for Yang Kaihui and Li Shuyi's husband
was written on 11 May 1957, published the following New Year's Day in
Hunan, and then later run in the national press. I follow the Chinese text
and notes in Xiao Yongyi, Mao Zedong shici, pp. 96-99; in the translation
I draw on the versions in Kau and Leung, vol. 2, p. 539, and in Ch'en, Mao
and the Chinese Revolution, pp. 347-48. Deng Tuo's life is carefully
evaluated in Timothy Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao's China:
Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia (Oxford, England, 1997), especially pp.
178-81, for their crucial confrontation. An excellent source on the Lushan
Plenum and Peng's role is Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the
Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 'The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1960' (New
York, 1983), pp. 187-251; quotations are from pp. 197, 203,247, and 249. For
Mao's Great Leap poem from the Shaoshan visit of 25 June 1959, see Xiao
Yongyi, pp. 106-8, and the English versions in Schram, Mao Tse-tung,
p. 298, and Ch'en, p. 350.
Chapter 11
The investigative tours coordinated by Tian Jiaying are carefully explored
in MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (New York, 1997),
vol. 3, 'The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961-1966,' especially pp. 39-43,
203
50-55. and 264-66. The suicides of Deng and Tian are discussed on pp.
456-60. The same book gives a detailed analysis of the various factional
groupings and their policies prior to the Cultural Revolution, and is a
good way to cross-check some of the most controversial parts of Li
Zhisui's memoir, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York, 1994).
Transcripts of Mao's talks with his nephew Mao Yuanxin are given in
Stuart Schram, ed., Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters,
1956-1971 (New York, 1974), pp. 243-52. Mao's remark on the intellectuals
cocking their tails is in Kau and Leung, The Writings of Mao Zedong, vol.
2, p. 611. The essay by Michael Schoenhals, "The Central Case Examination
Group, 1966-79,' China Quarterly, vol. 145, March 1996, pp. 87-m,
examines that crucial organization. Schoenhals has also edited an
invaluable collection of materials on the Cultural Revolution, China's
Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969: Not a Dinner Party (Armonk, N.Y., 1996).
See pp. 212-22 for the Number 26 Middle School manifesto. The most
complex and powerful account of the turbulent emotions aroused in the
young Red Guards that I have read is Rae Yang, Spider Eaters: A Memoir
(Berkeley, 1997).
Chapter 12
Besides the informal documents in Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the
People (pp. 270-74), a useful collection of Mao's Cultural Revolution
reflections is Jerome Ch'en, Mao Papers, Anthology and Bibliography
(Oxford, England, 1970), quotations from pp. 35-36, 45-49, and 153. Mao
Yuanxin's activities are mentioned in Li Zhisui, The Private Life of
Chairman Mao, pp. 504-5, and Mao's harsh 1974 letter to Jiang Qing on
p. 578. Li Zhisui mentions Li Na as a link with the students in pp. 468-69
and 504. Her Jinggangshan romance and pregnancy is discussed in Ye
Yonglie, Jiang Qingzhuan, pp. 607-8. Li Zhisui's details of Mao's debilities
seem to have been often exaggerated; a more vigorous and alert Mao
comes across from the transcripts of Henry Kissinger's five visits with Mao
between 1972 and 1975: see William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts:
The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York, 1999). Some of
these materials are also in Richard Nixon, RN, Memoirs (New York, 1978),
pp. 560-64, Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston, 1979), p. 1059,
and Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York, 1999), pp. 868-99. Ruan
204
Jihong collected valuable interview materials with Zhang Yufu, Mao's
female attendant in his last years; they are published in Huang Haizhou,
ed., Mao Zedong yishi (Hunan, 1989), pp. 26-39. The medical reports of
Mao's last hours are in Lin Ke et al., eds., Lishi de zhenshi (Hong Kong,
1995)> PP- 190-98. On Mao's death thoughts, see Schoenhals, China's
Cultural Revolution, p. 293.
205