Mao Zedong (2 page)

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 advertising, 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 December 26, 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 grandparents 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 B.C. 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 grand-father. 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 U.S. 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 1904-1905. 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 industrialization 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.”