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 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 uncontrollably 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 of fense of which 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 previously 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 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.
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 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 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 philosophers. 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 utilitarianism, 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 national ones,” and argued that intense family protection of the individual could in fact harm that individual’s development 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 philosophical 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.” Sometimes 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 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 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.