Mao Zedong (3 page)

These months in Xiangxiang township were the first time that Mao had been exposed to a wider world of contemporary 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 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 assemblymen 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, 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 intellectually, 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 foreign affairs minister. He joined in student demonstrations 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 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, crafts-men, 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 disadvantaged while at the same time increasing the power base of the affiliated secret societies.

Though they showed considerable courage and shrewdness 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 last long. They were not bad men, and had some revolutionary intentions, but they were poor and represented 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 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.”

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, Mao retreated in mid-1912 to the shelter of a more traditional 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 B.C. 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 B.C. 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 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: