Mao Zedong
A Lipper/Viking Book

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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 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 longstanding 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 bookkeeping, 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 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."

    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, 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 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."

(C) 1999 Jonathan Spence All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-670-88669-6



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