Mao Zedong (5 page)

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 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 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 combination of school-teaching, 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 corresponded, 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 preserving 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 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 August 11, 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 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.

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 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 townspeople 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 battlefields 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 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 magazines in Beijing, Shanghai, and smaller provincial cities, students and their teachers were exploring themes ranging from Bertrand Russell’s mathematical logic and Ein stein’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 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 April 6.