Mao Zedong (6 page)

To what extent was Mao the prodigal son returned? He told his family members that he had been “a staff member of Beijing University,” which left unclear exactly what he had done in the capital. But for now, with both his ill mother and his own future to think of, Mao took a job teaching history in a Changsha primary and middle school (it also had a teacher-training department) known as the “Study School.” He stayed there until December 1919. As well as teaching, Mao embarked on a burst of writing, clearly stimulated by his stay in the volatile intellectual world of Beijing. In his earlier school days, his classical literature teacher Yuan had mocked him for being a journalist overinfluenced by Liang Qichao. Forced to follow the great events of the May 4 students’ demonstrations in Beijing at a distance—the demonstrations, directed against the corrupt Beijing regime that had betrayed China to Japan, and against United States support for Japan’s position, led to the designation of this whole period of intellectual ferment as the “May Fourth Movement”—Mao decided to keep the students and citizens of Changsha up-to-date with the news. He did this through a journal he edited, the
Xiang River Review,
which he also wrote almost entirely himself, producing four issues at weekly intervals between July 14 and August 4, until the local warlord closed the magazine down.

In Mao’s “manifesto” for the new journal, dated July 14, 1919, he gave what we may assume to be an accurate summary of his political views that summer. It was an emotional voice, deeply influenced by the rhetoric of Li Dazhao, that attempted an overarching view of human destiny and world history. A movement for the “liberation of mankind” was under way, wrote Mao, and all old prejudices must be questioned. All old fears must be jettisoned too—fear of heaven, spirits, the dead, the bureaucrats, the warlords, the capitalists. The West had followed a route of “emancipation” that led through the Renaissance and the Reformation to the formation of representative governments with universal suffrage and the League of Nations. “Democracy,” however one chose to translate it into Chinese—Mao offered his readers four variants of acceptable Chinese renderings—was the central name for the movement against oppression in all its forms: religious, literary, political, social, educational, economic, and intellectual. But in fighting oppression one should not use the tools of oppression—that would be self-defeating. Instead, one should “accept the fact that the oppressors are people, are human beings like ourselves,” and that their oppressive acts are not so much willed by them, but are more like “an infection or hereditary disease passed on to them from the old society and old thought.” China was facing a revolution that cried out for bread, for freedom, and for equality; there was no need for a “revolution of bombs or a revolution of blood,” Mao wrote. Japan was the worst of the international oppressors, and he felt it should be dealt with by means of economic boycotts and student and worker strikes. To achieve this, the “popular masses” of China—“simple untutored folk”—should be educated and their minds broadened beyond the shores of their own Xiang River to grasp “the great world tides rolling in.... Those who ride with the current will live; those who go against it will die.” As part of his own contribution to this program, Mao wrote twenty-six articles on Chinese and world history for the first issue, and printed two thousand copies, which sold out in a day.

Increasing the print run to five thousand for the subsequent issues, Mao continued to write short essays and also a lengthy manifesto entitled “The Great Union of the Popular Masses,” which took up the majority of issues two through four. In this essay Mao laid forth a whole range of possible union organizations to give strength to those waging the struggle ahead—not just unions of workers, farmers, and students, but also of women, primary school teachers, policemen, and rickshaw pullers. To give a sense of the continuity of the struggle, Mao also published a detailed history of the various organizations of students in Hunan since the late Qing period, not neglecting to mention the role of major athletic meets as opportunities for student solidarity in the face of the oppressors. For the fifth issue, Mao promised his five thousand readers a detailed account of the “Hunan student army.”

In all these writings, Mao was either implicitly or overtly criticizing the ruling militarist in Hunan, General Zhang Jingyao, who seemed to represent everything against which Mao was now beginning to rebel. Like others in this period, Zhang had acquired his early knowledge of soldiering as a bandit, before transferring into a military academy and, after graduation, joining the coterie of a powerful northern Chinese politician. Through personal contacts and his control of a sizable body of troops he was appointed military governor of Hunan in 1918, after a savage war in which tens of thousands of Hunanese were killed, and even more homes and businesses were destroyed. Zhang brought with him into Hunan as senior administrators his three brothers, all as ruthless and corrupt as he was. It is not surprising that when Zhang heard of Mao’s fifth journal issue, with its provocative subject matter, he ordered all copies confiscated and destroyed. Unfazed, Mao got himself appointed as the editor of another journal, the
New Hunan,
for which he penned a new but far briefer manifesto. This journal, he declared, would have four guiding principles: to criticize society, to reform thought, to introduce new learning, and to discuss problems. All power or “authority”—Mao printed this word in English, which he was struggling to learn at this time— that might endeavor to silence them would be ignored. Mao might have believed that this journal would receive a measure of protection because it was the organ of the Yale-in-China association in Changsha (the American university’s offshoot in China), founded after the Boxer Uprisings of 1900 to bring Western medical education to China. If so, he was mistaken. This journal, too, was suppressed after one issue, by the same General Zhang.

Blocked from this new avenue, Mao became a regular contributor to Changsha’s largest newspaper, the
Dagongbao.
It was for this paper that he wrote a series of nine articles on the suicide of a local Changsha woman named Zhao Wuzhen, which attracted wide attention. Zhao had killed herself inside her enclosed bridal sedan chair, as she was being taken to an arranged marriage that she bitterly opposed. Mao used the opportunity to develop the ideas he had absorbed from Yang Changji, and other writers for
New Youth,
about the need to end old marriage customs, abolish matchmakers and their endless “cheap tricks,” and inaugurate an era of freedom of choice and economic opportunities for women in the new China.

During this period of the summer and fall of 1919, Mao continued to work on organizing the Hunan “United Students’ Association,” and in December he organized a widely supported student strike of thirteen thousand middle school students against Zhang Jingyao, who had further alienated all teachers and students by slashing the Hunan educational budget, cutting teachers’ merit raises, blocking teachers’ salaries, beating up those who protested, and billeting his unruly troops inside school buildings. All this was in addition to Zhang’s troops’ ongoing record of extraordinary cruelty to farmers’ families in the countryside, his seizure of banks’ assets, and his proven record of massive opium smuggling and the illegal selling of lead-mining rights to German and American businessmen. Zhang’s harsh repression of the student strike led Mao to consider his own future options with renewed care. Furthermore, Mao’s mother died that fall, on October 5, and, presiding at the funeral on October 8, he gave a loving oration in her memory. He was still unmarried and had become something of a marked figure in Changsha, as well as a definite thorn in the side of the dangerous General Zhang. So in December, Mao traveled once again to Beijing to see the Yangs, to attempt to deepen his contacts with Li Dazhao and other writers he admired, and to seek support for a national campaign to oust the corrupt general Zhang from Hunan Province.

Mao arrived in Beijing to find Professor Yang Changji desperately ill. A gastric illness the previous summer had somehow led to massive swelling of his body and to collapse of his digestive system. Convalescence in the scenic western hills, and specialized care in the Beijing German hospital, had alike been unavailing. Yang’s colleagues ascribed the illness to overwork at Beijing University, where he was teaching a full load besides translating two books on Western ethics and writing educational surveys. Yang died at dawn on January 17, 1920, and on January 22, just a few months after giving the eulogy at his own mother’s funeral, Mao became the cosignatory of the funeral eulogy for his most influential teacher. One day later, on January 23, Mao’s father died at his home in Shaoshan.

Mao, however, stayed on in Beijing. There must have been family matters to attend to back in Hunan, but there was a lot to do in Beijing. There were the Yangs, mother and daughter, to see to. Most important to Mao’s political future was Li Dazhao, whom he now got to know better, for both were mourning the loss of a mutual friend. Li now had organized a more formal Marxist Study Society in Beijing, and a translation of the
Communist Manifesto
was under way (some of it already completed, for Mao to see) along with more technical works like Karl Kaut sky’s
Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx.
Yet if Mao was now getting a more specific knowledge of Marxist-socialist theories, he remained very eclectic in his own mind—his surviving letters to friends from this time show him dreaming of a wide range of options, including a work-study school in the verdant Yuelu hills outside Changsha, a dream he had harbored since 1918. The students and teachers would learn and work at farming in all its aspects—from tending vegetables and flowers to raising rice and cotton, growing mulberry trees, and breeding fish and poultry. (Mao noted that such work would be regarded as “sacred,” but if the “rough work” was too hard for the students, then “hired hands should be employed to assist them.”) If farming proved impractical, an alternate approach would be to found a “Self-Study University” in which the teachers and students “would practice a Communist life.” Income for this project would be derived from teaching, publishing essays and articles, and editing books, and expenses would be cut by having the community do its own cooking and laundry. All income would be held in common, for this would also be a “work-study mutual aid society.” Intellectual focus would come from an “Academic Symposium,” meeting two or three times a week. After two or three years of such training the students and teachers might be able to set off for Russia, which Mao was now defining as “the number one civilized country in the world.”

Mao, in other words, was restless. As he wrote in March 1920 to a friend whose own mother had also just died, there was now a whole category of “people like us, who are always away from home and are thereby unable to take care of our parents.” In a letter to his girlfriend, Tao Yi, who was teaching in Changsha but hoping to come to Beijing, Mao repeated that he would like to go to Russia. To make that dream a reality, once things were peaceful again in Hunan he would form a “Free Study Society” in Changsha, hoping “to master the outline of all fields of study, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign.” Mao added, “Then I will form a work-study team to go to Russia.” He was confident, he told Tao Yi, that women going to Russia would “be particularly welcomed by the Russian women comrades.” He had been “consulting” Li Dazhao on this and other matters, he added. The reasons for not going abroad, however, were also considerable. Since one could read translations so much faster than the foreign-language originals, one could learn more and faster in China. “Oriental civilization,” wrote Mao, “constitutes one half of world civilization. Furthermore, Eastern civilization can be said to be Chinese civilization.” So why go anywhere?

When Mao did leave Beijing at last, on April 11, it was for Shanghai. This time he took twenty-five days for the trip, stopping off on the way at the north China sacred mountain of Taishan and at Confucius’s hometown of Qufu. In Shanghai he stayed with three other activists from the movement to expel Governor Zhang from Hunan. In early June, Mao was considering learning Russian—all three of his housemates wanted to go to Russia—and trying, he told a friend, “to find a Russian with whom to study the Russian language,” but he had trouble finding one. Mao was also trying to learn English, “reading one short lesson from the simplest primer every day.” Self-study was going to be his rule from now on: “I have always had an intense hatred for school, so I have decided never to go to school again.” As to philosophy, he was concentrating on Bergson, Russell, and Dewey. Mao also found the time and opportunity to meet with Chen Duxiu, one of the key radical faculty leaders of the May Fourth Movement, and the sponsor of the full translation of the
Communist Manifesto,
which was just being completed.

Fate solved Mao’s indecisiveness with startling suddenness when a rival coalition of political and military leaders unexpectedly attacked Changsha and drove out the hated General Zhang. It turned out that Mao had hitched his wagon to the right star after all: one of his former teachers with the requisite political contacts was named director of the Changsha normal school, and used his new influence to appoint Mao director of the attached primary school. On July 7, 1920, Mao was back in Changsha with a respected career opened up in front of him, and he moved swiftly to assert his presence. In just over three weeks after his return, on July 31, 1920, Mao announced to the local newspapers the formation of yet another new venture, one that would draw together at least some of his dreams of the previous years. It was to be called the “Cultural Book Society.”

Mao’s announcement started banteringly: How would one expect to find “new culture” in Hunan? Few of the thirty million Hunanese had received any schooling. Of those who had, only a few were “functionally literate.” And of the literate, how many knew what the new culture was? New culture was not just a matter of “having read or heard a few new terms.” Indeed most of the world, not just Hunan, had no knowledge of new culture. At this point Mao boldly inserted a phrase that showed the definite orientation of his thought: “A tiny blossom of New Culture has appeared in Russia, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.” The Cultural Book Society would try to ensure that this blossom would flower in Hunan. A bookstore would start the process, but a research wing, along with editorial and printing facilities, would soon be added. Through Chinese and foreign books, the new culture would reach across Hunan. The conclusion to the announcement had a special slant, emphasizing that this was no conventional capitalist enterprise. It had been founded “by a few of us who understand and trust each other completely.” None of the money that had been invested would be withdrawn by the investors. There would be no dividends. joint ownership would be perpetual. No one would take a penny of profit if it succeeded; “If it fails, and not a penny is left from the venture, we will not blame one another. We will be content to know that on this earth, in the city of Changsha, there was once a ‘collectively owned’ Book Society.”