Mao Zedong (7 page)

Mao listed himself among the original investors when the Cultural Book Society issued its first report on October 22, 1920. So how had he raised the money for the shop? Had Mao received a sizable inheritance, in the form of land and the cash profits from his father’s trading ventures? This would explain why Mao in 1920 apparently had none of the financial problems living in Beijing and traveling by train to Shanghai that had plagued him in 1919. And even though Mao drew no wages as manager of the bookshop, he had his salary as director of the primary school. Furthermore, Mao began to push the cause of Hunan independence with extraordinary energy after he returned to Changsha in July, and this was a cause dear to the heart of many wealthy businessmen and to the new governor of the province, Tan Yankai. Mao’s backers certainly covered a wide spectrum: as well as local business leaders, Mao listed the Beijing Marxist Li Dazhao as one of the “credit references” who persuaded the local book and magazine distributors to waive their customary security deposits.

Then there was the curious fact that the store run by the Cultural Book Society itself was not located in a Chinese-owned site in Changsha, as the board had apparently planned, nor in the city education building as some had suggested, but was rented from the Hunan-Yale medical school, the offshoot of the original Yale-in-China mission in the city. The guarantor of this lease—which was publicly announced in the director’s report—was a well-known Hunanese cultural and educational leader, who also invested in the venture (as did Mao’s friend Tao Yi, who put up ten silver dollars, although she was always so desperately short of money). Certainly the business was well-run, despite its unusual character and structure. According to the figures prepared by Mao Zedong—it was not for nothing, his father’s insistence that he learn accounting—income from sales for the first announced financial period was 136 Chinese dollars, while expenses, including the rent and start-up equipment, were only 101 Chinese dollars. With a surplus of 35 dollars from its sales of
New Youth,
and authors such as Bertrand Russell, Hu Shi, and Kropotkin, the Cultural Book Society’s store was turning a profit of more than 30 percent.

Mao seemed to have found a new niche as a businessman, bookseller, and school principal, and it was time to think of the future. Certainly Tao Yi had been generous, and was an independent spirit. But Yang Kaihui had returned to Changsha after her father’s death, and also was regarded as a bold pioneer in women’s educational circles, with her own excellent range of contacts. At her father’s funeral back in January there had been a public appeal—cosigned by Mao Zedong—for funds to help Yang Kaihui and her younger brother, who it was alleged had been left with no “means of support.” But in fact her father had owned some land in or near Changsha, and the appeal stipulated that the money raised for the children “could either constitute savings or be used as capital for a business.” So now neither Mao nor his teacher’s daughter was destitute, and they obviously had a great deal in common. In late 1920, Mao Zedong and Yang Kaihui began living together.

THE FIRST TIME that Mao in his own writings discussed the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin at any length was in an article of September 1920. The context, rather surprisingly, was Hunanese independence, for which Mao had become a forceful spokesman. In his essay, Mao argued that China’s apparent size and strength had always been deceptive: when it was examined more closely, one could see that China had been “solid at the top but hollow at the bottom; high-sounding on the surface but senseless and corrupt underneath.” The farce of China’s current attempts at proving itself a Republic was evidence of the truth of these assertions. Effective political organizations had to grow out of an integrated social system. Such a social system could initially take root only in “small localities,” and in such local settings “it is the individual citizens who comprise the foundation of the citizenry as a whole.” To Mao this had to be a voluntaristic process: “A forced attempt at construction simply will not work.” Mao then drew on the discussions of Marxism he had attended in Beijing but suggested that some of those arguments were lacking in cogency. People had used the example of Lenin, wrote Mao, to argue that “political organizations can reform social organizations,” and that “group forces can transform the individual.” Mao felt Lenin’s example in Russia was a special case, not one that could be simply applied to China. For a start, Lenin had relied on “millions of party members” to undertake his “unprecedented course of popular revolution that made a clean sweep of the reactionary parties and washed away the upper and middle classes.” Lenin had a carefully thought-out ideology—Bolshevism—and a “reliable mass party” that carried out his orders “as smoothly as flowing water.” The peasants of Russia also responded to his revolutionary call. Were there to be a “thorough and general revolution in China,” Mao wrote, he would support it. But he knew that was not possible at the moment. Accordingly, he would work for a Republic of Hunan “that shines like the rising sun.”

Events, however, were pushing China away from the federation of provinces that Mao envisioned. Part of the problem was that Hunan was in no way united, and within a few months of Mao’s return to Changsha from Shanghai, rival warlords were once again vying for control; although the province did declare its formal independence in November 1920 and formulated its own Hunanese constitution, including the granting of full civil rights to women, the Hunan assembly never established a fully independent jurisdiction. Equally fateful were developments in the Soviet Union. In March 1919 Lenin convened the first meetings of a “Third Communist International” to replace the Second International, which had disintegrated during World War I. This new international—known as the Comintem—was to be the global arm of the Soviet Communist Party, fostering revolution overseas not only to spread the cause of the world’s proletarians, but also to strengthen the Soviet Union’s own defenses. In the spring of 1920 the first of the Comintern agents (one of them was a Chinese raised in Siberia, who acted as interpreter) arrived in China to speed the formation of a Chinese Communist Party. The Soviet group rapidly identified the
New Youth
editors Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu as the two most prominent Chinese intellectuals interested in Marxism. Having conferred with Li in Beijing, they traveled to Shanghai to visit Chen. Though the Soviet agents did not meet Mao in either Beijing or Shanghai, and Mao had already returned to Changsha by August 1920 when a Communist “small group”—the first in China—was established in Shanghai, he and his fellow Hunanese had nevertheless made enough of an impression on the inner circle of leading radicals for Changsha to be included among the six cities in which further Communist “small groups” were to be formed. (The other four cities were Beijing, Wuhan, Jinan in Shandong province, and Canton.)

The first brief “Manifesto” of the Chinese Communist Party appeared in Shanghai in November 1920, but there is no evidence that Mao saw it right away. From a flurry of letters that Mao wrote at this time to friends in many parts of China and in France, we know that he was frantically busy with his teaching, running the New People’s Study Society and the Cultural Book Society, building up a “rent-a-book readers’ club,” and coordinating the struggle for Hunanese independence. Mao does not mention the Manifesto to any of his November correspondents, so it is unlikely that he had seen it yet or had any hand in drafting it. To a woman student friend from Changsha, who was then in France, Mao expressed his pessimism over the Hunanese people’s capacity for change, but added philosophically, “Education is my profession, and I have made up my mind to stay in Hunan for two years.” Mao was also clearly thinking deeply about his relationship with Yang Kaihui, struggling to avoid the entanglements and hypocrisies of what in an unusually frank letter he called the “capitalist” type of marriage in which fear and “legalized rape” were combined. The loftier goal must always be to develop a meaningful union based on “that most reasonable thing, free love,” wrote Mao to another friend on November 26. He added: “I have long since declared that I would not join this rape brigade. If you don’t agree with me, please put into writing your opposing views.”

The November 1920 Chinese Communist Manifesto—as if echoing its Comintern origins—was a formulaic document couched at the theoretical level, with no roots of any kind in the realities of Chinese society. The ideals of the Party were stated as being the “social and common ownership and use of the means of production,” abolition of the state, and formation of a classless society. The goals were to overthrow capitalism through class struggle. The immediate task of the Communist Party was to strengthen the anticapitalist forces and “organize and concentrate” the forces of class struggle: workers, peasants, soldiers, sailors, and students were singled out as the troops to be mobilized, and a “general federation of industrial associations” was seen as a central tool of this process. A final general strike would lead to the overthrow of the capitalists and the formation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, under whose leadership the class struggle would continue against “the residual forces of capitalism.”

Though the language was vague, the issues here were major, and we know that even before he saw the Manifesto, Mao was beginning to discuss such revolutionary issues through correspondence with several of his Changsha friends, who were now in France on the work-study program. In two especially long and detailed letters, one of December 1, 1920, and another of January 21, 1921, Mao wrestled with the two differing views on China’s future that the Chinese students in France had divided over. One group pushed for the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the need for violent class struggle. Anarchism, they felt, would not work, the forces of reaction were just too strong. A strong Communist Party, they argued, must be the “initiator, propagandist, vanguard, and operational headquarters of the revolutionary movement.” The other group wanted “a moderate revolution,” on evolutionary principles, driven by education, focusing on the people’s welfare, and using trade unions and cooperatives as its means. Mao was torn: “In principle I agree with the ideas to seek the welfare of all by peaceful means, but I do not believe they will work in reality.” Mao had listened to Bertrand Russell when the British philosopher came to Changsha on November 1, 1920, and argued for Communism but against “war and bloody revolutions”; Mao had strenuous arguments about the lecture with his friends and concluded, “This is all very well in theory; in reality it can’t be done.” A Russian-style revolution was certainly a “last resort” for China, but maybe it was coming to that.

The same issues were being constantly discussed at the Changsha meetings of the New People’s Study Society, where the members were overwhelmingly involved in education. Of those who attended regularly in December 1920, according to another of Mao’s neat and meticulous reports, besides himself there were three teachers at the Zhounan women’s school, three working as editors on the
Popular Newspaper
for a group called “Popular Books and Papers,” two teaching at primary school, and two working in the Cultural Book Society; all the others were students: six at middle schools, one at the Hunan-Yale medical school, and one in self-study. None were workers, farmers, or tradespeople. Mao’s own feeling was that this group as a whole was “somewhat immature,” and showed “childishness in thought and behavior”; some of them were “apt to launch or support causes rashly.” He did not entirely exempt himself from criticism. He knew full well that he was “weak-willed,” he told a friend in January 1921. “I constantly have the wrong attitude and always argue, so that people detest me.” But when Mao convened a lengthy meeting of the Cultural Book Society in that same month and called for a vote on the political options, twelve members, including Mao and Tao Yi, voted for Bolshevism, one voted for moderate (Russell-style) Communism, and two for parliamentary democracy. Tao Yi also spoke out for concentrating on ideological work within the army, rather than putting faith in education throughout the society as a whole. (Yang Kaihui is not listed among the attendants at the meetings.)

Even as the first Comintern agents were exploring the possibilities in China, Lenin convened the Second Congress of the Comintern. Despite serious differences over how to interpret the opportunity in China and what organizational forms would be most suitable, this congress decided to send the Dutch Communist Sneevliet (who operated under the pseudonym “Maring”) to China—specifically to Shanghai—to investigate the situation there and elsewhere in Asia. This decision was finalized in August 1920, but due to various organizational problems Maring left for China only in April 1921. His instructions were confusing and contradictory. Following current Comintern policies, he should encourage Chinese Communists to
unite
with the bourgeoisie in the interests of the national revolution, while at the same time leaving room for the development of a strong proletarian organization that could eventually
overthrow
the bourgeoisie. For his entire trip to China, Maring was given £4,000 sterling, of which he used £2,000 immediately for his wife’s expenses and some other political obligations. He also lost £600 of his funds in a bank failure, and was thus left with funding of exactly £1,400 for the entire revolutionary journey. Taking a train from Berlin in April 1921, he obtained his visa for China in Vienna, and traveled from there to Venice, where a passenger ship was readying to sail for China.

Maring reached Shanghai on June 3 and took rooms with a Russian landlady in the International Settlement. Within a few days he made contact with another Comintern representative, Nikolsky, who had been sent from Irkutsk. Though the details are obscure, it appears that Maring coordinated with Communists from the Shanghai and Beijing small groups, who had already begun to plan a Communist conference, and that letters were sent to Communists in the other four cities where small groups had formed, as well as to a Communist living in Japan and one with no fixed affiliation living in Hong Kong. Thus it was, after various delays and mishaps, that fifteen representatives (thirteen Chinese and the two Comintern representatives) convened in Shanghai for the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party on July 23, 1921. The fifteen were there to represent the complete roster of fifty-three Chinese Communists who were then affiliated with the Party in some form or other.