IN THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY, China had embarked on a dramatic social transformation. The Manchu dynasty that had ruled since 1644 was moving from the ancient to the modern. The shift was prompted by a series of abysmal defeats at the hands of European powers and Japan, beginning with the loss to Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42, as the powers came knocking on China’s closed door. From the Manchu court to intellectuals, nearly everyone agreed that the country must change if it wanted to survive. A host of fundamental reforms was introduced, one of which was to install an entirely new educational system. Railways began to be built. Modern industries and commerce were given top priority. Political organizations were permitted. Newspapers were published for the first time. Students were sent abroad to study science, mandarins dispatched to learn democracy and parliamentary systems. In 1908, the court announced a program to become a constitutional monarchy in nine years’ time.
Mao’s province, Hunan, which had some 30 million inhabitants, became one of the most liberal and exciting places in China. Though landlocked, it was linked by navigable rivers to the coast, and in 1904 its capital, Changsha, became an “open” trading port. Large numbers of foreign traders and missionaries arrived, bringing Western ways and institutions. By the time Mao heard about modern schools, there were over a hundred of them, more than in any other part of China, and including many for women.
One was located near Mao: Eastern Hill, in the county of the Wens, his mother’s family. The fees and accommodation were quite high, but Mao got the Wens and other relatives to lobby his father, who stumped up the cost for five months. The wife of one of his Wen cousins replaced Mao’s old blue homespun mosquito net with a white machine-made muslin one in keeping with the school’s modernity.
The school was an eye-opener for Mao. Lessons included physical training, music and English, and among the reading materials were potted biographies of Napoleon, Wellington, Peter the Great, Rousseau and Lincoln. Mao heard about America and Europe for the first time, and laid eyes on a man who had been abroad — a teacher who had studied in Japan, who was given the nickname “the False Foreign Devil” by his pupils. Decades later Mao could still remember a Japanese song he taught them, celebrating Japan’s stunning military victory over Russia in 1905.
Mao was only in Eastern Hill for a few months, but this was enough for him to find a new opening. In the provincial capital, Changsha, there was a school specially set up for young people from the Wens’ county, and Mao persuaded a teacher to enroll him, even though he was strictly speaking not from the county. In spring 1911 he arrived at Changsha, feeling, in his own words, “exceedingly excited.” At seventeen, he said goodbye forever to the life of a peasant.
MAO CLAIMED LATER THAT when he was a boy in Shaoshan he had been stirred by concern for poor peasants. There is no evidence for this. He said he had been influenced while still in Shaoshan by a certain P’ang the Millstone Maker, who had been arrested and beheaded after leading a local peasant revolt, but an exhaustive search by Party historians for this hero has failed to turn up any trace of him.
There is no sign that Mao derived from his peasant roots any social concerns, much less that he was motivated by a sense of injustice. In a contemporary document, the diary of Mao’s teacher, Professor Yang Chang-chi, on 5 April 1915 the professor wrote: “My student Mao Tse-tung said that … his clan … are mostly peasants, and it is easy for them to get rich” (our italics). Mao evinced no particular sympathy for peasants.
Up to the end of 1925, when he was in his early thirties, and five years after he had become a Communist, Mao made only a few references to peasants in all his known writings and conversations. They did crop up in a letter of August 1917, but far from expressing sympathy, Mao said he was “bowled over” by the way a commander called Tseng Kuo-fan had “finished off” the biggest peasant uprising in Chinese history, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64. Two years later, in July 1919, Mao wrote an essay about people from different walks of life — so peasants were inevitably mentioned — but his list of questions was very general, and his tone unmistakably neutral. There was a remarkable absence of emotion when he mentioned peasants, compared with the passion he voiced about students, whose life he described as “a sea of bitterness.” In a comprehensive list for research he drew up in September that year, containing no fewer than 71 items, only one heading (the tenth) was about labor; the single one out of its 15 sub-heads that mentioned peasants did so only as “the question of laboring farmers intervening in politics.” From late 1920, when he entered the Communist orbit, Mao began to use expressions like “workers and peasants” and “proletariat.” But they remained mere phrases, part of an obligatory vocabulary.
Decades later, Mao talked about how, as a young man in Shaoshan, he cared about people starving. The record shows no such concern. In 1921 Mao was in Changsha during a famine. A friend of his wrote in his diary: “There are many beggars — must be over 100 a day … Most … look like skeletons wrapped in yellow skin, as if they could be blown over by a whiff of wind.” “I heard that so many people who had come here … to escape famine in their own regions had died — that those who had been giving away planks of wood [to make coffins] … can no longer afford to do so.” There is no mention of this event in Mao’s writings of the time, and no sign that he gave any thought to this issue at all.
Mao’s peasant background did not imbue him with idealism about improving the lot of Chinese peasants.
2. BECOMING A COMMUNIST (1911–20 AGE 17–26)
MAO ARRIVED IN CHANGSHA in spring 1911, on the eve of the Republican Revolution that was to end over two thousand years of imperial rule. Though Changsha seemed “just like a mediaeval town” to the British philosopher Bertrand Russell a decade later, with “narrow streets … no traffic possible except sedan chairs and rickshaws,” it was not merely in touch with new ideas and trends, it seethed with Republican activity.
The Manchu court had promised a constitutional monarchy, but the Republicans were dedicated to getting rid of the Manchus entirely. To them Manchu rule was “foreign” domination, as the Manchus were not Han Chinese, the ethnic group that formed the bulk — about 94 percent — of the population. The Republicans lit sparks through newspapers and magazines that had sprung up all over China in the previous decade, and through the entirely new practice of public debates, in what had hitherto been an almost totally private society. They formed organizations, and launched several — unsuccessful — armed uprisings.
Mao quickly caught up on the issues through newspapers, which he read for the first time now, at the age of seventeen — the start of a lifelong addiction. He wrote his first, rather confused, political essay expressing Republican views, and pasted it up on a wall at his school, in line with the latest trend. Like many other students in the school, he cut off his pigtail, which, as a Manchu custom, was the most obvious symbol of imperial rule. With a friend, he then ambushed a dozen others and forcibly removed their queues with scissors.
That summer, extremely hot and humid as usual in Changsha, students debated feverishly about how to overthrow the emperor. One day, in the middle of an impassioned discussion, a young man suddenly tore off his long scholar’s gown, threw it on the ground and yelled: “Let’s do some martial exercises and be prepared for war [against the emperor]!”
In October an armed uprising in neighboring Hubei province heralded the Republican Revolution. The Manchu dynasty that had ruled China for over 260 years crumbled, and a republic was declared on 1 January 1912. The child emperor, Pu Yi, abdicated the following month.