MAO

‘Beijing is like a crucible’, Mao wrote, ‘in which one cannot but be transformed.’¹ As the train drew slowly past its massive grey-brick walls, beside the crenellated battlements of the Tartar City, antique symbol of China's departed power and glory, to come to a halt in the new Western-style railway station, symbol of its need for foreign techniques and ideas, the young provincial student from the south entered a world in political and intellectual ferment. He would emerge from it, seven months later, with very different notions of how China should be saved.

Even before he left Changsha, Mao had serious doubts as to whether he wanted to go with the others to France. One difficulty was money. Although he could raise the 200 yuan for the boat fare, he told a friend, he could not get the additional hundred yuan he would need for language training. Language, in fact, seems to have been the nub of the problem: Mao struggled to master English all his life, and though eventually he learned to read with the help of a dictionary, speaking it was completely beyond him. French, he evidently concluded, was bound to be still worse. His ear for language was so poor that even mandarin lessons were a trial, and to the end of his days he conserved a thick Hunanese brogue which fellow provincials immediately identified as the speech of a Xiangtan man. There were other considerations, too. Mao still saw his future as a teacher. ‘Of course, going [for language training] is one thing to do,’ he conceded, ‘but it is not as beneficial as engaging in education … Education is inherently superior.’ He also persuaded himself that it was important that not all the leaders of the New People's Study Society leave China at the same time. If Cai Hesen and Xiao Yu went to France, he reasoned, he should stay behind to ensure that the society continued to promote reform. Yet had language not been such an insurmountable obstacle, the other factors might not have loomed as large.²

Talking later to Edgar Snow, he put a different gloss on it. ‘I felt that I did not know enough about my own country, and that my time could be more profitably spent in China,’ he said. ‘I had other plans.’³

Professor Yang, in whose house Mao and Xiao Yu stayed for a time after their arrival in Beijing, provided a letter of introduction to the university librarian, Li Dazhao, who found him a job as an assistant.⁴ Li was only five years older than Mao, but his intellectual status and national prominence set him a generation apart. A well-built, dignified man, with piercing eyes and a bristling black moustache, whose small wire-rimmed spectacles made him look like a Chinese Bakunin, Li had recently joined Chen Duxiu, the head of the Department of Letters, as co-editor of Mao's favourite magazine, New Youth. Working in such surroundings, in a room beside Li's office in the south-east tower of the old university library, not far from the Forbidden City, should have been everything Mao could have wished for. He had obtained, he told his family proudly, ‘a position … as a staff member of Beijing University’.⁵ It sounded wonderful. But the reality was a crushing disappointment:

My office was so low that people avoided me. One of my tasks was to register the names of people who came to read newspapers, but to most of them I didn't exist as a human being. Among those who came to read, I recognised the names of famous leaders of the [Chinese] ‘renaissance’ movement, men … in whom I was intensely interested. 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.⁶

In the winter of 1918, Mao was once again a small fish in a very big pond. In his reminiscences, nearly twenty years later, one can still sense a lingering resentment. When he tried to ask a question after a lecture by Hu Shi, who had pioneered the use of the vernacular in literature and was then completing his seminal Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy, the great man, two years Mao's senior, discovering that his questioner was not a student but a mere library assistant, brushed him aside.⁷ Younger student leaders like Fu Sinian, soon to found the Xin chao (New Tide) Society, the most influential of the Beijing University reform groups, were equally distant.⁸

To compound his problems, life in the capital was expensive and the eight silver dollars a month he was paid – half the wage of a rickshaw coolie – covered only the barest necessities. With Xiao Yu and six other Hunanese students, he rented a room in a traditional grey-tiled Beijing house, a single-storey dwelling built around the four sides of a small courtyard, about two miles from the university, in the Sanyanjing (Three Eyes Well) area near Xidan, a bustling commercial street west of the Forbidden City. It had no running water and no electric light. The eight young men possessed between them only one warm coat, which meant that in the coldest weather, when the temperature fell to 10 degrees below freezing, they had to take turns to go out. There was a small pot-bellied Chinese stove for cooking, but they had no money to buy the compacted blocks of coal dust and clay which were used to heat the kang – the traditional northern brick bed, covered with felt, with a brazier underneath – and at night they huddled together for warmth. ‘When we were all packed fast on the kang, there was scarcely room enough for any of us to breathe,’ Mao recollected. ‘I used to have to warn people on either side of me whenever I wanted to turn over.’⁹

Gradually, however, he began to find his way in the city. One of those who encouraged him was Shao Piaoping, a writer who headed the Journalism Research Society, whom Mao remembered, years afterwards, as ‘a liberal, and a man of fervent idealism and fine character’.¹⁰ Li Dazhao took him to a preparatory meeting where there was discussion of establishing a Marxist Study Society and he became a member of a patriotic association called Young China.¹¹ There he was introduced to Chen Duxiu, whose insistence on the total transformation of traditional Chinese culture as a prerequisite to modernisation influenced him, he said later, ‘perhaps more than anyone else’.¹² Young men of Mao's generation at that time viewed Chen's role in China as comparable to that of Tolstoy in Russia.¹³ ‘We regard Mr Chen as a bright star in the world of thought,’ he wrote later. ‘Anyone with a reasonably clear mind assents to the opinions he expresses.’¹⁴ Mao also attended meetings of the Philosophy Society, and he and his companions immersed themselves in the ‘latest new theories’ being aired in the discussion groups and magazines that sprang up all over the campus that winter and the following spring.¹⁵

Like other educated young Chinese, Mao was still ‘looking for a road’,¹⁶ bewildered yet fascinated by a cornucopia of Chinese and Western ideas which alternately reinforced and contradicted each other: ‘My mind was a curious mixture of ideas of liberalism, democratic reformism, and utopian socialism,’ he recalled. ‘I had somewhat vague passions about “nineteenth-century democracy”, utopianism and old-fashioned liberalism, and I was definitely anti-imperialist and anti-militarist.’¹⁷

The utopianism came from Jiang Kanghu, the anarchist-influenced leader of the Chinese Socialist Party, whose writings Mao had first encountered as a soldier during the 1911 revolution in Changsha; and from Kang Youwei, who had tried to unite the materialist universality of Euclidian mathematics with traditional Chinese idealism, picturing a realm of Great Harmony in which the family and the nation would wither away and the citizens of the world would live in self-governing economic communities without distinction of race or sex.¹⁸ At one point, carried away by such notions, Mao himself imagined a time when ‘all under heaven will become sages … We may destroy all secular laws, breathe the air of harmony and drink the waves of a crystal clear sea.’¹⁹ A few months later, he pulled himself up: ‘I am sure that once we entered [such a world],’ he wrote, ‘competition and friction would inevitably break forth.’²⁰ Yet the visionary in Mao never quite let go of Kang's romantic, utopian dreaming. There would always be a part of him that longed to be a sage-king, free, as he put it, to roam ‘a heaven-made world, wishing to share his celestial transformation with all living beings.’²¹

From Liang Qichao he drew the conviction that no new order could be built unless the old were destroyed. Adam Smith, Huxley and Spencer furnished what he termed his ‘old-fashioned liberalism’, while the Ming philosopher and strategist, Wang Yangming, inspired him to link man to society, theory to practice, knowledge to will, and thought to action. From the Hunanese Ming patriot, Wang Fuzhi, came the image of a world in constant flux, in which the mutability of things, driven by the dialectical contradictions inherent in the material world, was the basic principle moving history forward.²²

Mao's assimilation of these men's ideas was not uncritical. He tried to weigh each proposition before approving or rejecting it, and often embraced a concept only to discard it a few months later.²³ In the process, he strove for an approach to politics which, in his own words, combined ‘the clarity that comes from introspection and … the knowledge that come from observing the outside world’.²⁴

The goal was to find a unifying doctrine that would weld these disparate elements into a coherent whole.

Marxism was not his first choice. In 1918, none of Marx's works, or Lenin's, was available in Chinese translation. That spring, an account of the Bolshevik Revolution had appeared in a small Shanghai anarchist magazine.²⁵ But its circulation was limited, and in November, when Li Dazhao published in New Youth the first substantial article on the subject in Chinese, the topic was so unfamiliar that the printer at one point transliterated ‘Bolshevism’ as ‘Hohenzollern’. Even Li, despite his enthusiastic assertion that ‘the world of tomorrow … will assuredly belong to the Red flag’, did not seem very sure what the new Bolshevik Party really represented. ‘What kind of ideology is it?’ he asked. ‘It is very difficult to explain it clearly in one sentence.’ None the less, he told his readers, it was clear that the Bolsheviks were revolutionary socialists who followed the doctrines of ‘the German economist, Marx’, and aimed to destroy national boundaries and the capitalist system of production.²⁶

Mao must have read this article, but it does not seem to have made much impression on him and he never referred to it subsequently. Instead, he was drawn to anarchism, which at that time was being vigorously promoted by Chinese exile groups in Paris and Tokyo. Its attraction lay in its rejection of authority, which resonated with Young China's attempts to break free from the stifling conventions of the Confucian family system, and its vision of social change engendering a new era of peace and harmony. The work-study programme to send young Chinese to France, in which Mao and his New People's Study Society were participating, had been established by Chinese anarchists. When educated Chinese talked of ‘social revolution’, it was usually anarchism, not Marxism, that they had in mind.²⁷ Even Li Dazhao's chiliastic description of Bolshevism as an ‘irresistible tide’, ushering in the dawn of freedom, was couched in anarchist terms. ‘There will be no congress, no parliament, no prime minister, no cabinet, no legislature and no ruler,’ he had written. ‘There will be only the joint soviets of labour, which … will unite the proletariat of the world and create global freedom … This is the new doctrine of the twentieth-century revolution.’²⁸ Right up to the early 1920s, Chinese Marxists and anarchists continued to view each other as siblings in the same socialist family, fighting the same battle by different means.

Under the influence of its radical chancellor, Cai Yuanpei, Beijing University became a major centre of anarchist activity.²⁹ Classes were offered in Esperanto, the anarchists’ chosen language for their new frontier-free world. Students secretly circulated copies of the Fuhuzhi (Collected Essays on Tiger Taming) by Liu Shifu, founder of the quaintly named Huiming xueshe, the Society of Cocks Crowing in the Dark, which advocated ‘communism, anti-militarism, syndicalism, anti-religion, anti-family, vegetarianism, and international language and universal harmony’.³⁰

To Mao, anarchism was a revelation. Years later he acknowledged that he had ‘favoured many of its proposals’ and had spent long hours discussing its possible application in China.³¹ His views emerged graphically in an article written in the summer of 1919:

There is one extremely violent party, which uses the method, ‘Do unto others as they do unto you’, to struggle desperately to the end with the aristocrats and capitalists. The leader of this party is a man named Marx who was born in Germany. There is another party more moderate than that of Marx. It does not expect rapid results, but begins by understanding the common people. Men should all have a morality of mutual aid and work voluntarily. As for the aristocrats and capitalists, it suffices that they repent and turn toward the good, and that they be able to work and to help people rather than harming them; it is not necessary to kill them. The ideas of this party are broader and more far-reaching. They want to unite the whole globe into a single country, unite the human race in a single family, and attain together in peace, happiness and friendship … an age of prosperity. The leader of this party is a man named Kropotkin, who was born in Russia.³²

The passage is revealing both for Mao's ignorance of Marxism and its Russian apostles – Lenin does not even get a mention – and for his explicit rejection of revolutionary violence. His ideas had matured since his passionate defence, three years earlier, of the brutal rule of ‘Butcher’ Tang, whose harsh dictatorship, he had held, had been justified because it produced tranquillity and order. As he turned twenty-five, Mao was beginning to think more deeply about means as well as ends, and the type of society that such means implied. Anarchism, with its stress on education, individual will and the cultivation of the self, accorded better than Marxism with the one-world utopianism Mao had absorbed from Kang Youwei, and with his traditional, Chinese scholar's belief in the power of virtue and example. He may not have been a full-fledged anarchist when he left Beijing, but for the next twelve months, anarchism, in the broad-church sense in which it was then understood in China, provided the frame of reference for all his political action.

The winter Mao spent in Beijing influenced him in other ways. China's capital in 1918 was a metaphor for the country's transformation, by turns painful and exhilarating, glorious and mundane.³³ Behind the faded, red walls of the Forbidden City, the deposed young Emperor still lived, surrounded by more than a thousand Court eunuchs. Manchu bannermen, their families and retainers, accounted for a third of the capital's one million people. Camel trains came down from the north, from the land beyond the Great Wall. Dignitaries in richly embroidered brocade robes travelled in antiquated glass-windowed carriages, with outriders on shaggy Mongolian ponies who went ahead to clear the way.

Yet the wide, Ming-dynasty avenues, which the north wind filled each spring with choking grey, desert dust, had been macadamised, and motor-cars now careered about the city, carrying warlord generals and venal politicians, their mistresses and their bodyguards, scattering the blue-hooded Beijing carts in which lesser mortals rode. Jinrickshas, still a rarity in Changsha, jammed Beijing's streets, 20,000 of them in 1918, twice that number three years later. Foreign soldiers drilled on the glacis in front of the Legation Quarter.

Wealthy families amused themselves with sleigh-rides on the ice of the imperial lakes, pulled by coolies with iron crampons attached to their cloth shoes, while in the narrow, unpaved lanes, the children of the poor were ‘sickly and stunted, their little arms and legs like sticks’, barely surviving amid appalling deprivation. ‘Most have ulcerous sores or scars left by sores’, a visitor wrote. ‘Many exhibit oversized heads, blindness, crooked mouths, missing noses and other signs of having been maimed or crippled.’³⁴

Yet Mao's memories in later years were not of the clash of old and new, ancient grandeur and Western modernity, or the squalor and clamour of Beijing – ‘a cacophony, a pandemonium, that had no counterpart in Europe’, as one Western resident put it³⁵ – but of its timeless beauty:

In the parks and the old palace grounds I saw the early northern spring. I saw the white plum blossoms flower while the ice still held solid over Beihai [lake]. I saw the willows over Beihai with the ice crystals hanging from them, and remembered the description of the scene by the Tang poet, Zhen Zhang, who wrote about Beihai's winter-jewelled trees looking like ‘ten thousand peach trees blossoming’. The innumerable trees of Beijing aroused my wonder and admiration.³⁶

Here was the same romantic young student who, three years earlier, fleeing Changsha to escape the depredations of the Guangxi army, had stopped to describe to Xiao Yu the emerald-green of the paddy fields, luxuriant with new rice-shoots. ‘Smoke hangs in the sky,’ Mao wrote then, ‘the mountain mists unfold; the gorgeous clouds intermingle; and as far as one can see, everywhere it is like a painting.’³⁷ At First Normal, he had copied into his notebook the Lisao, the Song of Sorrow, by Qu Yuan, an ill-fated statesman of the third century bc, whom Chinese remember each spring at the Dragon Boat Festival as a paragon of princely virtue.³⁸ Mao's love of poetry, kindled as an adolescent at Dongshan Upper Primary School, would remain with him through all the tumultuous years that followed, offering a soaring counterpoint to the brutishness of war and release from the arid logic of revolutionary struggle.

In March 1919, Mao received word that his mother's illness had grown worse. He was about to leave for Shanghai with the first group from the New People's Study Society which was setting out for France, and decided to go ahead with the trip anyway. When finally he did reach Changsha, having spent three weeks in Shanghai seeing off his friends, he found that his mother had already arrived in the city, accompanied by his younger brothers, to seek medical treatment.³⁹ It was unsuccessful, and in October she died from what today would be an easily treatable case of lymph gland inflammation. His father, who fell ill with typhoid, followed her a few months later.⁴⁰

Mao felt deep guilt, not only for having been away, but because the previous autumn he had promised himself to take her to Changsha for treatment, but had done nothing about it.⁴¹ In a letter to his uncles, he sought to justify himself: ‘When I heard [her] illness had become serious,’ he wrote, ‘[I] rushed back home to look after her.’⁴² As he well knew, this was untrue. After her death, he wrote, more candidly, to a close friend who had also recently lost his mother: ‘For people like us, who are always away from home and therefore unable to take care of our parents, such an occurrence especially causes sorrow.’⁴³ Years later, his dereliction of filial duty still nagged at his conscience. In Bao'an, he pretended to Edgar Snow that his mother had died when he was a student, in what can only have been a deliberate attempt to camouflage his absence.⁴⁴

To support himself, Mao took a part-time job teaching history at a local primary school.⁴⁵ Almost immediately, however, Hunan, and the rest of China, were engulfed in a new political storm.⁴⁶

Ever since the start of the Great War, Japan had been angling to take over the former German concession in Shandong. At the peace conference in Versailles, the Chinese government's position was that, since China had sided with the Allies, it should be permitted to recover the territory under the principle of national self-determination, championed by the American President, Woodrow Wilson. But in April it emerged that, as the price of a new Japanese loan, Premier Duan Qirui had made a secret agreement the previous autumn – which the government was now seeking to repudiate – signing away Shandong to Japanese control. Wilson, who had been supporting China, now gave up in disgust, and on April 30, 1919, he, Lloyd-George and Clemenceau – the ‘Holy Trinity’, as they were known – ratified Japan's take-over of German treaty rights.

When the news reached Beijing on Saturday, May 3, it provoked an unparalleled outpouring of rage, frustration and shame. This time anger was directed not at Japan alone, but at all the imperialist Powers, America first among them, and above all at China's own government, which had sold out the country's interests before the peace conference had even begun. A group of students in Shanghai wrote bitterly: ‘Throughout the world, like the voice of a prophet, has gone the word of Woodrow Wilson strengthening the weak and giving courage to the struggling. And the Chinese have listened … They have been told that secret covenants and forced agreements would not be recognised. They looked for the dawn of this new era; but no sun rose for China. Even the cradle of the nation was stolen.’⁴⁷

On Sunday afternoon, 3,000 young people gathered outside Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, refusing appeals from the Education Minister and the Police Chief to disperse. A manifesto was approved, drafted by Lo Jialun, a student leader from Beijing University's New Tide Society. China was facing annihilation, he wrote. ‘Today we swear two solemn oaths with all our fellow countrymen: (1) China's territory may be conquered but it cannot be given away, (2) The Chinese people may be massacred, but they will not surrender.’ The crowd, whipped up to fever pitch, called for the heads of the Communications Minister, Cao Rulin, the éminence grise of the warlord cabinet; and his two principal supporters, Zhang Zongxiang, Minister at the Chinese Legation in Tokyo, and Lu Zongyou, who were blamed collectively for arranging the fatal loan. In a solemn declaration, the leaders of the protest urged the nation to resist:

We now approach a crisis in which our country is threatened with subjugation … If her people cannot unite in indignation in a last-minute effort to save her, they are indeed a worthless race of the twentieth century and should not be regarded as human beings … As for those who willingly and traitorously sell out our country to the enemy, as a last resort we shall have to rely on pistols and bombs to deal with them. Our country is in imminent peril – its fate hangs by a thread! We appeal to you to join our struggle.⁴⁸

The meeting over, they marched to the Legation Quarter. The students, including many children, carried white banners on which they had written, ‘Down with the nation-selling clique!’ and ‘Protect our country's earth!’.⁴⁹ Before them went two huge five-coloured national flags and a pair of scrolls with a mock funeral inscription:

A delegation handed in petitions at the American, British, French and Italian missions.⁵¹ Then the cry went up: ‘On to the house of the traitor!’ The crowd surged forward to the home of Cao Rulin, in a side-street near the Foreign Ministry, which they found well-guarded by militia and police. When the police tried to move them on, five young diehards, led by a student anarchist, Kuang Husheng, leapt over the wall and broke a window to get inside. The imposing double doors were thrown open, and the students stormed in after them. An eyewitness reported:

The change which came over this procession of apparently innocent schoolboys was astounding … The 3,000 bunched up in the narrow street … went through police, gates and all in a fine indifferent frenzy and set about making a ruin of Cao's residence in the most systematic manner. They did not find the man they were looking for, however. With rare agility he went through a back window, over the back wall, and landed with a badly injured leg in another street, where he was picked up and taken to the sanctuary of a foreign hotel. Instead, the infuriated students found an unhappy victim in Zhang Zongxiang [who had been hiding with another Chinese official and a Japanese journalist] … The mob fell upon Zhang with all their fury. Everyone insisted upon hitting him at least once. He was dragged into the street and then mauled in the dust until past recognition.

Kuang and his group of anarchists then set the building on fire. In the confusion the Japanese journalist, with the help of some of the police, managed to get Zhang away to the safety of a nearby store. There another group of students found him and beat him unconscious again. Eventually reinforcements arrived, and in the ensuing melee, a number of students were injured, one of whom died later, and thirty-two were arrested. As they were marched off to prison, they were ‘heartily cheered by all foreigners and Chinese en route’, reflecting general contempt for the warlord government's cravenness.

Cao's elderly father, his son and young concubine, whom the students had allowed to leave, were then driven with a military escort to the Legation Quarter, where, in a final indignity, the legation police arrested their driver for speeding.

The May Fourth Incident, as these events were afterwards called, spawned a nationwide movement for national renewal that spread to every corner of China, triggering a tidal wave of cultural, political and social change that has been regarded ever since as one of the defining periods of modern Chinese history.

In Hunan, Zhang the Venomous issued a proclamation, forbidding agitation.⁵² A handful of students distributed tracts urging people to protest. But they were pitifully few compared with the thousands who gathered in other provincial capitals,⁵³ and Zhang's troops made short work of dispersing them. The Governor was less successful in preventing an economic boycott. There was a run on Japanese-owned banks, as Chinese refused paper notes and withdrew their savings in silver; Chinese newspapers rejected Japanese advertisements; merchants refused to sell Japanese goods. The city was plastered with crudely drawn posters, depicting China's humiliation at the hands of the ‘Eastern dwarves’, and consignments of Japanese silk, smuggled in by profiteers, were publicly burned.⁵⁴ But even here, Hunan was merely following the lead of other provinces, which had acted sooner and more forcefully. Zhang's condemnation of the boycott as ‘a national disgrace’ had its effect. In Changsha, there was no merchants’ strike and no Japanese shops were looted. Zhang himself noted with satisfaction that the province had been ‘quite a model [compared] to other places’.⁵⁵

At the end of May, he had helped He Shuheng, an older fellow teacher, and Deng Zhongxia, a student he had met at the Young China meetings in Beijing, who had come to Changsha to spread word of what was happening in the capital, to set up a Hunan United Students Association, whose stated aim was ‘to restore national sovereignty and punish those who have betrayed the motherland’.⁵⁶ He reportedly wrote a ‘fiery appeal’, urging nationwide resistance,⁵⁷ and the association sent out inspection teams, working jointly with the trade guilds, to ensure that the boycott was complied with.

Very quickly he realised, however, that such efforts were peripheral to the main task at hand. To Mao, as to Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao in Beijing, Japan's refusal to return Shandong and the ensuing boycott were merely symptoms of China's national malaise, of which the cause, and the cure, lay far deeper.⁵⁸ They were useful as a vehicle to mobilise public feeling. But if lasting change were to be achieved, the sense of national outrage would need to be channelled so as to bring about fundamental political reform. The May Fourth Incident was merely a catalyst. The energy it had released had to be made to trigger China's hoped-for renaissance, rather than being dissipated by sops, like the dismissal of Cao Rulin and his two cohorts, announced with much fanfare by the Beijing government at the beginning of June, or China's symbolic refusal, later that month, to sign the Paris peace treaty.

With this aim in mind, and with the support of the Students’ Association's Chairman, Peng Huang, a fellow member of the New People's Study Society, Mao decided to produce a weekly newspaper, Xiangjiang pinglun (Xiang River Review), whose purpose was to agitate for thoroughgoing reform.⁵⁹ In a front-page editorial in the first issue, published on July 14, he nailed his colours to the mast:

Today we must change our old attitudes … Question the unquestionable. Dare to do the unthinkable … Religious oppression, literary oppression, political oppression, social oppression, educational oppression, economic oppression, intellectual oppression and international oppression no longer have the slightest place in this world. All must be overthrown under the great cry of democracy …

The time has come … The floodgates … have opened! The vast and furious tide of the new thought is already rushing, surging along both banks of the Xiang River! Those who ride with the current will live; those who go against it will die. How shall we greet it? How will we propagate it? How will we study it? How will we carry it out? This is the most urgent, most pressing task, for all of us Hunanese …⁶⁰

He attempted to answer that question in a long essay entitled ‘The Great Union of the Popular Masses’, published in three consecutive issues in late July and early August.⁶¹ In it, he argued that the chances of reform were brightest when ‘the decadence of the state, the sufferings of humanity and the darkness of society have all reached an extreme’. To seize the opportunity so presented, what was needed was a ‘great union’ of all progressive forces in society – formed from ‘a multitude of small unions’ representing workers and peasants; students; teachers; and such disadvantaged groups as women and jinricksha-pullers, often regarded in the May Fourth period as symbols of the country's exploitation. If only they would struggle together, Mao wrote, no force would be able to withstand them.

Could such an enterprise really succeed? ‘Some doubts may well be expressed,’ Mao conceded. ‘Hitherto … organised undertakings on a large scale were something of which the people of our country were quite simply incapable.’ But now, he insisted, it was different. The consciousness of the Chinese masses had been raised, the Empire had been overthrown, and democracy, ‘the great rebel’, was waiting in the wings:

We are awakened! The world is ours, the state is ours, society is ours! If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act? … Ideological liberation, political liberation, economic liberation, liberation between men and women and educational liberation are all going to burst from the deep inferno where they have been confined and demand to look at the blue sky. Our Chinese people possess great inherent capacities! The more profound the oppression, the more powerful its reaction, and since this has been accumulating for a long time, it will surely burst forth quickly. I venture to make a singular assertion: one day the reform of the Chinese people will be more profound than that of any other people, and the society of the Chinese people will be more radiant than that of any other people … [and] it will be achieved earlier than that of any other place or people. Gentlemen! Gentlemen! We must all exert ourselves! We must all advance with the utmost strength! Our golden age, our age of glory and splendour, lies before us!

The essay was remarkable not only for its clarity and force, its unabashed confidence in the future and its implicit exaltation of youth as the primary motor of change, but because it offered a coherent, practical programme for achieving it. That made it stand out from the flood of material being published in the 400 or more student news-sheets that sprang up in China at that time,⁶² fifteen of them in Changsha alone, and overnight it won Mao, and the Xiang River Review, a national reputation. The liberal philosopher, Hu Shi, who had snubbed Mao nine months earlier, described it as ‘one of the [truly] important articles’ of the time, and praised its author's ‘exceedingly far-reaching vision and effective and well-chosen arguments’.⁶³ Li Dazhao reprinted it in the Meizhou pinglun (Weekly Review), which he edited in Beijing. The New Tide leader, Lo Jialun, another of those who had spurned Mao's overtures when he was a library assistant, said it conveyed the essence of the student movement's aims.⁶⁴

More important in the long-term for Mao's development was the new emphasis he placed on organisation, which eventually would lead him to Marxism. For the moment, however, he continued to view the world revolution, which he maintained was moving inexorably eastward from Leningrad to Asia, in essentially anarchist terms. His articles dealt with educational policy, the struggle for women's rights, and such well-worn anarchist themes as ‘whether or not to retain the nation, or the family, or marriage, [and] whether property should be private or public’. The Marxist concept of class struggle, to the extent that he understood it at all, he found entirely alien: ‘[If] we use oppression to overthrow oppression,’ he wrote, ‘the result [will be] that we still have oppression. This would be not only self-contradictory, but also totally ineffectual.’ Rather than waging a ‘revolution of bombs [and] … of blood’, oppressors should be shown the error of their ways. Indeed, he used the word ‘class’ very rarely, and then usually in such un-Marxist categories as ‘the classes of the wise and of the ignorant’, or ‘the strong and the weak’.⁶⁵

Writing for a wider audience gave Mao for the first time an opportunity to apply to contemporary politics the analytical tools he had developed as a student. In ‘The Great Union of the Popular Masses’, he asserted a dialectical relationship between oppression and the reaction against it, which was straight out of Paulsen's System der Ethik.⁶⁶ The same sense of historical flux informed his assessment of Germany's defeat: ‘When we look at history in the light of cause and effect, joy and suffering are often closely interrelated, inseparable. When the joy of one side reaches an extreme, the suffering of the other side will inevitably also reach an extreme.’ Thus the invasion of France by the Holy Alliance in 1790 contained within it the seeds of Napoleon's rise; Napoleon's subjugation of Prussia in 1815 created the conditions for the French defeat of 1870, which in turn paved the way for Germany's defeat in 1918. Nor would it end there: the harshness of the conditions imposed by the Allies at Versailles made another cycle of conflict inevitable. ‘I guarantee’, Mao wrote, ‘that in ten or twenty years, you Frenchmen will yet again have a splitting headache. Mark my words!’⁶⁷

Mao's sympathy for Germany, shared by many educated Chinese, reflected admiration for its ‘towering strength’ and ‘spirit of greatness’, which had enabled it to become the most powerful nation in Europe. Yet here, too, his sense of history gave him a prescience which few others at that time shared.

We must realise [he wrote at the end of July] that Japan and Germany are a couple of dogs, male and female, that have tried to mate on a number of occasions, and although they haven't made it up to now, their lusting after each other will never go away. If the militarist adventurers of the authoritarian Japanese government are not exterminated, if the German … government is not overthrown by revolution, and if this lustful stud and lascivious bitch are still not separated, the danger will be truly great.⁶⁸

By the beginning of August 1919, an uneasy calm had returned to China. The government in Beijing had made symbolic amends. The strikes and demonstrations were over.

Only in Hunan did friction continue. At a meeting with student representatives, Governor Zhang, fanned by four bodyguards, yelled furiously: ‘You are not permitted to march in the streets, you are not permitted to hold meetings … You should work hard at studying and teaching. If you don't listen, I'll cut off your heads!’⁶⁹ Soon afterwards the Students’ Association was banned and Peng Huang, its chairman, fled to Shanghai.⁷⁰

Mao was unimpressed. On August 4, the Xiang River Review published a wickedly mischievous petition, which he himself had written, begging the Governor to allow the reopening of Changsha's leading newspaper, the Dagongbao:

We, the students, have long been worried about the Honourable Governor … We did not in the least expect that the paper would be banned, and its editor arrested, just because it published a manifesto … expressing opposition to [an] illegal election [rigged by Zhang's supporters] … We sincerely hope that Your Honour, for the sake of both interest and profit, will reach a correct decision [and release him]. In that case, the people of Hunan will forever remember your virtuous action. Otherwise … ill-informed outsiders may proclaim that this government is abolishing the right to free speech. We should guard against evil tongues more than a flooding river … Your Honour is enlightened and farsighted, and it is impossible that you do not agree with us.⁷¹

The Governor's response was predictable. Despite Mao's claim that the Review dealt solely with social and academic affairs,⁷² the next issue was confiscated and the journal ordered closed.⁷³ A few days later, a group of soldiers, led by Zhang's adopted son, bayoneted to death⁷⁴ two young radicals from Shanghai who were helping the students to organise the anti-Japanese boycott. The following month, Mao took over as editor of Xin Hunan (New Hunan), the weekly journal of Xiangya Medical College, a Chinese-American[Q1] teaching hospital in Changsha. In the first issue, he proclaimed defiantly: ‘Naturally we will not be concerned whether things go smoothly or not. Still less will we pay attention to any authority whatsoever.’ In October, it, too, was banned.⁷⁵

That month Mao's mother died. When he resumed writing, several weeks later, for the Dagongbao, which Zhang had permitted to reopen, the plight of China's women and the strait-jacket of the Confucian family were uppermost in his mind.

During the summer, in ‘The Great Union of the Popular Masses’, he had already taken on the role of spokesperson for women's equality:

Gentlemen, we are women! … We are also human beings … [yet] we are not even allowed to go outside the front gate. The shameless men, the villainous men, make us into their playthings … But so-called ‘chastity’ is confined to us women! The ‘temples to virtuous women’ are scattered all over the place, but where are the ‘pagodas to chaste men’? … All day long they talk about something called being ‘a worthy mother and a good wife’. What is this but teaching us to prostitute ourselves indefinitely to the same man? … Oh, bitterness! Bitterness! Spirit of freedom! Where are you? … We want to sweep away all those devils who rape us and destroy the liberty of our minds and our bodies!⁷⁶

In 1919, such views were widely shared among progressive young Chinese, revolted by the extremes of suffering which many Chinese women were routinely expected to endure.

That autumn, a particularly ghastly case occurred in Changsha, involving a young woman who had been affianced by her parents as the second wife of an elderly merchant. Twenty-three-year-old Zhao Wuzhen was borne in procession in her bridal sedan chair, decked out in red silk, to her future husband's home. But when the door was opened, it was discovered that, on the way, she had cut her throat with a razor.⁷⁷

Mao, with bitter memories of his own arranged marriage, and still in mourning for his mother, whom he saw as having been trapped in a similarly loveless union, threw himself into the debate, publishing no fewer than ten articles in the Dagongbao in the space of a fortnight. Her family, he acknowledged, were partly to blame, by forcing her to marry an old man she did not love. But the root cause of the tragedy was ‘the darkness of the social system’, which had left her no alternative but to take her own life. Citing one of his favourite proverbs – ‘Better a shattered piece of jade than an unbroken pot of clay’ – he argued that what she had done was ‘an act of true courage’, and disagreed with those, like Peng Huang, who suggested that she could have found other ways of struggling against her fate:

Mr Peng wonders why Miss Zhao didn't just run away … First let me raise a few questions, after which I shall present my view.
1) Within the city of Changsha, there are more than forty pedlars [who go from house to house, selling linen goods to women in the inner quarters] … Why is this?
2) Why is it that all the lavatories in the city of Changsha are for men only, and none for women?
3) Why is it you never see women entering a barber shop?
4) Why is it single women are never seen staying in hotels?
5) Why is it you never see women going into tea-houses to drink tea?
6) Why is it that the customers in [the big shops] … are always men, never women?
7) Why is it that of all the carters in the city, not one is a woman? … Anyone who knows the answers to these questions will understand why it was that Miss Zhao could not run away … Even if [she] had wanted to, where could she have run to?⁷⁸

Mao's new emphasis on social factors, and on first-hand observation, made him re-examine his political goals. To change China, he concluded, it was first necessary to change society. To change society, one must first change the system. To change the system, one must begin by changing those in power. Some of his colleagues in the New People's Study Society demurred, holding that it was the role of scholars to set forth great ideas, not to ‘concern ourselves with small problems and petty affairs’. True up to a point, Mao replied, but so long as the larger aim was not forgotten, promoting practical, political change was the ‘most economical and most effective means’ to influence the current situation and bring about fundamental reform.⁷⁹

Under his influence, this pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts approach was adopted by Changsha's students that winter when renewed efforts to enforce the anti-Japanese boycott provoked a showdown with Zhang Jingyao.

On December 2, some 5,000 students and others including representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, members of the Society for Promoting National Goods, factory workers and clerks, marched to the former imperial examination hall for a rally at which they planned to burn fourteen boxes of smuggled Japanese cloth. As the proceedings neared their climax, several hundred soldiers, led by the Governor's youngest brother, Zhang Jingtang, debouched from the surrounding streets, and encircled the demonstrators, rifles at the ready. ‘What kind of people are you, making this disturbance?’ he shouted at the crowd. ‘You should realise that we Zhang brothers are the ones who give you money for your studies.’ Spurring his horse forward, he went on angrily: ‘I know how to set fire to things as well as you … I am also a military man and know how to put people to death. I'll have some of you put to death for certain if this sort of thing goes on.’ When a student protested that the rally was patriotic, he laid about him with the flat of his sword and the troops began to advance. ‘You Hunanese are bandits,’ he cried, ‘and your women are bandits too.’ The leaders of the protest were forced to kneel on the ground, while Zhang boxed their ears, and a number of arrests were made.⁸⁰

The incident, trivial in itself, was the final straw for the Hunanese. Those whom Zhang had insulted were the sons and daughters of the elite. Already, that autumn, a leading Changsha banker had told a foreign acquaintance: ‘This time the trouble is [among] the gowned classes, not the short-coated masses … Better for this city to be looted and get rid of Zhang Jingyao than to have to continue longer under the present conditions.’⁸¹ After eighteen months of northern rule, the economy had collapsed.⁸² In many areas even the troops were no longer being paid, prompting Zhang, like other local warlords, to issue secret orders to farmers to resume opium cultivation, which, though banned by treaties with the Powers (and by a new presidential decree, issued in Beijing), generated large amounts of tax revenue.⁸³ Now the local gentry decided the Governor would have to go.

Two weeks after the confrontation in Changsha, a delegation left secretly for Beijing to plead for Zhang's removal.⁸⁴ Mao was among its members, charged with setting up a ‘People's News Agency’ to distribute information about the anti-Zhang campaign to Chinese-language newspapers.⁸⁵ On December 24, the ‘news agency’ scored a notable scoop when students at Wuhan discovered forty-five sacks of opium poppy seeds, each weighing 200 lbs, in a railway freight shed, awaiting shipment to Changsha, addressed to Governor Zhang.⁸⁶ For the next two months, the delegation produced a hail of petitions denouncing Zhang's ‘insatiable greed’ and ‘tyrannical rule’.⁸⁷ They held a meeting, which Mao attended, with an official at the Prime Minister's Office, and Hunanese members of the National Assembly pledged to resign their seats unless Zhang was dismissed.⁸⁸ But the Governor remained firmly in place, and at the end of February, the frustrated delegates decided they could do nothing more.⁸⁹

In the end, when Zhang fell, four months later, it was not because of popular protests but warlord politics. In May 1920, Wu Peifu, sensing that the simmering conflict between his Zhili clique and the rival Anfu government was coming to a head, decided to aid Tan Yankai's southern forces to recover Hunan, while he himself headed north to Beijing to do battle with Duan Qirui. On June 11, the Governor fled, signalling his departure by blowing up a munitions dump. In a characteristic final gesture, he extorted one last million Chinese silver dollars from local merchants by threatening to burn down the city and execute their leaders. The arrival of the southern forces the following afternoon provoked, one resident wrote, ‘the greatest day of rejoicing I have ever seen in Changsha’, as joyful crowds marched through the streets and innumerable firecrackers exploded late into the night. Little more than a month later, Duan Qirui's armies were defeated by Wu and other Zhili generals, and the Anfu clique, which had ruled northern China for three years, was formally dissolved.⁹⁰

If Mao's trip to Beijing was a failure as an exercise in practical politics, it turned out to be instrumental in his eventual conversion to Marxism. Already the previous autumn, when Zhang's crackdown on the students was at its height and the Xiang River Review had been banned, he had established a ‘Problem Study Society’, one of the aims of which was to see how the ‘union of the popular masses’ could be advanced. The society was eclectic in scope, and the list of more than a hundred issues with which it proposed to deal, ranging from ‘whether or not socialism can be established’ to such esoteric matters as ‘the problem of drilling traffic tunnels under the Bering Sea, the English Channel and the Straits of Gibraltar’, illustrated the sense of limitless possibility that the May Fourth movement unleashed.⁹¹

The society had been inspired by a celebrated debate that year between Hu Shi and Li Dazhao. Hu had argued that China needed ‘More Study of Problems; Less Talk about Isms’. Li contended that without ‘isms’ (or theories), problems could not be understood. Mao, in September 1919, was trying to straddle the two.

By then, more information about the Bolshevik revolution was becoming available. That spring the Beijing newspaper, Chenbao, began publishing translations of Japanese texts about Marxism. During the summer Li Dazhao wrote a long article for New Youth, soon republished in provincial journals all over China, entitled ‘My Marxist Views’, the second part of which dealt with Marx's economic theories. Almost overnight, Mao's vocabulary changed. For the first time he began to appreciate that the system which he wanted to transform was essentially economic in nature.⁹² The ‘core relationship’ of traditional marriage, he announced, was ‘economic, and thus controlled by capitalism’. If the marriage system was to change, women must obtain economic independence. If society was to change, the old economic relationships would have to go, and a new economic system must be put in their place.⁹³ A month later, Mao began referring to his colleagues in the New People's Study Society as ‘comrades’, and to working people as ‘toilers’.⁹⁴

In the spring of 1920, Russia's decision to repudiate the ‘unequal treaties’, under which, like the other Powers, it had enjoyed extraterritorial rights in China, provoked a surge of popular gratitude towards the Bolshevik regime, and immense interest among Chinese radicals in the principles by which it ruled.⁹⁵

Mao followed these developments closely and tried to learn all he could about the new government in Moscow. Russia, he told a friend, was ‘the number-one civilised country in the world’. He became desperate to go there, to see communism for himself, and talked to Li Dazhao about the possibility of setting up a work-study programme to send young people to Moscow, similar to the scheme under which Chinese were travelling to France. At one point he even announced that he was going to learn Russian. Yet at heart Mao remained deeply ambivalent about the benefits of foreign travel. ‘Too many people are infatuated with the two words, “going abroad”,’ he grumbled – only to add wistfully, a few lines later: ‘I think the only correct solution is for each of us to go abroad once, just to satisfy our craving for it.’ In the end, he resolved his dilemma by postponing a decision, remaining in China to study ‘for the time being’.⁹⁶

Even in Beijing, however, studying the Russian experience was easier said than done.

The first[Q2] complete translation of the Communist Manifesto did not appear in book form until April 1920, when Mao was about to leave for Shanghai, and none of Lenin's writings was translated until the end of the year.⁹⁷ What there was, he eagerly sought out. The Manifesto, in particular, influenced him profoundly. So did Kautsky's Class Struggle, which advocated non-violent revolution. Li Dazhao also gave him encouragement, as did Chen Duxiu, whose decision to embrace communism, Mao said later, ‘deeply impressed me at what was probably a critical period of my life’.⁹⁸

But Mao was still a long way from accepting Marxism as a doctrine. While at the beginning of June Chen was already on the point of setting up a ‘communist group’ in Shanghai,⁹⁹ Mao was enthusiastically promoting the Japanese ‘New Village’ movement, which envisaged the establishment of communes based on Kropotkin-style mutual aid, shared resources, and work and study, as a first step towards the peaceful creation of a classless, anarchist society. Manual labour was compulsory, and to reduce the gap between town and country, and between students and society, members were required to go out among the peasantry to spread modern ideas, much as students in Russia were sent to the villages to spread Bolshevism.¹⁰⁰

That summer, after several such schemes had collapsed, in Beijing and elsewhere, Mao conceded that the communes were impractical.¹⁰¹ But he did not abandon the ‘New Village’ concept altogether: he would later found a ‘Self-study University’ in Changsha, based on the principles of communal living, whose members were pledged to teach, study, and ‘practice communism’. In July 1920 he set up a Cultural Book Society to disseminate in the province the new literature which the May Fourth movement had spawned.¹⁰² Once again, Marxism was not a major influence. The society sold more copies of Kropotkin, Hu Shi and John Dewey, than of Kautsky or Marx. Mao at that time considered Dewey, who taught that ‘education is life, school is society’, to be one of the ‘three great contemporary philosophers’, along with Bertrand Russell and the French thinker, Henri Bergson.¹⁰³

Years later, in Bao'an, Mao told Edgar Snow that by the summer of 1920, he considered himself a Marxist.¹⁰⁴ That was untrue. He admitted to a friend at the time that he still did not know what to believe.¹⁰⁵ Indeed, far from being a source of enlightenment, Mao's Marxism that summer was just another element of confusion. He castigated himself for not being better organised: ‘I am too emotional and have the weakness of being vehement,’ he confessed to one of his former teachers. ‘I cannot calm my mind down, and I have difficulty in persevering. It is also very hard for me to change. This is truly a most regrettable circumstance!’ He wished he had X-ray eyes, he went on, so that he could read more widely. ‘I would like very much to study philology, linguistics and Buddhism, but I have neither the books nor the leisure to study them, so I slack off and procrastinate … It is hard for me to live a disciplined life.’¹⁰⁶

The desire to study Buddhism may sound strange in a man of strong radical beliefs. But to Mao, in 1920, Chinese culture was still the foundation on which everything else had to be built and it would remain so for the rest of his life. Nor was that unusual.¹⁰⁷ Others of his generation sought to ground Western ideas of socialism in the teachings of Mozi, a neglected fourth-century BC philosopher who had identified with the common people and preached universal love, and of Mencius, who had written of an ancient system of shared ownership of fields.

Mao never repudiated the ideas of his youth. His thinking developed by accretion. The idealism he absorbed from Paulsen and Kant was overlain with the pragmatism of Dewey; the liberalism of John Stuart Mill with social Darwinism; Adam Smith with T. H. Huxley. Liang Qichao's constitutionalism gave place to the socialism of Jiang Kanghu and Sun Yat-sen. The utopianism of Kang Youwei prepared the way for anarchism and Marxism. All this ‘modern knowledge’ was buttressed by a classical inheritance – from Wang Yangming of the Ming to the Song neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi; from the great Tang essayist, Han Yu, to Qu Yuan of the Warring States – which itself was anchored in the bedrock of the traditional Chinese amalgam of Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism which Mao had absorbed in his childhood in the village schools of Shaoshan. Each layer subsumed the others. Nothing was ever lost.

One result was a remarkable capacity, which grew more pronounced as Mao aged, for metaphor and lateral thinking. But more crucially, his approach to Marxism, when finally he embraced it, was coloured by other, very different intellectual traditions.

The Cultural Book Society stocked, alongside anarchist texts, such determinedly traditional offerings as a repunctuated edition of Water Margin in classical Chinese.¹⁰⁸ And in the spring of 1920, when Mao was finally able to do some of the sightseeing he had spoken of two years before, it was to the classical sites of antiquity that his footsteps first turned:

I stopped at Qufu, and visited Confucius’ grave. I saw the small stream where Confucius’ disciples bathed their feet, and the little town where the sage lived as a child. He is supposed to have planted a famous tree near the historic temple dedicated to him, and I saw that. I also stopped by the river where Yan Hui, one of Confucius’ famous disciples, had once lived, and I saw the birthplace of Mencius. On this trip I climbed Taishan, the sacred mountain of Shandong, where General Feng Yuxiang retired and wrote his patriotic scrolls … I walked around Dongting lake, and I circled the wall of Baodingfu. I walked on the ice of the Gulf of Beihai. I walked around the wall of Xuzhou, famous in [the novel], The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and around Nanjing's wall, also famous in history … These seemed to me then achievements worth adding to my adventures …¹⁰⁹

As that account, sixteen years later, to Edgar Snow, made clear, to Mao the journey back through China's past was in its way as much an accomplishment as his journey into the new, foreign world of the ‘isms’ which held the key to China's future.

Well before Zhang Jingyao was forced to abandon the governorship of Hunan, a lively debate developed over how the province should be ruled once he went. The Republic of China, which Sun Yat-sen had founded, was now widely viewed as a failure. Since 1913, Hunan had been ruled by three northern warlords – ‘Butcher Tang, Fu the Tyrant and Zhang the Venomous’ – each worse than the one before. Tens of thousands of Hunanese had died in a futile civil war; hundreds of thousands had lost their homes. Among the provincial elite, the barbarism of the last two years had convinced conservatives and progressives alike that Hunan would be far better off under Hunanese control. From there it was but a small step to proposing that the province declare its independence – not just in words, but in fact – first from the government in Beijing and then from the rest of China. In 1920, the new watchwords were self-rule and self-government. The slogan, ‘Hunan for the Hunanese!’, resonated anew, and the old ‘independent kingdom’ mentality, on which nineteenth-century travellers had remarked, underwent a dramatic revival.

Mao was initially sceptical. ‘I do not really understand just how we should [do this],’ he wrote in March of that year. ‘Since it is a province within China, it would not be easy for Hunan to establish its independence, unless the whole situation changes in future and our status becomes like that of an American or German state.’¹¹⁰

But less than three weeks later he was won over, and joined Peng Huang in founding an ‘Association for Promoting Reform in Hunan’, based in Shanghai and subsidised by a group of wealthy Hunanese businessmen. The overthrow of Governor Zhang, he warned, risked being a ‘tiger's head with a snake's tail’ – a brave beginning not followed through. The ‘evil system’ itself had to be changed, or another warlord would take Zhang's place. But to change the system throughout China was not possible. The best approach, therefore, was to start in one local area, in this case, Hunan, applying the principle of self-determination, in the hope that it would become a model for other provinces to follow. Then, eventually, all would ‘join together in providing a general solution to the problems of the whole country.’¹¹¹

In June 1920, ten days after Zhang fell, Mao took these arguments a step further in a letter published in the Shanghai newspaper, Shenbao:

From now on the essential things for us to do are … to abolish the military governorship, cut back the military forces, and … to build the people's rule … There is no hope of fully establishing people's rule in China within the next twenty years. [So] during this period, Hunan had best protect its own boundaries and implement its own self-rule … without bothering about the other provinces or the central government. Thus it can [become like] one of the [American] states … a hundred years ago … By bringing into full play the spirit of the people of Hunan, we can create a Hunanese civilisation within the territory of Hunan … For the past four thousand years, Chinese politics has always opted for grand outlines of large-scale projects with big methods. The result has been a country outwardly strong but inwardly weak; solid at the top but hollow at the bottom; high-sounding on the surface but senseless and corrupt underneath. Since the founding of the Republic, famous people and great men have talked loudly about the constitution, the parliament, the presidential system and the cabinet system. But the more noisily they talk, the bigger the mess they make. Why? Because they try to build on sand, and the edifice collapses even before it is completed. We want to narrow the scope and talk about self-rule and self-government in Hunan.¹¹²

For the next two months, Hunanese of all social strata, from the peasantry in their burnt-out villages to the great merchants in the cities, were too busy trying to repair their shattered livelihoods after the destruction wrought by Zhang's army to give much thought to politics. In July Mao returned to Shaoshan, where he spent several weeks with his brothers, looking after the affairs of the family which, as the eldest son, he now headed.¹¹³ In Changsha, Tan Yankai began, for the third time in his career, to piece together what had survived of the provincial administration. But he refused the now hated title of dujun, or Military Governor, preferring instead to be called ‘Commander-in-Chief’ of the forces which had liberated the city.

Hunan was thus in name, and in fact, independent of Beijing's control, but the form of its future government was undecided. In late August, this issue was addressed by Xiong Xiling, a Hunanese scholar who had been Prime Minister in the early years of the Republic. He proposed that the new Governor be elected by a college composed of local assembly-men and members of educational and business associations.¹¹⁴ Counter-proposals followed, and when Mao returned to Changsha at the beginning of September, he found the debate once more in full swing. He immediately contributed an essay of his own, published in the Dagongbao. ‘A storm of change is rising throughout the entire world,’ he proclaimed; ‘the call for national self-determination echoes to the heavens.’ Hunan should become the first of ‘twenty-seven small Chinas’ which would break free from ‘foundationless big China’, inaugurating a process of change that would lead to a ‘thoroughgoing general revolution’ of new progressive forces.¹¹⁵

Tan Yankai hesitated. Self-government would confer a broad-based legitimacy that would make his position less vulnerable to the ambitions of local military commanders. But he wanted to ensure that the deliberations remained firmly under his own control.

In mid-September, therefore, Tan summoned a convention of gentry and officials to begin drafting a new constitution. When this was criticised as too narrow, he suggested giving the provincial assembly the task. To Mao, Peng Huang, and their ally, the Dagongbao editor, Long Jiangong, that was unacceptable, too. ‘If we want self-government,’ Long wrote, ‘we cannot rely on this small number of people from a special class … We must find salvation for ourselves! … We must throw off the snare of top-down rule!’ They proposed a constitutional convention, elected through universal suffrage by all the people of Hunan over the age of eighteen (or in one of Mao's early proposals, over fifteen).¹¹⁶

A petition to this effect was approved at a public meeting Mao chaired on October 8, at which he urged his fellow townspeople not to let slip the chance the self-government movement was offering:

Citizens of Changsha! … If you succeed, [the] 30 million people [of Hunan] will benefit. If you fail, 30 million people will suffer. You must know that your responsibility is not light. The political and social reforms of the Western countries all started with movements of the citizens. Not only did the great transformations in Russia … and other countries which have shocked the world recently originate with the citizens, but even in the Middle Ages it was the citizens alone who wrested the status of ‘freemen’ from the autocrats … Citizens! Arise! The creation of Hunan's future golden age is being decided now.¹¹⁷

Two days later, on the Chinese Republic's National Day, a huge demonstration wound its way in pouring rain through the narrow streets of the old inner city, banners flying and bands playing, to the Governor's yamen, where a copy was presented to Tan.¹¹⁸ The North China Herald reported at length on the event under the headline, ‘Provincial Home Rule in China: Every Province its Own Master’:

The document was the work of three gentlemen: Mr Long [Jiangong], the editor of the Dagongbao; Mr Mao [Zedong] of the First Normal School; and Mr Peng [Huang], a bookseller … Of the 430 [signatories] … about 30 [were said to] be connected with the press of the city; perhaps 200 were teachers or men of the scholar class; about 150 [were] merchants, and, say, 50 [were] working men. It is interesting that not only were working men invited to sign but that representatives of their class stood side by side with some of the most cultured men in the city as members of the deputation of 15 which took the document to the governor … There can be no doubt that the eyes of China are fixed on Hunan at this juncture. Hunan has a chance that [other provinces] have not … If Hunan does act, its example will spread.¹¹⁹

But even as the petition was delivered, Tan was having second thoughts. As the campaign had gathered pace, it had grown more radical. The petitioners wanted a political system based on ‘democracy and socialism’, and had hinted that if they did not get it ‘a bloody revolution’ might ensue. In his articles in the Dagongbao, Mao had stated explicitly that their object was not to have ‘one Hunanese’ – in other words, Tan – rule Hunan, ‘[for then] the ruler is made master and those he rules are made slaves’; the aim was ‘rule by the people’.

In fact, this was largely rhetoric. Mao himself conceded that, in a country where 90 per cent of the population was illiterate, a mass-based Leninist-style revolution to ‘make a clean sweep of the reactionary parties and wash away the upper and middle classes’ was not possible. The best that could be hoped for was to create a movement of the educated elite, to ‘push things forward’ from the outside.¹²⁰

But even with those caveats, conservatives were alarmed. ‘Hunanese civilisation’ was one thing; ‘people's rule’ was quite another.

During the National Day march, a group of demonstrators, disregarding the organisers’ warnings against disorderly conduct, had climbed on to the roof of the provincial assembly building – symbol of elitist rule – and, amid cheers and ribaldry from below, ripped down the Assembly's flag.¹²¹ The following day, Tan seized on this incident as proof that the kind of popular self-government the radicals were advocating was unworkable, and announced that he was withdrawing his support.

The movement then collapsed. On November 1, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, both of whom were then visiting China, addressed a conference in Changsha on constitutional issues, in which Mao also took part. But no conclusion was reached. A few weeks later, Tan was repaid for his timidity when a local army commander, Zhao Hengti, overthrew him in just the kind of military power-play he had been hoping a popular mandate would prevent.¹²²

Zhao ordered the drafting of a provincial constitution of his own, which was published the following April and promulgated in January 1922. But it was only a pale shadow of the ‘total self-rule’ that Mao and his friends had been fighting for.¹²³ For a time Zhao maintained friendly relations with the southern government in Canton, and became known as a leading proponent of federalism in China. In reality, however, one warlord had replaced another, as Mao had warned might happen. Zhao continued as Governor until 1926, when he was overthrown in his turn by another rebellious military officer.

To Mao, the failure of the independence movement was a grievous disappointment. All his efforts over the past year, he told friends, had been ‘to no avail’. The Hunanese had shown themselves to be ‘muddle-headed, with neither ideals nor long-term plans. In political circles, they are lethargic and extremely corrupt, and we can say that there is absolutely no hope for political reform.’ It was time to start afresh, he wrote, to ‘carve out a new path’.¹²⁴

Characteristically, this provoked a feverish bout of soul-searching, as he reproached himself for everything from emotional shortcomings to lack of progress in his studies.¹²⁵ But instinctively he felt the way ahead lay through the New People's Study Society, which had languished during the campaign against Zhang, and whose future role and activities were now the subject of intense debate.

What was needed, Mao believed, was a ‘dedicated group of comrades’, sharing common goals, who would combine their intellectual resources to work out a joint strategy for thoroughgoing reform. They should work quietly behind the scenes, without ‘seeking for vain glory or trying to cut a figure’, and should ‘absolutely not jump on the political stage to [try to] grasp control’. Secondly, in order to ‘overthrow and sweep away the old order’, it was necessary to mobilise ‘the people of the whole country, not [just] a few bureaucrats, politicians and military men’. An ‘ism’ – any ‘ism’ – required a movement to put it into effect, and the movement, in turn, required a broad popular base.¹²⁶ As Mao put it in a letter to his friend Luo Zhanglong in November 1920:

We really must create a powerful new atmosphere … To [do this] naturally requires a group of hard-working and resolute people, but even more than that it requires an ism that everyone holds in common. Without an ism, the atmosphere cannot be created. I think our study society should not merely be a gathering of people bound by sentiment; it must become a group of people bound together by an ism. An ism is like a banner; only when it is raised will the people have something to hope for and know in which direction to go.¹²⁷

But the question remained: which ‘ism’? Already, that July, sharp differences had emerged among the sixteen members of the group in France. At a meeting in Montargis, sixty miles south of Paris, where they had gone for language studies, Cai Hesen had argued that China needed a Russian-style revolution. Xiao Yu disagreed, proposing instead a moderate anarchist-inspired reform programme, similar to that which Mao had championed in the Xiang River Review a year earlier, based on education and mutual aid. The differences were papered over with a compromise that the society's guiding principle would be ‘to reform China and the world’.¹²⁸ But afterwards Xiao and Cai wrote separately to Mao, setting out their rival positions. The main mission of socialism, Cai argued, was to destroy the capitalist economic system, using the dictatorship of the proletariat as its weapon:

I don't think anarchism will work in the world today, because obviously there exist two antagonistic classes in this world. In overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, there is no way the reactionary classes can be suppressed save by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Russia is a clear illustration. Therefore I think that in the future reform of China … we must first organise a Communist Party, because it is the initiator, propagandist vanguard and operational headquarters of the revolutionary movement.¹²⁹

Cai was not alone in drawing this conclusion. In an article in New Youth that summer, Chen Duxiu called for ‘revolutionary means [to] be used to establish a state of the working class’.¹³⁰

In Changsha in September, Mao and Peng Huang, with the backing of a wealthy sympathiser in the provincial administration, set up a Russia Study Society,¹³¹ which, over the next three months, recruited more than a dozen young Hunanese, including such future communist luminaries as Ren Bishi and Peng Shuzhi, to go to Moscow to attend the newly established University of the Toilers of the East.¹³² It was headed by one of Chen Duxiu's friends, He Minfan, the principal of the Wang Fuzhi Academy, an old-fashioned literary scholar with a flowing white beard falling on to his formal silk gown, who had developed, somewhat improbably, a keen interest in socialism.¹³³ Mao was listed as its secretary and was the moving force behind it.[Q3]

A month later, He Minfan set up a Marxist Study Circle on the model of those established in Beijing and Shanghai by Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Besides himself and Mao, there were three other founding members: Peng Huang, He Shuheng and another teacher. Soon afterwards they began discussing the establishment of a Socialist Youth League branch.¹³⁴ [Q4]

Yet Mao was a reluctant convert. Where Cai Hesen understood at once that Bolshevism was the answer to China's problems, and embraced it enthusiastically, Mao came to it despite himself. ‘Cai is the theorist, Mao the realist’, their friends used to say. In the end, it was realism that led Mao to endorse what he called Russian ‘terrorist tactics’. It was, he told Cai, ‘a last resort’ after ‘other, better means’ – a reference to the self-government movement and the anarchist ‘new village’ experiment – had failed. ‘Russian-style revolution’ looked like being the only one that would work:¹³⁵

The Russian method represents a road newly discovered after all the other roads have turned out to be dead ends. This method alone has more potential than other methods of transformation … Social policy is no method at all, because all it does is patch up some leaks. Social democracy resorts to a parliament as its tool for transforming things, but in reality the laws passed by a parliament always protect the propertied class. Anarchism rejects all authority, and I fear that such a doctrine can never be realised. The moderate type of communism, such as the extreme freedom advocated by [Bertrand Russell], lets the capitalists run wild, and therefore it will never work either. The radical type of communism, or the ideology of the workers and the peasants, which employs the method of class dictatorship, can be expected to achieve results. Hence it is the best method to use.¹³⁶

The alternative, advocated by Xiao Yu, was to use ‘the method of education’, to persuade the bourgeoisie of the error of their ways, so that ‘it would not be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and bloody revolution’. In theory, Mao wrote in December, this would of course be best. But in practice it was not possible. ‘Historically no despot, imperialist or militarist, has ever stepped down of his own free will without waiting for people to overthrow him’:

Education requires: (1) money, (2) people, and (3) institutions. In today's world, money is entirely in the hands of the capitalists. Those in charge of education are all either capitalists or the slaves of capitalists … If you teach capitalism to children, these children, when they grow up, will in turn teach capitalism to a second generation of children. If education has thus fallen into the hands of the capitalists, it is because they have ‘parliaments’ to pass laws protecting the capitalists and handicapping the proletariat. They have ‘governments’ to execute these laws and to enforce actively the advantages and prohibitions they contain. They have ‘armies’ and ‘police’ to provide passive guarantees for the safety and happiness of the capitalists and to repress the demands of the proletariat. They have ‘banks’ as their treasury to ensure the circulation of their wealth. They have factories, which are the instruments by which they monopolise the commodities produced. Consequently, unless the communists seize political power … how could they take charge of education? … That is why I believe the method of education is not feasible …¹³⁷

He concluded that Xiao Yu's view was untenable, and expressed ‘profound approbation for the views of [Cai] Hesen’. On New Year's Day, 1921, eighteen members of the New People's Study Society made their way through a snowstorm to a meeting at the Cultural Bookstore in Changsha, where, after two days’ discussion, they voted by a margin of twelve to three, with three members undecided, in favour of Bolshevism as the society's common goal.¹³⁸ By now the Marxist Study Circle had been transformed into an embryonic ‘communist group’.¹³⁹ On January 13, the Hunan branch of the Socialist Youth League, composed mainly of students and New People's Study Society members, held its inaugural meeting. From Shanghai, Mao had received copies of an underground journal, ‘Communist Party’ (Gongchandang), which Chen Duxiu's group had launched on November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and of a draft Party Manifesto, issued at about the same time. It called for common ownership of the means of production, the abolition of the state and the creation of a classless society, and declared:

The instrument to defeat capitalism is class struggle … [The] task is to organise and concentrate the power of this class struggle and to make the force opposing capitalism stronger … The objective is to organise some large industrial associations … and also to organise a revolutionary, proletarian political party – the Communist Party. The Communist Party is to guide the revolutionary proletariat to fight against capitalists and to seize political power from them … Power will be placed in the hands of workers and peasants, just as the Russian Communist Party did in 1917.¹⁴⁰

A few days after the inauguration of the Youth League, Mao wrote to Cai Hesen, explicitly rejecting anarchism as a practical political doctrine, and endorsing Marx's ‘materialist conception of history’ as the philosophical basis for the new party they were planning to create.¹⁴¹ His conversion was complete.

Mao's Marxism would always retain an anarchist tincture. But the long search for an ‘ism’ was over.

Becoming a Marxist was not the only change in Mao's life in 1920. His personal circumstances altered markedly too. As a student, he had been proverbially penniless, and remained so after he graduated. Much of the time he borrowed to get by, relying on the Confucian tradition of mutual aid, whereby friends who have money help those who have not (in the knowledge that one day the roles may be reversed, and they will be helped in turn). None the less, it was a precarious existence. He recounted, years later, how his much-vaunted sightseeing trip that spring had almost ended in disaster when he ran out of money soon after leaving Beijing:

I did not know how I was to get any further. But as the Chinese proverb says, ‘Heaven will not delay a traveller’, and a fortunate loan of 10 yuan from a fellow student … enabled me to buy a ticket as far as Pukou [not far from Shanghai] … On the way [I visited the classical sites] … But when I reached Pukou I was again without a copper … Nobody had any money to lend me; I did not know how I was to get out of town. But the worst of the tragedy happened when a thief stole my only pair of shoes! Ai-ya! What was I to do? But again, ‘Heaven will not delay a traveller’, and I had a very good piece of luck. Outside the railway station I met an old friend from Hunan, and he proved to be my ‘good angel’. He lent me money for a pair of shoes, and enough to buy a ticket to Shanghai.¹⁴²

In Shanghai, Mao was reduced to taking in washing to help pay for the room he shared with three Hunanese students. Doing washing was not so bad, he told friends, but he had to spend most of his earnings on tramcar fares in order to collect and deliver it.¹⁴³

Once back in Changsha, however, his fortunes improved dramatically. In September 1920 he was appointed principal of the primary school attached to First Normal, which gave him for the first time a regular, well-paid job, and a status that accorded with his increasingly influential role in provincial politics. It also made possible the second big change in Mao's life. That winter he married Yang Kaihui, the twenty-year-old daughter of his ethics professor at First Normal, Yang Changji, who had died in Beijing the previous January.¹⁴⁴

In the liberal circles in which Mao moved, relations between the sexes in China in the early part of the century were not that different from those in contemporary Europe or America. Like all Chinese cities, Changsha had its entertainment district, known as the ‘willow lane quarter’, where singing girls entertained the wealthy, and common prostitutes, the poor. As in Edwardian Britain or belle époque France, brothel-going attracted no social stigma. Indeed, so universal was the practice that every new radical group which claimed to have China's future at heart, from the anarchist ‘Six No's Society’, founded by Cai Yuanpei in 1912, to Mao's New People's Study Society, laid down as a condition of membership that those who joined must abstain from visiting prostitutes to show their moral commitment to the reformist cause.¹⁴⁵

There is an early hint of Mao's own attitude in a memorial poem for a schoolfriend, which he wrote in 1915 at the age of twenty-one: ‘Together we denounced the licentious, but how shall we purge the evil in ourselves?’ Two years later, he likened the heroic drive of great men to ‘the irresistible sexual desire for one's lover, a force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped’. Sex and food, he wrote then, were the two basic human instincts.¹⁴⁶

By his own account, Mao fell in love with Yang Kaihui during the winter of 1918, when he was working as an assistant librarian at Beijing University.¹⁴⁷ But it appears that at that stage he had no opportunity to declare his feelings and in any case he was too shy. Meals at the professor's home, according to Xiao Yu, always took place in complete silence,¹⁴⁸ and even in a liberal household it was not considered proper for young people of opposite sexes to be alone together. But from this time on, Mao's writings began to sound a more romantic note. ‘The power of the human need for love is greater than that of any other need,’ he proclaimed.¹⁴⁹ ‘Unless people have yielded to the irresistible natural force of love, they either … start big rows [after marriage], turning the bedroom into a battlefield of deadly mutual hostility, or find themselves a world of secret amours “amid the mulberry fields of the Pu River.”’^I

The course of love, however, did not run smooth. Back in Changsha a year later he was smitten by another young woman, Tao Yi, who became his first serious girlfriend.¹⁵⁰ She was an early member of the New People's Study Society, and their romance evidently lasted through most of the spring and summer of 1920, when they worked together in the Hunan self-government movement and on setting up the Cultural Book Society. Then they drifted apart, and in the autumn Mao was back courting Kaihui.¹⁵¹ He told her about Russia and this wonderful new idea called communism, and persuaded her to join the Youth League. His enthusiasm overcame their shyness. ‘I saw his heart,’ she wrote later, ‘and he saw mine’.¹⁵²

Cai Hesen and his girlfriend, Xiang Jingyu, had written in the meantime from Paris to say they had decided to flout convention, and instead of getting married, had concluded ‘a union based on love’. Mao was lost in admiration:

I think we should regard Xiang and Cai as our leaders and organise an ‘Alliance for the Rejection of Marriage’ [he wrote]. Those who have marriage contracts should break them (I am opposed to humanism!). Those who do not have marriage contracts should not enter into them … I think that all those men and women who live under the marriage system are nothing but a ‘rape brigade’. I have long since proclaimed that I would not join this rape brigade.¹⁵³

Yet less than three months later, he did marry. Yang Kaihui's family no doubt insisted on it. For a professor's daughter to marry a peasant's son, even one who had become as prominent as Mao, was enough of a social gamble, without adding to it the opprobrium that in Changsha, far more than in France, would attach to an irregular union. In any case, the kind of marriage Mao railed against was the traditional one arranged by a matchmaker. To him, the criterion of marriage was that ‘the man and the woman both know in their hearts that they have a deep and mutual affection for each other’.¹⁵⁴ The key to happiness was free choice.

In the autumn of 1921, they moved into a small house in an area called Clearwater Pond, just outside Changsha's Small East Gate.¹⁵⁵ For the next few years, perhaps for the only time in Mao's life, he had a truly happy family to come home to. His first son, Anying, was born in October 1922; the second, Anqing, in November 1923; the youngest, Anlong, in 1927. It was a surprisingly traditional Chinese household: his mother-in-law lived with them and Kaihui stayed at home with the children, while Mao roamed far and wide, working for the cause to which they were both now committed. As the years passed, the cause took over, and the family was left behind.

I This has been a synonym for illicit love-affairs since ancient times. The phrase derives from a line in the Liji, or Book of Rites, which links debauchery on the banks of the Pu River with the ruin of the State of Wei.