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IT WAS ONE THING for Mao to say he had to get back to his books. It was quite another to decide how to do it. For a few months in 1912, Mao simply browsed through the educational advertisements in the local newspapers, and (according to his later reminiscences) because of his gullibility and lack of experience, he was briefly convinced of the inestimable value of a whole range of special training schools, at least to the extent of sending in his dollar registration fee and in one case taking courses of a few weeks. The schools that caught his eye were for police training, legal work, commercial skills, and soap making. These new schools, with their promises of guaranteed careers for ambitious youth, were themselves reflections of the rapid changes that were sweeping China. Their claims were flamboyant because they were untried and unprovable, and, as Mao learned to his chagrin, some of them held their classes mainly in English, which he could not understand except for a few phrases remembered from his earlier primary school.
Perhaps on the rebound from all this new knowledge, Mao retreated in mid-1912 to the shelter of a more traditional middle school in Changsha, one with a predictable curriculum of Chinese learning. His teachers there encouraged him to explore China’s own imperial past more deeply, believing that he had the “literary tendencies” to undertake serious study. One teacher led him through a collection of selected imperial edicts from the Qianlong emperor’s reign in the eighteenth century, a period when China had been rich and prosperous, and had greatly expanded its borders. Others took him more deeply into earlier texts in classical Chinese than he had ever gone before, including the celebrated Historical Records (Shiji) by the second century B.C. historian Sima Qian, still regarded as China’s greatest master of expository and narrative history.
Mao had almost certainly read some of these stories before, perhaps in simplified versions; it was at primary school that he began to delve deeply into the histories of early rulers, including the builders of the Qin dynasty, which after centuries of steady military expansion and administrative experimentation was finally in 221 B.C. able to draw all of known China together into a single centralized imperial state. One of Mao’s middle school essays, dated June 1912, has been preserved and gives us an entry into his intellectual mindset at this time. It is an analysis of one of the Qin’s first famous ministers, Lord Shang. Lord Shang was condemned by later Chinese scholars for his ruthlessness and deviousness, and for imposing savage and inflexible laws that terrified the people and reduced them to silence or to sycophancy. The historian Sima Qian said that Lord Shang was “endowed by heaven with a cruel and unscrupulous nature” and was a “man of little mercy.” The eighteen-year-old Mao took a different tack. His point of entry into his own essay was an enigmatic paragraph in the center of Sima Qian’s biography in which Lord Shang is presented as trying to convince the people of Qin to obey the new laws and take them seriously:
When the laws had been drawn up but not yet promulgated, Lord Shang was afraid people would not trust him. Therefore he set up a three-yard pole by the south gate of the capital market and announced that any member of the populace who could move it and set it up by the north gate would be given ten pieces of gold. The people were suspicious, and no one ventured to move the pole. Then Lord Shang announced, “Anyone who can move it will be given fifty gold pieces!” When one man moved the pole, he was promptly given fifty gold pieces, thus making clear that there was no deception. Then the laws were promulgated.
In his essay, Mao observed that when he read this passage he was drawn to “lament the foolishness of the people of our country.” The Chinese people, now as in the past, were “mutually dependent and interconnected,” so how could the people distrust their government? Lord Shang’s laws “were good laws,” Mao wrote firmly. Lord Shang himself was “one of the very first on the list” in the four-thousand-year-long record of those who had sought China’s welfare. He defeated the states bordering Qin’s territory, unified the Central Plain, preserved the people’s wealth, and increased the prestige of the state and “made slaves of the indigent and idle, in order to put an end to waste.” The fact that the people feared and distrusted him, so that he had to use the pole and the golden reward to convince them, was proof to the young Mao of “the stupidity of the people of our country,” a stupidity that was ongoing and pervasive, and had led the people of China into a long period of “ignorance and darkness” that had brought the entire country “to the brink of destruction.” The story of Lord Shang and the pole, Mao concluded, not only showed the innate stubbornness of the masses of the people—“at the beginning of anything out of the ordinary, the mass of the people always dislike it”—but constituted a shameful secret for the nation as a whole. If those in the Western nations or the “civilized” Eastern ones (Mao meant Japan) heard of it, they would “laugh uncontrollably so that they have to hold their stomachs, and make a derisive noise with their tongues.”
That the derision of the foreigners should be seen as a potent factor to Mao is interesting in itself—by the first decade of the twentieth century the Chinese were circulating translations of various sharp critiques of their own country made by foreign missionary observers, as if to rub salt into their own wounds, and Mao had probably seen these in the newspapers he read so avidly. But more significant is Mao’s self-confident acceptance of the necessity of Lord Shang’s laws, despite the fact that those same laws had been seen by so many Chinese commentators across two millennia as ultimately destructive and self-defeating. The laws that Lord Shang had decreed included the following: all people in China would be grouped in units of five or ten households, linked in mutual surveillance and held mutually responsible under the law; those failing to report an of fense of which they were aware should be cut in two at the waist; all families with more than two sons must declare the formation of a second household for tax purposes; people of all ages must “exert all their strength” in farming and weaving; profiteers and those “who became poor out of laziness” were to be arrested and made government slaves; social and economic status categories were to be sharply defined and backed by rules concerning clothing and ownership; and anyone giving shelter or lodging to strangers without proper credentials was to be prosecuted.
In the months after Mao wrote this essay, with its bleak view of China’s ordinary people, China did in fact embark on the only broad-based political elections in its history. The elections were called under the rules of the new draft constitution promulgated in 1912, and a large number of political parties were formed and competed for seats in the new Chinese parliament—among them Sun Yat-sen’s previously illegal and underground Revolutionary Alliance, now renamed the “Nationalist Party” (Guomindang).Candidates and voters in these elections had to be male, with certain educational or economic qualifications, and the elections were hard-fought, with the Nationalist Party winning the largest plurality but not an absolute majority. In a tragedy for China, Song Jiaoren, a close friend of Sun Yat-sen’s and the architect of the Nationalist election victory, and who many had believed would be China’s new premier, was assassinated in March 1913 as he waited in Shanghai to board the train to Beijing. The assassination may well have been ordered by China’s acting president, the former Qing dynasty governor-general Yuan Shikai, but that was never proved. What was clear was that Yuan was bitterly hostile to the Nationalist Party, and that within a few months he had declared the party illegal and had driven most of its leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, once more into exile. For the next fourteen years, during the most important phase of Mao’s schooling and young manhood, the Chinese republic became a sham, with the real power focused largely in the provinces and concentrated in the hands of local military leaders.
Mao commented on none of these crucial events of 1913, at least not in any sources that have survived. Instead he tells us that he spent this dramatic year of China’s history wrapped up in an intensive period of private study in the Changsha public library. The establishment of such public libraries had been one of the priorities recommended by China’s late Qing reformists, and now Mao was to reap the benefits. Though very short of money, and living in a noisy Changsha hostel for Xiangxiang natives, Mao established his own rigorous reading schedule during the library’s open hours, pausing only at noon each day to buy and eat a lunch of two cakes of rice. According to his later memories, he concentrated his reading on “world geography and world history.” As well as carefully scrutinizing world maps—the first he had seen—he plunged into his first serious study of Western political theory. Among the works that Mao recalls reading in translation during this time were Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Darwin’s The Origin of Species,and Herbert Spencer’s Logic. Mao also mentions reading John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, and there is no reason to doubt him: by this time all the titles Mao mentions had been translated into Chinese and were available in China’s better provincial libraries.
It must have been a solitary life, and one without clear purpose; certainly Mao’s father thought so, and refused to send any more money unless Mao formally enrolled again in a school from which he might really graduate, and which might lead to gainful employment. Also, life in the Xiangxiang hostel grew intolerable, as fights flared regularly there between the students and the restless demobilized Xiangxiang soldiers and militia who used the same premises. When a group of soldiers tried to kill some of the students—Mao writes that he hid out in the toilet during this confrontation—he decided to leave. Once again, an advertisement caught his eye: it was for a school in Changsha called the “Hunan Provincial Fourth Normal School,” and it offered free tuition along with cheap room and board. Urged on by two friends who asked him to write their application essays for them, and with a written promise of renewed support from his family if he was admitted, Mao applied in the fall of 1913. He and his friends were all accepted. “In reality, therefore, I was accepted three times,” as Mao put it.
This was the school that drew things together for Mao; it gave him support and focus through teachers he both admired and respected, and a group of friends with whom to share life’s travails and adventures. Mao was to stay there for five years. Even though he fretted under the restrictive regulations, especially the required courses in natural sciences and life-drawing (both of which he hated), he had outstanding teachers in classical Chinese and in the social sciences. The classical-language teacher made him restudy all he thought he knew about the early Chinese language, pointing out that Mao wrote like a “journalist,” due to the pernicious stylistic influence of some of the reformers he had been reading so avidly. This teacher, whom the students nicknamed “Yuan the Big Beard,” put Mao through an intensive course on the great Tang dynasty prose writers and poets of the eighth and ninth centuries, whom many considered the finest stylists in China’s long history. Some fragmentary pages from Mao’s surviving school notebooks, dated around December 1913, show the wide range of literary works that teacher Yuan discussed, and the detailed way that he led Mao (and the other students) through the variant classical pronunciations, the accurate translation of archaic economic and social terms, the exact identity of historical personages mentioned in the texts, and an analysis of the passages from various earlier Confucian classics chosen by Tang writers for inclusion in their own essays and poems.
Some of Mao’s other notes show how carefully Yuan (or perhaps other teachers in the middle school) introduced and analyzed the work of poets from the mid-seventeenth century, who wrote in anguish at the victory of the Manchu conquerors over the once proud Ming dynasty. Such poems had complex racial and nationalist overtones in their contempt for foreign barbarians and their veneration of the long literary traditions of China’s past. From such instructors Mao emerged with a decent familiarity with China’s traditional culture, though not with the kind of encyclopedic sweep and depth of knowledge that would allow him to write or argue on an equal footing with those young men who had spent years working with scholars in their own private academies. And for the rest of his life Mao was interested in poetry and continued to write poems in the classical style even during the most strident periods of later revolutionary upheaval.
Strong though his literature teachers’ impact may have been, it was Mao’s social science teacher, Yang Changji, who was to have the deepest influence on Mao’s intellectual life. As Mao recalled later, Yang “was an idealist, and a man of high moral character. He believed in his ethics very strongly and tried to imbue his students with the desire to become just, moral, virtuous men, useful in society.” Yang was, by all accounts, a remarkable figure, and the fact that men of his background were now available to be the teachers of restless middle school students is one of the indices of how the intellectual world of China was shifting in the early twentieth century. A Changsha native born in 1870, Yang spent the years between 1902 and 1913 in a series of schools in Japan, Great Britain, and Germany. From these experiences Yang had developed his own broad-based system of ethics that combined the idealism of Kant and the theories of individual “self-realization” developed by British philosophers. The Changsha middle school position was Yang’s first teaching job, and he led Mao and the other students through a rich series of ethical arguments, some of which he illustrated through selected passages drawn from the Analects of Confucius, and others by a careful reading of the German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen’s System of Ethics, which had just been translated into Chinese. Yang explored the moral problems inherent in hedonism and utilitarianism, and in the evolutionary theories then becoming popular. At the same time he queried such deeply held Chinese beliefs as “Family priorities should come before national ones,” and argued that intense family protection of the individual could in fact harm that individual’s development of independence. Yang also encouraged Mao and other students to meet with such radical figures as the Japanese socialist Miyazaki Toten, who came to lecture at the Changsha normal school in March 1917.
Yang could not make Mao into a philosopher any more than Yuan could make him into a classical exegete, but Yang could and did introduce Mao to a global array of philosophical concepts, and gave him some of the analytical keys to continue his own investigations. By a lucky chance, Mao’s original copy of Paulsen has been preserved, along with the marginal notes that Mao made during his senior year. The notations show him reading with close attention and occasionally expressing his own excitement in writing. Mao was especially intrigued to learn that moral philosophy always sprang from experience and that accordingly morality was different in different societies. From such a perspective, wrote Mao, “all our nation’s two thousand years of scholarship may be said to be unthinking learning.” Sometimes Mao’s comments reflect his awareness of a different road opening up before him. Opposite Paulsen’s comment that “all human beings without exception tend to stress self-interest over the interests of others,” Mao wrote, “I really feel that this explanation is incomplete.” And where Paulsen suggested that certain people were “devoid of feelings for the interests of others ... [and] even take pleasure in the suffering of others,” Mao exclaimed, “Except for those who are sick and crazy, there definitely are no such persons.”
Many passages of Paulsen reminded Mao of Chinese philosophers or the early historical tales he had loved to read, just as others reminded Mao of something as local as the behavior of the lawless troops in Changsha, or as portentous as the fate of Republican China. Most moving, perhaps, are the moments when Mao read into Paulsen’s words the deepest feelings of his own psyche. “This section is very well done,” he noted next to Paulsen’s powerful passage on the human wish to live “an historical life,” one in which each person could “form and create, love and admire, obey and rule, fight and win, make poetry and dream, think and investigate.” Sometimes Mao sighed over his new knowledge, as is seen in his handwritten comment on the pervasiveness of evil: “I once dreamed of everyone being equal in wisdom, and of the whole human race being made up of sages, so that all laws and rules could be discarded, but now I realize that such a realm cannot exist.”
Yang not only wrote on ethics, he also wrote on physical culture and personal strength, and here his words touched another chord in Mao. Yang wrote that scholars in China were so physically frail that they were incapable of serving in the army, and hence military service was left to “scoundrels with little education.” On the other hand, in Japan, as in the West, all kinds of sports from baseball and soccer to fencing and rowing were used to strengthen the citizenry, and in those countries outings to scenic spots were a basic part of life. Mao absorbed many of these ideas. He came to believe that exercise should be both violent and systematic, conducted in the nude if possible or in the lightest of clothes, and directed at strengthening the spirit as well as the body. By 1915 at the latest, Mao had begun to go on long tramps through the countryside with small groups of friends, staying with peasant families or in out-of-the-way mountain temples. He even posted notices around in Changsha, calling for “worthy men” to join him in these activities. After a day of hiking in the hills, the young men would swim in the Xiang River or one of its tributaries in the twilight; then they would sit on the riverbank and talk the hours away, discussing China’s fate, the meaning of Western culture, the need for economic reform, and the best modes of social organization, before returning to their simple lodgings for a well-earned sleep. Mao never lost the love of swimming he developed during these years, and he often promoted it to his friends as the finest form of exercise.
It was surely because of Yang’s help and encouragement that a lengthy essay Mao wrote on physical education, its spiritual and physical effects, and the best ways to exercise different parts of the body, was published in April 1917 in the prestigious Beijing monthly journal New Youth. This was the banner publication for new ideas in China, and was edited by a formidable group of scholars, many of whom were on the Beijing University faculty. At the same time, during 1917, Mao expanded his activities by forming a discussion society among his like-minded circle of students and friends, and by taking practice-teaching courses run by the middle school in the local community. In May, from the experience gained in the course, Mao and other students started a small school on their own, the “Workers’ Evening School.” The school offered instruction in basic math, reading, and writing, but also introductions to history, geography, “moral cultivation,” and economics. Mao taught history. In April 1918, with the help of Yang Changji, a formally structured “New People’s Study Society” met in Changsha. Mao was a founding member.
Throughout these years, Mao and other normal-school students were often invited to Yang’s home. Yang had a daughter, Kaihui, born in 1901 just before her father left for his studies in Japan and Europe. She was raised until his return in 1913 by her mother, who sent her to a local school, at which Kaihui was the first female student. Later she transferred to an all-girls’ school run by a teacher recently returned from Japan, who regaled the girls with tales of democratic revolutions. By 1911 or 1912 she was transferred to the Number One Changsha girls’ school, where she stayed until her father’s return. At this point, her father seems to have kept her at home so he could tutor her himself in both Chinese and English. Yang Changji was interested in problems of women’s education and freedom for women, and in an article he wrote in 1915 for a radical friend’s journal, he praised the free choice of marriage partners common in the West, and the equal rights that women enjoyed there. Yang felt that couples should marry late rather than early, and he denounced the practice of arranged marriages. He also criticized the prevalence of concubinage among wealthy Chinese. Mao must have met Kaihui—whom he was later to marry—fairly often on the visits to his teacher’s home, though there is no evidence of any romantic attachment at this time.
At the meetings of the New People’s Study Society, Mao was beginning to meet a number of other vivacious and politically radical woman, and by 1919 one of them, Tao Yi, became his girlfriend. She was three years younger than Mao, and also from Xiangtan county. Tao Yi graduated from the Changsha Zhounan girls’ normal school and was eager to go on for advanced study in Beijing, but she was too poor to do so. She made enough money to live on by a combination of school-teaching, cooking, tailoring, and crocheting, while she continued to study on her own. She was especially interested in psychology, theories of teaching, and the English language. As she told a group of friends in the New People’s Study Society, she had “long thought about finding a partner for self-study, but several attempts [had] been unsuccessful.” Though the two met often, and also corresponded, we know no details of their personal relations; but we do know that at this time there was a strange combination of emotions in the air for young men and women like Mao and Tao, a feverish sense of excitement that fused with a wish for chaste and enduring friendship built on a solid intellectual base of moral commitment. Even in the absence of any personal revelations, some sense of Mao’s mental state as far as women were concerned can be gleaned from a passage of his 1918 commentary on the Paulsen text that he was then studying. When Mao came across this profoundly pessimistic sentence: “The natural man would ... annihilate the whole universe merely for the sake of preserving himself,” he erupted in protest. Mao’s anguished marginal comment included the sentence: “For example, since I cannot forget the feeling I have toward the one I love, my will desires to save her and I will do everything possible to save her, to the point that if the situation is desperate I would rather die myself than let her die.”
Mao completed his courses successfully at the middle school and graduated in June 1918. He was twenty-four. That same summer, his teacher Yang Changji received the offer of a professorship at Beijing University, the most prestigious institution of higher learning in China and the center of the intellectual excitement generated by New Youth and a host of other innovative magazines and journals. Not surprisingly, Yang accepted, left his home and job in Changsha, and traveled with his wife and daughter to Beijing. Mao initially stayed on in Changsha after graduation, but he felt aimless and listless. In a letter of August 11, 1918, to a former schoolmate, Mao wrote that he and his closest friends felt “our future is rather empty, and we have no definite plans.” Some of them were getting local teaching jobs, while others were wondering whether to go to France on the newly announced work-study fellowships that would enable them to pay for their education by working in French factories. This program had been the brainchild of a group of prominent Chinese intellectuals. Some of these sponsors were self-professed anarchists living in Paris and studying the anarchist theories concerning the abolition of private property and restrictive personal bonds, and they believed in the ideal of mutual help as the way to solve social problems. Another sponsor of the program was Cai Yuanpei, the translator of the Paulsen edition that Mao had just been reading and the recently named chancellor of Beijing University.
The students chosen to go to France were to attend a training school first, either in Beijing or in Baoding city in north China, to prepare them linguistically and practically for the new life ahead. In a cryptic comment in the same August 1918 letter, Mao remarked, “I can raise the 200 yuan[Chinese dollars] for travel to Beijing and France, but the 100 yuan for travel to Baoding I cannot raise.” He gave no explanation of why he could raise the larger sum but not the smaller one, but perhaps it was easier to get donations for foreign travel than for domestic journeys. A significant example of selective (or distorted) memory in Mao’s later autobiographical reminiscences refers also to this same time. In the summer of 1936, Mao told his American interviewer, Edgar Snow: “In my last year in school my mother died, and more than ever I lost interest in returning home. I decided that summer to go to Beijing. Many students from Hunan were planning trips to France ... [but] I did not want to go to Europe. I felt that I did not know enough about my own country, and that my time could be more profitably spent in China.” But in fact Mao’s mother was alive, though not well, all through 1918; she was having great difficulty swallowing, and it was also feared that she had ulcers. One other letter of Mao’s has survived, also written in August 1918, to his “seventh and eighth maternal uncles”—that is, to his mother’s brothers from the Wen clan. In this letter, Mao talks of his mother’s illness and of his desire to find her a good doctor. He already had obtained a “special prescription” which he hoped would help her. In the meantime, Mao wrote casually that he was going to make a boat trip to Beijing with a few friends: “Sightseeing is the only aim of our trip, nothing else.” There was no mention of money problems.
It was in this tangle of prevarications and half-truths, in August 1918, that Mao took leave of his ailing mother and for the first time in his life set foot outside his natal province of Hunan. When he arrived in Beijing he went to call on the Yangs, and asked the newly appointed Professor Yang to help him find a job.