by Philip Short
Much as he might complain about his father's meanness, Mao inherited his sense of thrift. Throughout his adult life, at least where his own person was concerned, he was famously unwilling to buy anything new if the old one could be patched up and made to serve a little longer.13
The earthiness of his childhood proved equally tenacious.14 Hygiene was rudimentary, and washing as much a rarity as in medieval Europe. ‘A total apathy in regard to matter in the wrong place pervades all classes from the highest to the lowest,’ wrote a contemporary observer. ‘Gorgeous silks conceal an unwashed skin, and from under the rich sable cuffs of the official protrude fingernails innocent of soap or penknife.’15 To the end of his days, Mao preferred a rub with a steaming towel to washing with soap and water.16 Nor did he ever get the hang of using a toothbrush. Instead, like most rural southerners, he rinsed his mouth with tea.17
The other constants of peasant life were bedbugs, lice and itch-sores. When Mao itched, he scratched: at Bao'an, in the 1930s, he had no compunction about lowering his trousers, while receiving a foreign visitor, to search for an uninvited guest in his underwear.18 In part, he disdained convention; in part, it was ingrained peasant habit. Nowhere was that more viscerally evident than in his attitude to the workings of his own body. The Chinese as a nation have always been unfazed by natural processes which send Anglo-Saxons in particular into contortions of squeamishness. Small children were, and in many parts of the countryside still are, brought up wearing split trousers so that they can squat and relieve themselves wherever the urge takes them. Adults used communal latrines, where defecation was a social event. Mao was never reconciled to Western-style lavatories with a seat and flushing water. Even at Zhongnanhai in the early 1950s, when he was already Head of State, it was one of the duties of his personal bodyguards to follow him out into the garden with a shovel, and dig a hole in the ground for Mao to perform his bowel movement. The practice ended only after Zhou Enlai arranged for a specially built latrine which met with Mao's approval to be installed next to his bedroom.19 He was equally ill at ease with Western-style beds, insisting all his life on having hard wooden boards to sleep on.
When Mao was six he started helping in the fields like other children of his age, carrying out the small tasks which Chinese peasant families always left to the old and the very young: watching over the cattle and tending the ducks.20 Two years later, his father sent him to the village school – an important decision for it cost four or five silver dollars a year, nearly six months of a labourer's wages.21
Among all except the very wealthy, every family's dream in nineteenth-century China was to have a son whose brilliance in expounding the classical Confucian texts would win him a place of honour in the imperial examinations, opening the way to an official career with all the prestige, and opportunities for ‘squeeze’, which that entailed. In the words of one of the most sympathetic Western observers of Chinese life at that time:
Education is the royal road to the honours and emoluments that the state has to bestow, and it is by means of it that the wildest ambition that ever ran riot through a young man's brain can ultimately be satisfied. In the West there are many ways by which a man may rise to eminence, and finally occupy a prominent position as a member of Parliament, or as holding some office under Government that will bring him before the notice of the public. In China they are all narrowed down to one, and it is the one that leads from the schoolhouse … It may be confidently asserted that every schoolboy carries in his satchel a possible viceroyship when … untrammelled by parliaments, he may rule over twenty or thirty millions of people.22
Yet the dream was for the few. Most of the population was too poor to take even the first step: learning to read and write.23
Mao's mother, Wen Qimei, literally ‘Seventh Sister’, the peasant custom then being not to name girls, but simply to number them in order of their birth, may have had dreams for him. Three years older than her husband, she was a devout Buddhist. She introduced her son to the mysteries of the village temple with its fantastic images of arhats and bodhisattvas, blackened by grime and smoke, the air heavy with the smell of incense; and later she grieved when, as an adolescent, his faith began to falter.
Mao's father did not dream. His ambitions, typical of the small landlord he had become, were much more down-to-earth.24 He himself was barely literate, having had but two years' schooling. He wanted his son to do better, but for strictly practical ends: to keep the farm accounts, and then later, after an apprenticeship with a rice merchant in Xiangtan, to take over the family business and support his parents in their old age.25
Royal road it might be, but a village school in the last days of the Chinese Empire was a grim place, calculated to dampen the boldest spirit.26 It consisted of a single room with bare mud-brick walls and a floor of beaten earth, unheated in winter, sweltering in summer, with a central door and two small apertures at each end allowing in air and a little light to pierce the gloom. The school year began in February, on the 17th of the First Moon, two days after the Lantern Festival, which brought to an end the festivities marking the Chinese New Year. Each boy waited at the school gate, carrying a small desk and stool which he had brought from home. Usually there were about twenty of them, the youngest, like Mao, seven or eight years old, the oldest seventeen or eighteen. They all wore identical loose jackets, cross-tied at the front, of homespun blue cotton, and loose, baggy trousers made from the same material. The teacher sat at a table, with an ink-stone and water-dropper, a small earthenware teapot and cup, bamboo tallies to record the presence of each pupil, and a stout bamboo rod before him. Tradition held that he should show no sign of interest in, or sympathy for, his students lest it endanger his authority, which was absolute.
Mao's teacher was in that mould. He belonged to the ‘stern-treatment school … harsh and severe’, Mao remembered.27 They learned to fear his bamboo rod, which he used frequently, and his ‘incense board’ – a slatted wooden washboard on which a pupil would be made to kneel for the time it took an incense-stick to burn down.28
If the material conditions were depressing, the method of teaching was more so. There were no picture books to excite the imaginations of Mao and his classmates, no simple stories to capture the attention of their young minds. Instead, they were subjected to a system of rote-learning, which had been handed down almost unchanged for 2,000 years and whose guiding principle was to keep knowledge the preserve of the elite by making it as difficult as possible to acquire.
The first schoolbook with which the children of Mao's generation were presented was the Three Character Classic, so-called because each of its 356 lines contains three Chinese characters. Written in the eleventh century to introduce young people to Confucian ideas, it opens with the words:
Men at their birth are by nature radically good,
In this, all approximate, but in practice widely diverge.
To which a fifteenth-century commentator adds:
This is the commencement of a course of education and explains first principles … That which heaven produces is called ‘man’; that which it confers is called ‘nature’; the possession of correct moral principle is called ‘goodness’ … This refers to man at his birth. The wise and the simple, the upright and the vicious, all agree in their nature, radically resembling each other, without any difference. But when their knowledge has expanded, their dispositions and endowments all vary … thus perverting the correct principles of their virtuous nature … The superior man alone has the merit of supporting rectitude. He does not allow the youthful buddings of his natural character to become vitiated.29
That is heavy going for eight-year-olds in any circumstances. But to the strain of mastering such abstruse metaphysical notions was added another, more fundamental obstacle.
The textbooks were printed on flimsy paper in large characters, five pairs of lines to a page.30 First the teacher would summon the pupil to his table and make the child repeat after him the lines he was to learn, until he h
ad them off by heart. Then the next child would come up, until the whole class had been seen, and each boy had returned to his desk to practice what he had learned while tracing, on thin slips of paper, the shapes of the corresponding characters. But not in silence:
After [being] informed what sounds to utter, each [pupil] spends his time in bawling out the characters at the top of his voice to make sure he is not idle, as well as to let the teacher hear whether the sounds have been correctly caught. When the lesson has been ‘learned’, that is when the scholar is able to howl it off exactly as the master pronounced it, he stands with his back to the teacher and repeats (or ‘backs’) the lesson in a loud sing-song voice until he reaches the end of his task, or the end of what he remembers, when his voice suddenly drops from its high pitch like a June beetle that has struck a dead wall.31
As each one practised in his own time, the result was an incomprehensible cacophony.32 Incomprehensible, not merely to others but also to themselves. For the meanings of Chinese characters are, in most cases, not immediately apparent from their form. The teacher did not explain what any of the lines meant: he merely required his pupils to be able to reproduce, singly or as blocks of text, the characters they had learned and the sounds they represented.33
Altogether six books had to be memorised in this way. After the Three Character Classic came the Book of Names, which lists in an arbitrary and unbroken sequence the 454 permitted Chinese surnames; the Thousand Character Classic, written in the sixth century, composed of a thousand characters, no two of which are the same; the Odes for Children, on the importance of study and literary pursuits; the Xiaoqing, or Filial Classic, which is ascribed to Confucius himself and dates back at least to the fourth century; and the Xiaoxue, or Filial Learning, which sets out in exhaustive detail the duties of each member of the Confucian family and state.34
It was like asking a child in Britain or America, speaking only English, to learn by heart a sizeable part of the Old Testament in Greek. The result was that many Chinese completed their schooling without ever learning to read or knowing the meanings of more than a handful of characters.35
For two years, until Mao was about ten, he spent his days from sunrise to dusk memorising, copying and reciting moralistic phrases like, ‘Diligence has merit; play yields no profit’, having no idea what they meant.36 The only respite was on festival days, which came round on average once a month, and in the three weeks' holiday when the school closed over the Chinese New Year.
Then, finally, the teacher began to work through the texts again, this time explaining their meaning.
For Mao, as for all Chinese of his generation, the importance of these texts and their commentaries, together with the Four Books – the Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean and the works of Mencius – which he studied next, cannot be overstated.37 The ideas they contained, the way those ideas were formulated and the values and concepts that underpinned them, fixed the underlying pattern of Mao's thought for the rest of his life, just as surely as, in Western countries, the parameters of thought for atheists, no less than believers, are defined by Judæo-Christian values and ideas.
Learning the Classics may have been drudgery, but Mao realised early on that they were extremely useful. Confucian thought was the common currency of Chinese intellectual life, and quotations from the Master an essential weapon in argument and debate – as even Mao's father recognised after the family had been defeated in a lawsuit because of an apt Classical quotation used by their opponent.38
Moreover, there were passages which, as a boy of eleven or twelve, Mao must have found exhilarating, prefiguring his lifelong exaltation of the power of the human will:
Men must rely on their own efforts …
In all the world there is nothing that is impossible,
It is the heart of man alone that is wanting resolution.39
The textbooks stressed, too, the importance of studying the past, another Confucian pursuit which was to stay with Mao all his life. His fascination with history may have come initially from novels like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Journey to the West,40 whose hero, the Monkey King, had captivated generations of Chinese, but his approach to it was that set out in the Three Character Classic:
Records of rule and misrule, of the rise and fall of dynasties,
Let he who studies history examine these faithful chronicles,
Till he understands ancient and modern things as if before his eyes.41
More broadly, Mao drew from Confucianism three key ideas which were to prove fundamental to the whole of his later thought. These were, first, the notion that every human being, and every society, must have a moral compass; if not Confucianism, then something else which fulfils that role. The second was the primacy of right-thinking, which Confucius called ‘virtue’: only if a person's thoughts were right – not merely correct, but morally right – would his actions be right. Third was the importance of self-cultivation.
Mao claimed to dislike the Classics,42 but his fondness for quoting them belies that. His speeches in later life were packed with allusions to Confucius, to the Daoist thinker, Zhuangzi, to the Mohists and other early philosophical schools, far outnumbering those to Lenin and Marx.43 Theirs were the ideas with which he grew up, and which he knew better than any other.44 The Confucian legacy would prove at least as important to him as Marxism, and in the last years of his life it became once more ascendant.
While he was at the village school, Mao continued to help out with odd jobs on the farm and, at his father's insistence, learned how to use an abacus so that in the evenings, when he got home, he could do the daily accounts.
The family had grown. When he was two-and-a-half years old, Mao's mother had given birth to a second son, Zemin.45 Four other children, two boys before Mao was born and afterwards two girls, died at birth, but in 1903 a third brother, Zetan, survived, and soon afterwards Mao's parents adopted a baby girl, Zejian, the child of one of his paternal uncles.46 By 1906 there were six mouths to feed as well as the hired labour. So, shortly after Mao's thirteenth birthday, his father decided that he must work full-time.
Mao's relations with his father were difficult, though perhaps not more so than for most Chinese boys of his time. Filial piety was a fine concept, and Mao, like all his classmates, was brought up on exemplary tales, supposed to have come down from the deepest antiquity, of sons who performed extraordinary feats to show their devotion to their parents: Dong Yong of the Han, who sold himself into slavery to raise the money to give his father a proper burial; Yu Qianlu, who ate his dying father's excrement in the hope that the old man's life might be saved; and many others still more farfetched.47 In theory, a father had the right to put to death an unfilial son. But in practice, all this was honoured in the breach.
‘The term “filial” is misleading, and we should not be deceived by it,’ wrote an American missionary towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Of all the people of whom we have any knowledge, the sons of the Chinese are the most unfilial, disobedient to parents and pertinacious in having their own way from the time they are able to make known their wants.’48
That was certainly so in Mao's case. While he accused his father of being hot-tempered, miserly and excessively strict, frequently beating himself and his brothers, even his own account makes clear that the blame was not all on one side:
My father invited many guests to his home, and while they were present a dispute arose between the two of us. My father denounced me before the whole group, calling me lazy and useless. This infuriated me. I cursed him and left the house. My mother ran after me and tried to persuade me to return. My father also pursued me, cursing at the same time that he commanded me to come back. I reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any nearer … My father insisted that I apologise and kow-tow as a sign of submission. I agreed to give a one-knee kow-tow if he would promise not to beat me.49
Mao neglected to mention that it was against eve
ry rule of propriety for a thirteen-year-old to argue with his father before guests, and the family must have lost much face as a result.
Years afterwards, Mao portrayed such experiences as teaching him the value of rebellion against authority: ‘I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained weak and submissive he only beat me more.’
Yet what comes across most strongly is the essential ordinariness of it all. Mao's mother, whom he loved deeply – a kind woman, generous and sympathetic and ever ready to share what she had – trying to make peace. His father, angry and hurt, but wanting somehow to retrieve the situation. And Mao himself, recalcitrant but also wanting a way out. Hardly an untypical relationship between parents and a teenage child.
As Mao grew older, however, the atmosphere at home soured. His father perpetually nagged and found fault with him, and he became increasingly alienated.50 Then came the fiasco of his marriage. At the age of fourteen, his parents betrothed him, in keeping with custom, to a girl four years older than himself, the eldest daughter of an impoverished rural scholar, a distant relative who had fallen on hard times.51 She would be an extra pair of hands to work in the fields and, in time, would assure the family's posterity.52 Gifts were exchanged, the bride-price paid – no small matter in those days, when a marriage portion could amount to a family's annual income53 – and the young woman, Luo Yigu, moved into the family home. But Mao refused to go along with the arrangement. By his own account, he never slept with her[Q1], he ‘gave little thought to her’ and did not consider her to be his wife.54 Shortly afterwards, he compounded his offence by leaving home and going to live with a friend, an unemployed law student.55
