by Philip Short
Mao is oddly reticent about this episode. His father should have been furious, not only because of the money wasted but because of the shame brought on the family by such egregious flouting of social convention. Yet he says nothing of the arguments and bitter recriminations that might have been expected to follow. One account suggests that she remained in Mao's father's household, perhaps to become the older man's concubine, before dying of dysentery shortly after her twentieth birthday.56 Whether for this or other reasons, Mao's mother left the family home in Shaoshan to live instead with her brother's people in her native village in Xiangxiang.57
When she died, ten years later, after a long illness, Mao gave vent to his bitterness at these events in an emotional oration at her funeral, in which the sole reference to his father was the cryptic line: ‘[Mother's] hatred for lack of rectitude resided in the last of the three bonds.’58 The last of the ‘three bonds’ is that between husband and wife. That Mao should have made this charge at the funeral ceremony, before his father and all their relatives, testified to extraordinary depths of hostility and unwillingness to forgive. Interviewed in the 1930s in Bao'an by the American journalist, Edgar Snow, he said of his father, ‘I learned to hate him’.
Mao's opposition to the marriage his parents had arranged may have been due partly to suspicion that his father wanted to tie him to the land, and to a life of rural drudgery which he had come to loathe. From then on he showed a growing determination to strike out on his own. He started studying again, this time at a private school in the village run by an elderly scholar who was a clansman, and shortly after his fifteenth birthday, told his father he no longer wished to be apprenticed at Xiangtan. He wanted to enrol at junior middle school instead.59
In this, as in much else, he eventually had his way. What followed showed a side of his father for which, in later life, Mao gave him little credit.
Where the older man consistently underestimated his son's strength of character and stubbornness, so Mao failed to recognise that behind the skinflint exterior there dwelt a parent's pride. Implicit in Confucian thought is the notion of a continuum between the generations. A man counts his life a success if his children succeed; their success in turn brings glory to himself and to his ancestors. Mao's father may have been uneducated, but he recognised that Mao was, in his own words, ‘the family scholar’,60 and alone had a chance to succeed beyond the narrow confines of their native village.
For most of the next ten years, the father whom Mao portrayed as an avaricious, tight-fisted tyrant, blinkered by the narrow prejudices of his class, paid his school fees and living expenses, and continued to do so even when it became clear that his son had no intention of returning home permanently and would therefore bring him no practical advantage.
A generation earlier, such repeated challenges to parental authority would not have been tolerated. But China was changing. Even in remote Shaoshan, the old immutable ways were crumbling.61
*
Change was wrought by internal decay and by foreign pressure. In the century-and-a-half since the Emperor Qianlong had dismissed King George III's request for trade facilities with the contemptuous words, ‘China has … no need of the manufactures of outside barbarians’, the balance of power in the world had altered. China had stagnated, its wealth haemorrhaging away in bloody rebellions and civil unrest. Europe, through the Industrial Revolution, developed undreamed-of power and irresistible pressures for expansion. Conflict between the two was inevitable. In 1842 came the First Opium War, in which Britain acquired Hong Kong, and foreign settlement was permitted for the first time in Shanghai and four other Treaty ports. In the Second Opium War, in 1860, British and French troops marched on Beijing and burned to the ground the Emperor's Summer Palace. Foreign privileges expanded to include the right of residence in the capital itself.
But not in Hunan. Of all the Emperor's subjects, the Hunanese were the most conservative and the most virulently hostile to outsiders. ‘[They] seem to be a distinct type of the Chinese race [and] … appear to trust no other provincial in the Empire’, one early traveller related, ‘and from all I can see and hear, this feeling is thoroughly reciprocated.’62 The Prince Regent, Prince Gong, called them ‘turbulent and pugnacious’.63 Hunan's people boasted openly that ‘no Manchu ever conquered them’.64 To foreigners, it was ‘the closed province’.65 When the English missionary, Griffith John, arrived outside the walls of the capital, Changsha, in 1891, he was stoned by the mob. ‘Like the Forbidden City at Beijing and the kingdom of Tibet,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘it is one of the few places left in the whole world which no foreigner may presume to enter. It is perhaps the most intensely anti-foreign city in the whole of China, a feeling kept up by the literati with the full sympathy of the officials.’66 Yet the early travellers were also struck by ‘the keenness of the people’ and their ‘stubborn disposition’, in contrast to the ‘disheartening apathy’ found in other parts of China.67
Already in the eighteenth century the Jesuits regarded Hunan as the most impenetrable part of China, a place ‘where persecution is most to be feared’.68 More recently, in Mao's grandfather's time, Hunan had held firm against the Taiping Rebellion, which devastated eight provinces and claimed 20 million lives. Changsha withstood a siege lasting eighty days, and afterwards called itself ‘the City of the Iron Gates’. The resistance was not out of loyalty to the throne, but rather because Changsha's elite saw the Taipings' Christian-inspired teachings as heretical to Confucianism. A Hunanese viceroy, Zeng Guofan, who became one of Mao's childhood heroes, defeated the Taiping forces. Another Hunanese, Hong Tachuan, was one of the two principal Taiping leaders.
‘Independence and aloofness have long been characteristic of the Hunanese,’ one writer noted at the turn of the century. ‘Certain intellectual qualities have tended to make them marked men.’69 The province produced a disproportionate number of high imperial officials and an equally large number of reformers and revolutionaries.
The Chinese Empire's reaction to the foreigners at its gates was initially to do nothing. But then, in the 1870s, the so-called self-strengthening movement began. Under the slogan, ‘Western function, Chinese essence’, reformers argued that if the country had access to modern weapons, it could repel the invaders and preserve unchanged its Confucian way of life. That was seen to have failed when China was again humiliatingly defeated in 1895 and, to add insult to injury, not by a Western power but by fellow Asians, the Japanese, who until then had been regarded contemptuously as dwarves. Three years later an attempt to reform the imperial system, initiated by the young Emperor Guangxu, was crushed by conservatives led by the Empress Dowager. It was assumed abroad that China would be partitioned by the Powers. The issue was debated in London in the House of Commons, and in 1898 Hunan, along with the rest of the Yangtse Valley, was declared part of the British sphere of influence.70 Then came the Boxer Rebellion, last spasm of a moribund regime. To Chinese progressives and foreigners alike, the old order was dead. It only remained to be cut down.
Little of this reached Shaoshan. News was exchanged in the teahouses, and there was a noticeboard, surmounted by an awning, where official proclamations were posted.71 Traders came and went through the nearby port of Xiangtan from Canton, Chongqing in Sichuan and Wuhan on the Yangtse, bringing with them, as in medieval Europe, the gossip of the roads. Yet the peasants heard only vague rumours of the Boxers, and nothing at all of the menace weighing down on China from without. Even the death of the Emperor in 1908 did not become known in the village until nearly two years after it occurred.72
Mao first became aware of his country's predicament when he was about fourteen through a book he borrowed from one of his cousins, called Words of Warning to an Affluent Age, written shortly before the Sino-Japanese War by a Shanghai comprador named Zheng Guanying.73 It urged the introduction of Western technology to China. Its descriptions of telephones, steamships and railways, things beyond the understanding of a village which knew nothing of electricity and
where the only power came from draught animals and human brawn, fired Mao's imagination. He was then working full-time on the farm. The book, he said later, was instrumental in deciding him to stop farm work and start studying again.74
Zheng Guanying denounced the treatment of Chinese by foreigners in the treaty ports. He advocated parliamentary democracy, a constitutional monarchy, Western methods of education and economic reforms.
But these ideas made less impression on Mao than a pamphlet he came across a few months later, which described China's dismemberment by the Powers. Nearly thirty years on, he still remembered the opening sentence: ‘Alas, China will be subjugated!’ It told how Japan had occupied Korea and the Chinese island of Taiwan, and of China's loss of suzerainty in Indochina and Burma. Mao's reaction was that of millions of patriotic young Chinese. ‘After I read this,’ he recalled, ‘I felt depressed about the future of my country and began to realise it was the duty of all the people to help save it.’75
The other major influence on Mao at this time was the growth of banditry and internal unrest as the Qing Empire decayed.
Tales of rebels, like the 108 heroes of Liangshanpo, in the novel, Water Margin, and of secret societies and sworn brotherhoods, pledged to right wrongs and protect the poor, had entranced him since he was first able to read. Most of his classmates at Shaoshan devoured the stories too, hiding them under copies of the Classics when their teacher walked by, discussing them with the old men of the village and reading and rereading them until they knew them by heart. Mao recalled being ‘much influenced by such books, read at an impressionable age’, and he never lost his love of them.76
Much more important in shaping his ideas, however, were the food riots that broke out in Changsha in the spring of 1910, an event which Mao said later, ‘influenced my whole life’.77 The previous year, the Yangtse had burst its banks twice, flooding much of the riceland of northern Hunan and Hubei, on the second occasion so suddenly that ‘people were obliged to flee, being unable to rescue even their clothes’. The British consul in Changsha, citing treaty rights, opposed the provincial Governor's proposal to limit rice exports to other provinces. So did some of the leading gentry, who saw the famine as an opportunity to make fat profits by cornering the market.78 By early April the price of rice reached 80 copper cash a pint, three times the normal level.79 Reports from the interior of the province spoke of ‘people eating bark and selling children, of corpses piling up along the sides of the road, and of cannibalism’.80
On April 11, a water-carrier and his wife who lived near the city's South Gate committed suicide. In the words of one contemporary account:
The man carried water all day and his wife and children begged, and still they could not get enough to keep the children from being hungry, for the price of rice was so high. One day the woman and children came back after begging all day, and there was not rice enough for the children's supper. She built a fire and got some mud and made some mudcakes and told the children to cook them for their supper. Then she killed herself. When the man came home he found his wife dead and the little children trying to cook their mud cakes for supper. It was more than he could stand and so he killed himself too.81
The suicide triggered an uprising which the Japanese consul at the time described as ‘no different from a war’.82 A mob gathered by the South Gate, seized the Police Commissioner, and then, instigated, it later transpired, by arch-conservative xenophobes among the Changsha gentry, began a wild night and day of burning and looting directed mainly at foreign-owned targets – among them, foreign steamship companies, blamed for sending rice downriver and aggravating the grain shortage; the foreign operated customs service; foreign missions; and Western-style schools which disseminated foreign learning. Not until next morning did the rioters, now numbering some 30,000, remember their grievance against the Chinese authorities and turn their attention to the Governor's yamen, which they burned to the ground.83 Another seventeen buildings, most of them either occupied by or having connections with foreigners, were totally destroyed, and many more vandalised.84
The Powers reacted swiftly. Although no foreigner was harmed, Britain sent gunboats up the Xiang River to bring out its citizens, and the United States alerted its Asiatic Fleet, based in Amoy. Later a large indemnity was imposed.
But it was the Qing government's response that was most revealing. The Governor and other officials were dismissed. Several of the gentry, including two Hanlin scholars, holders of imperial China's highest literary distinction, were impeached for fomenting the unrest and subjected to what was termed ‘the extreme penalty’, which turned out to mean little more than being degraded in rank. But two of the poor of the city, ‘unfortunate wretches’ as one foreign resident called them, a barber and a boatman, alleged to have been among the leaders of the riot, were taken through the streets in wicker cages to the city wall, where they were decapitated and their heads exposed on lamp-posts.85
For days, Mao and his friends talked of nothing else:
It made a deep impression on me. Most of the other students sympathised with the ‘insurrectionists’, but only from an observer's point of view. They did not understand that it had any relation to their own lives. They were merely interested in it as an exciting incident. I never forgot it. I felt that there with the rebels were ordinary people like my own family, and I deeply resented the injustice of the treatment given to them.86
A few weeks later, another incident occurred at a small town called Huashi, about twenty-five miles south of Xiangtan. A dispute broke out between a local landlord and members of the Gelaohui (the Elder Brother Society), a secret brotherhood with branches throughout Hunan and the neighbouring provinces. The landlord took his case to court and, in Mao's words, ‘as he was powerful … easily bought a decision favourable to himself’. But instead of submitting, the members of the brotherhood withdrew to a mountain fastness called Liushan and built a stronghold there.
They wore yellow head-dresses and carried three-cornered yellow flags. The provincial government sent troops against them, and the redoubt was destroyed. Three men were captured, including their leader, known as Pang the Millstone Maker. Under torture they confessed that they had been instructed in the methods and incantations used by the Boxers, which they had believed would make them invulnerable. Pang was beheaded. But in the eyes of the students, Mao wrote, ‘he was a hero, for all sympathised with the revolt’.87
Mao's views, however, were not yet as clear-cut as these statements make it appear. Early the following year another rice shortage arose, this time in Shaoshan itself. Mao's father continued to buy grain and send it for sale in the city, aggravating the shortage. Eventually one of the consignments was seized by hungry villagers. His father was furious. Mao did not sympathise with him but ‘thought the villagers’ method was wrong too'.88
By this time Mao was enrolled at the junior middle school which he had bullied and cajoled his father into letting him attend. It was in the neighbouring county of Xiangxiang, where his mother's family lived, and was a ‘modern’ establishment with Western-inspired teaching methods, opened a few years earlier as part of the Qing court's belated endeavours to come to terms with foreign learning after the defeat of the Boxers. Mao, on his first journey outside his native Shaoshan, was overwhelmed:
I had never before seen so many children together. Most of them were sons of landlords, wearing expensive clothes; very few peasants could afford to send their children to such a school. I was more poorly dressed than the others. I owned only one decent coat-and-trousers suit. Gowns were not worn by students, but only by the teachers, and none but ‘foreign devils’ wore foreign clothes.89
Dongshan Upper Primary School, as the place was officially named, had in earlier times been a literary academy. It was surrounded by a high stone wall with thick black-laquered double doors, reached by a balustraded white stone bridge across a moat. On a hillside nearby stood a seven-storeyed white pagoda.90
Mao paid 1,400 copper cash (equiv
alent to about one Chinese silver dollar, or five English shillings) for five months' board, lodging, books and tuition fees. To attend such a school was an exceptional privilege: not one child in 200 at that time had access to education of this level. In these elite surroundings, the unmannered, gangling youth from Shaoshan, older and taller than most of his classmates and with an accent different from theirs, was given a hard time. ‘Many of the richer students despised me because usually I was wearing my ragged coat and trousers,’ Mao remembered. ‘I was also disliked because I was not a native of Xiangxiang … I felt spiritually very depressed.’91
It took all the fortitude acquired in his clashes with his father to overcome this hostility, which Mao himself frequently made worse by the arrogance, mulishness, and sheer childish pig-headedness with which he stuck to his guns when he thought he was right.92 But eventually he made friends, among them Xiao San, who later became a writer under the name Emi Siao. He was also close to a cousin, one of his maternal uncles' children, who had started at the school a year before him.
Despite his problems, Mao made good progress and his teachers liked him. It quickly became clear that his inclinations were literary rather than scientific. History was his favourite subject, and he read every book he could about the two great founding dynasties of modern China, the Qin and the Han, which flourished around the time of Christ. He learned to write Classical essays, and developed a love of poetry which was to become one of the lasting pleasures of his life. A quarter of a century later, he could still quote the words of a Japanese song, celebrating victory in the Russo-Japanese War, which the music teacher, who had studied there, used to sing to them:
