by Philip Short
The years Mao spent in Changsha, from his arrival during the final months of Manchu rule until his graduation in 1918, were tumultuous for China and for the world. The nations of Europe devoured each other in war. In Russia, 30 million peasants starved while the Tsar's government exported wheat. The Bolshevik Revolution created the world's first communist state. The Panama Canal opened; the Titanic sank; the dancer, Mata Hari, was executed as a spy.
This was the decade in which Mao laid the foundations of his intellectual development.
Already at Dongshan, his horizons had begun to widen. There, for the first time, he learned something of foreign history and geography. A schoolfriend lent him a book entitled Great Heroes of the World, in which he read about George Washington and the American Revolution; the Napoleonic War in Europe; Abraham Lincoln and the fight against slavery; Rousseau and Montesquieu; the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone; and Catherine and Peter the Great of Russia.7 Later, in the provincial library, he found translations of Rousseau's Du contrat social and Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, expounding Western notions of popular sovereignty, the social contract between ruler and ruled, and individual freedom and equality. He read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and works by other prominent nineteenth-century liberals, including Darwin, Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.8 The half-year he spent in this way, ‘studying capitalism’ as he later put it,9 also introduced him to foreign poetry and novels, and to the legends of ancient Greece. In the library, too, for the first time, he saw a map of the world.
A teacher at the First Provincial Middle School encouraged him to read the Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Those Who Govern (Zizhitongjian), the great Song dynasty text by Sima Guang, regarded as a masterpiece by generations of Chinese scholars and in Mao's day, nearly a millennium later, still the pre-eminent model for the study of political history.10 The book is a panoramic chronicle of the rise and fall of dynasties, on a scale never attempted in China again, covering some 1,400 years starting from the fifth century bc. Its guiding principle is that described in the opening lines of one of Mao's favourite novels, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: ‘Empires wax and wane, states cleave asunder and coalesce.’ An eighteenth-century French Jesuit wrote of its author: ‘He paints for us the personages whom he places on history's stage, characterised by their actions and coloured by their brilliance, their interests, their views, their faults and their virtues … He lays before the reader the chain of events, illuminating first this aspect and then that, until their most distant and astounding consequences are made plain. His genius … shows us history in all its majesty … giving to it a voice of such philosophical eloquence that even the most indolent souls are subdued and forced to reflect.’11 Sima Guang's depiction of a world in ceaseless flux, where history is a continuum and the past provides the key to managing the present, made the Mirror one of the most influential books in Mao's life, which he continued to read and reread up to his death.
Changsha also brought him into contact with contemporary ideas. In the Xiang River Daily (Xiangjiang ribao), in 1912, he first encountered the term, socialism. Soon afterwards he came across some pamphlets by Jiang Kanghu, an advocate of progressive causes who had been influenced by a Chinese anarchist group based in Paris.12 Shortly after the revolution, Jiang had founded the Chinese Socialist Party, whose doctrines were expressed by the slogan: ‘No government, no family, no religion: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’13 This was strong stuff, and Mao wrote enthusiastically about it to several of his classmates. Only one, he remembered, sent a positive response.
More important still were the five years he spent training to be a teacher. It was the closest Mao came to a university education, and he spoke of it later as the period when his political ideas began to take shape.14 He started preparatory classes at the Fourth Normal School in the spring of 1913, a few months after his nineteenth birthday. A year later, it merged with First Normal, which had been built on the site of a twelfth-century literary academy outside the South Gate, and boasted a spacious, well-equipped campus with the newest Western-style buildings in Changsha.
Two professors, in particular, helped to shape his ideas: Yuan Jiliu, nicknamed ‘Yuan the Big Beard’, who taught Chinese language and literature; and Yang Changji, the head of the philosophy department, known irreverently to his students as ‘Confucius’, who had recently returned to Changsha after spending ten years abroad, studying at Aberdeen, Berlin and Tokyo.15 In the 1930s, when Mao reminisced about his schooldays to Edgar Snow, it was to them that his thoughts immediately turned:
Yuan the Big Beard ridiculed my writing and called it the work of a journalist … I was obliged to alter my style. I studied the writings of Han Yu, and mastered the old Classical phraseology. Thanks to Yuan the Big Beard, therefore, I can today still turn out a passable Classical essay if required. [But] the teacher who made the strongest impression on me was Yang Changji … He 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. Under his influence I read a book on ethics [by the neo-Kantian philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen] … and was inspired to write an essay entitled ‘The Power of the Mind’. I was then an idealist, and my essay was highly praised by Professor Yang Changji … He gave me a mark of 100 for it.16
The essay has been lost, but Mao's marginal notes on a Chinese translation of part of Paulsen's System der Ethik, totalling more than 12,000 words in a microscopic and often almost illegible hand, have been preserved.17 They contain three core ideas, which would preoccupy Mao throughout his political career: the need for a strong state, with centralised political power; the overriding importance of individual will; and the sometimes conflictual, sometimes complementary relationship between the Chinese and Western intellectual traditions.
The notion of a strong state, with a wise, paternalistic ruler, was rooted in the Confucian texts Mao had learned as a child. It formed the centrepiece of an essay he had written while still at middle school about Shang Yang, Chief Minister of the State of Qin in the fourth century BC, who was one of the founders of the Legalist school of thought. Law, Mao declared, was ‘an instrument for procuring happiness’. Yet the law-making of wise rulers was often frustrated by ‘the stupidity … ignorance and darkness’ of the people, whose resistance to change had ‘brought China to the brink of destruction’. It was enough to make more ‘civilised peoples laugh [until] they have to hold their stomachs’.18 Mao's teacher thought so highly of this effort that he circulated it to the rest of the class.
The theme of Chinese backwardness, and the need to overcome it, recurred constantly in his writings at this time. The country's future difficulties, he told a friend, would be ‘a hundredfold those of the past’, and extraordinary talents would be needed to overcome them.19 The Chinese people were ‘slavish in character and narrowminded’.20 Over 5,000 years of history, they had accumulated ‘many undesirable customs, their mentality is too antiquated and their morality is extremely bad … [These] cannot be removed and purged without enormous force.’21
His pessimism was reinforced as, year by year, China yielded ever more abjectly to pressure from the Great Powers. On May 7, 1915, Yuan Shikai was handed a Japanese ultimatum, the so-called ‘Twenty-one Demands’, claiming for the Mikado's government a virtual protectorate over China, including exclusive rights in the former German sphere of influence in Shandong, and a shared presence with the Tsarist Empire in Manchuria. It was, Mao wrote, a day of ‘extraordinary shame’.22 He urged his fellow students to remonstrate with the government,23 and gave vent to his own feelings in a poem, written a few days later to mark the death of a schoolfriend:
Repeatedly the barbarians have engaged in trickery,
From a thousand li they come again across Dragon Mountain …
Why should we be concerned about life and death?
This century will
see a war …
The eastern sea holds island savages,
In the northern mountains hate-filled enemies abound.24
The ‘island savages’ were the Japanese; the ‘hate-filled enemies’, the Russians. Of the two, the Japanese were the more formidable. ‘Without a war,’ Mao wrote a year later, ‘we will cease to exist within twenty years. But our countrymen still sleep on without noticing, and pay little attention to the East. In my view, no more important task confronts our generation … We must sharpen our resolve to resist Japan.’25
Mao's first attempt to help remedy what he perceived as China's failings was eminently practical. Early in 1917, he submitted an article on physical education to New Youth (Xin qingnian), then the country's leading progressive magazine, edited by the radical scholar, Chen Duxiu. It opened with the words:
Our nation is wanting in strength; the military spirit has not been encouraged. The physical condition of our people deteriorates daily … If our bodies are not strong, we will tremble at the sight of [enemy] soldiers. How then can we attain our goals, or exercise far-reaching influence?26
This was not, in itself, original. His philosophy teacher, Professor Yang Changji, had lectured Mao's class in very similar terms three years before. Attempts to promote sports and other forms of physical exercise in Chinese schools had been under way since the Qing reforms introduced after the Boxer Revolt.
The problem, Mao wrote, was that these efforts had been half-hearted. Tradition stressed literary accomplishment and rejected the idea of physical exertion, which led students and instructors to look down on it:
Students feel that exercise is shameful … Flowing garments, a slow gait, a grave, calm gaze – these constitute a fine deportment, respected by society. Why should one suddenly extend an arm or expose a leg, stretch and bend down? …
The superior man's deportment is cultivated and agreeable, but one cannot say this about exercise. Exercise should be savage and rude. To charge on horseback amidst the clash of arms and to be ever-victorious; to shake the mountains by one's cries and the colours of the sky by one's roars of anger … All this is savage and rude and has nothing to do with delicacy. In order to progress in exercise one must be savage … [Then] one will have great vigour and strong muscles and bones.27
As a parting shot at his compatriots’ effete ways, he proposed that exercises be done in the nude.
The New Youth article, published in April 1917, was significant, not only as Mao's first modest contribution to the national debate over China's future, but because it contained in embryo the second of the core themes that emerged in his thinking at this time: the supreme importance of individual will.
‘If we do not have the will to act,’ he wrote, ‘then even though the exterior and the objective [conditions] are perfect, they still cannot benefit us. Hence … we should begin with individual initiative … The will is the antecedent of a man's career.’28 That autumn he attempted to refine this definition. ‘Will is the truth which we perceive in the universe,’ he suggested. ‘[But] truly to establish one's will is not so simple.’ Each person must find his own truth, and ‘act in accordance with [it], instead of blindly following other people's definitions of right and wrong’.29 A few months later he told friends, in terms reminiscent of the Three Character Classic. ‘If man's mental and physical powers are concentrated together … no task will be difficult to accomplish.’30
To these traditional Chinese notions, Mao joined the Western concept of individual self-interest:
Ultimately, the individual comes first … Society is created by individuals, not individuals by society … and the basis of mutual assistance is fulfilment of the individual … Self-interest is indeed primary for human beings … There is no higher value than that of the individual … Thus there is no greater crime than to suppress the individual … Every act in life is for the purpose of fulfilling the individual, and all morality serves [that end].31
This emphasis on ‘the power of the will [and] the power of the mind’,32 coupled with Mao's view of history, and his enduring attachment to the legendary heroes of novels like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, led him to the view that ‘great and powerful men are representatives of an era, and … the whole era is but an accessory to these representative people’:33
The truly great person develops … and expands upon the best, the greatest of the capacities of his original nature … [All] restraints and restrictions [are] cast aside by the great motive power that is contained in his original nature … The great actions of the hero are his own, are the expression of his motive power, lofty and cleansing, relying on no precedent. His force is like that of a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual desire for one's lover, a force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped. All obstacles dissolve before him. I have observed from ancient times the fierce power of courageous generals on the battle line, facing undaunted ten thousand enemies. It is said that one man who scorns death will prevail over one hundred … Because he cannot be stopped or eliminated, he is the strongest and most powerful. This is true also of the spirit of the great man and the spirit of the sage.34
The hero had to contend, in Mao's scheme of things, with a world in which order continually degenerated into chaos, from which new order was born. ‘There is only movement in heaven and on earth,’ he wrote.35 ‘Throughout the ages there have been struggles between different schools of thought.’36 In a striking passage, he went on to argue that while men yearn for peace, they were also bored by it:
A long period of peace, pure peace without any disorder of any kind, would be unbearable … and it would be inevitable that peace would give birth to waves … I am sure that once we entered [an age] of Great Harmony, waves of competition and friction would inevitably break forth that would disrupt [it] … Human beings always hate chaos and hope for order, not realising that chaos too is part of the process of historical life, that it too has value … It is the times when things are constantly changing and numerous men of talent are emerging that people like to read about. When they come to periods of peace, they … put the book aside …37
Mao's reflections on these ‘scholarly issues [and] weighty affairs of state’,38 as he put it to a friend, took place against a backdrop of growing awareness of the tension between the Chinese traditions he had absorbed as a child and the new Western ideas to which he was being exposed.
At first he consciously emulated the views of Kang Youwei and other nineteenth-century reformers. ‘I have come to the conclusion that the path to scholarship must first be … Chinese and later Western, first general and later specialised,’ he had written in June 1915.39 Three months later he expanded on this idea:
One ought to concentrate on the comparison of China and the West and choose from abroad what is useful at home … [A friend] introduced me to … [Herbert Spencer's] Principles of Sociology, and I took this book and read it through. Afterward, I closed the book and exclaimed to myself, ‘Here lies the path to scholarship’ … [This book] is most pertinent … [and contains much] to be prized … However, something even more important … is Chinese studies … Chinese studies are both broad and deeply significant … General knowledge of Chinese studies is most crucial for our people.40
In almost all Mao's writings, throughout his life, Chinese rather than Western experience was given pride of place. Even when the topic was physical education, an alien, Western practice that had been transplanted into China, a list of Chinese exemplars came first, starting with a group of late Ming dynasty scholars. Only afterwards did he mention such ‘eminent [foreign] advocates of physical education’ as Theodore Roosevelt and the Japanese, Jigoro Kano, the inventor of judo. Grounding foreign ideas in Chinese reality to establish their relevance became a cardinal principle that he never afterwards relinquished.
In 1917, however, he began for the first time to question whether traditional Chinese thought really was superior. The country's ancient learning was ‘disorganised and unsy
stematic’, he complained that summer. ‘This is why we have not made any progress, even in several millennia … Western studies … are quite different … The classifications are so clear that they sound like a waterfall dashing against the rocks beneath a cliff.’41 But a few weeks later he was not so sure. ‘In my opinion Western thought is not necessarily all correct either,’ he wrote. ‘Very many parts of it should be transformed at the same time as Eastern thought.’42
He found a provisional answer in one of Paulsen's theses. ‘All nations inevitably go through the stage of old age and decline’, the German had written. ‘With time, tradition acts as an obstacle to the forces of renewal and the past oppresses the present.’43 This was China's position, Mao decided. ‘All the anthologies of prose and poetry published since the Tang and Song dynasties [should] be burned,’ he told a friend. ‘Revolution does not mean using troops and arms, but replacing the old with the new.’44
He did not propose, however, that the Classics should be destroyed. The foundations of Chinese culture were inviolate. Only the tangled superstructure needed to be cleared away, so that China's originality and greatness could flourish anew.
As the decade unfolded, the prospects for national renewal had begun to look increasingly bleak. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911, so-called because it took place in the year of the Iron Pig in the traditional sixty-year cycle,45 lived up to none of its ambitions. Its one achievement had been destructive: the overthrow of the Manchu Court.
The Hunanese reformists had suspected from the start that Yuan Shikai's administration would be a replica of the Qing autocracy he had previously served, and tried to keep him at arm's length. The provincial government, led by Tan Yankai, supported instead the newly formed Guomindang (Nationalist Party) of Sun Yat-sen, which won an overwhelming victory in the parliamentary elections held in the winter of 1912. Yuan proved every bit as unscrupulous as they had feared. The following spring, Sun Yat-sen belatedly launched the expedition to curb Yuan's power from which he had shrunk the year before. Jiangxi and five other southern provinces declared their support. But the Second Revolution, as it was called, failed to ignite. By the end of August 1913, the southern armies had been soundly defeated, and their leaders fled into exile. The southern military governors, loosely aligned with Sun's forces, retained control over their fiefdoms in Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan. But in Hunan, Yuan was able to reimpose the Beijing government's rule, appointing Tang Xiangming, a conservative loyalist, to replace the liberal Tan. Soon afterwards the Guomindang was banned throughout China by presidential decree, accused of ‘fomenting political troubles.’
