Mao

by Philip Short

  Such remote, elite manoeuvrings, as they must have seemed to a nineteen-year-old student who not long before had watched a dynasty collapse, evidently left Mao cold. The one incident from this time that stuck in his mind was the explosion that summer of the Changsha arsenal – and that for the spectacle it created rather than for political reasons. ‘There was a huge fire, and we students found it very interesting,’ he recalled. ‘Tons of bullets and shells exploded, and gunpowder made an intense blaze. It was better than firecrackers.’46 The fact that it had been blown up by two of Yuan's supporters to deprive the Hunanese of weapons, he passed over in silence.

  For most of the next five years, Mao's studies came first; republican politics a distant second – and then only if they became a major issue for the nation's youth. That happened in the spring of 1915, when Yuan capitulated to Japan's ‘Twenty-one Demands’;47 and again the following winter, when he began manoeuvring to restore the monarchy. That year, Mao became a member of the Wang Fuzhi Society, named after a Hunanese Ming patriot who had fought against the Manchus, the weekly meetings of which served as a cover for reformist scholars to foment opposition to Yuan's imperial ambitions.48 He also helped to organise the publication of a collection of anti-restoration writings by Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, entitled Painful Words on Current Affairs, a move which so angered the authorities that police were sent to the college to investigate.49

  At the end of December 1915, Yuan proclaimed himself Emperor, taking the reign name Hongxian. Yunnan's Military Governor promptly revolted, followed by Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangxi. The following spring, the new Emperor began having second thoughts, and offered to become President again. But he had left it too late. The southern armies were on the march; the smell of blood was in the air. In Hunan, secret society members rose in rebellion, triggering a mutiny led by one of Governor Tang's commanders. It failed. But it was the signal for Tang, who had helped to orchestrate Yuan's imperial ambitions, to scramble frantically to distance himself from his erstwhile patron. At the end of May, he declared Hunan independent of both the northern and southern forces. Then, on June 4, as all-out civil war loomed, Yuan died of a brain haemorrhage, and the northern generals and their troops beat a hasty retreat to Beijing to argue over the succession. Their departure brought the collapse of the delicate military balance that had been keeping Tang in power. A month later, disguised as a peasant, the Governor slipped out of the back door of his yamen, accompanied by a few trusted servants, and boarded a British steamer bound for Hankou. With them went 700,000 silver dollars from the provincial treasury.

  Tang's overthrow triggered two weeks of blood-letting in Changsha and the surrounding area, in which at least 1,000 people died, followed by prolonged political chaos, as rival factions disputed his position.50

  Mao made his way back on foot to Shaoshan. In a letter to his classmate, Xiao Yu, the younger brother of Emi Siao, he related how the southern troops – ‘a rough crowd … from the mountain wilds, [who] talk like birds and look like animals’ – swaggered about, looking for trouble, ate at restaurants without paying, and held gambling parties on street corners. ‘The atmosphere is white-hot with debauchery,’ he lamented. ‘The disorder is extreme … Alas, it is like the Reign of Terror in France!’.51

  Yet, far more striking than Mao's contempt for the soldiery was his defence of the ex-Governor, who had been almost universally hated.

  If anyone had carried out a reign of terror in the province, it was ‘Butcher’ Tang, as he was soon known. He had come to power with a mandate to root out Guomindang influence, and he went to work with a will from the first day he took office. An American missionary doctor in Changsha remembered having invited him to lunch, with several of his cabinet officers, to celebrate his appointment:

  The following day we had bad news about three of our luncheon guests. That noon, in a public square near the yamen, the treasurer of the province was publicly shot, while the other two senior cabinet members … were thrown into a common prison, sentenced to be executed within two days. The atmosphere was tense. The leading gentry and the students in all the city schools were stirred as seldom before … Guards were … placed at the front gates to prevent pupils from leaving for student-union meetings. ‘Any principal’, the Governor's proclamation read, ‘permitting students to hold political assemblies on school grounds will be dismissed …’ We went down, every couple of hours, to the central public square to make inquiries … Bystanders told us that executions had been going on there steadily ever since daybreak.52

  Sixteen other former members of Tan Yankai's government were arrested and shot in an amphitheatre used for athletics events.53 In the three years that Tang held power, at least 5,000 people were executed for political offences, together with an unknown number of common criminals.54 Independent accounts, by Chinese and foreigners alike, described him as ‘ruling with an iron hand’,55 and in China, in the first decades of the twentieth century, that phrase was not a metaphor. A missionary reported the treatment of three thieves, one only seventeen years old:

  As they would not name their accomplices, the [magistrate] made them kneel on broken tiles, with a pole on the upper side of their legs, on which two men jumped in order to bring pressure. He [took] thick incense sticks – as thick as one's finger and as hard as wood – and thrust the red-hot ends into their eyes and up their nostrils. He then used these burning incense sticks to draw characters and figures on their naked bodies. Finally, with hands and feet fully extended on the ground and firmly secured to stakes, smouldering incense sticks were left to burn out upon their flesh, after having had their bodies severely ironed with red hot irons. All three men succumbed, and when removed from before the seat of justice were scarcely recognisable as human bodies.56

  Even by such standards, the methods of ‘Butcher’ Tang were extreme. The head of the Hunan Office of Military Law acquired the nickname ‘The Living King of Hell’, so barbarous were the tortures conducted there. Special police units were set up to search out Guomindang supporters. Many schools were closed, as the educational budget was sharply reduced, and those that remained open were kept under surveillance. Newspapers which questioned Tang's policies were banned, and in 1916, when press censorship was introduced, those which were left appeared with blank spaces. ’Detectives are everywhere and the people as silent as cicadas in winter,’ one Chinese journalist wrote. ‘On guard against each other, they dare not speak about current affairs.’57

  Mao knew all this. His own school had been forced to close during the wave of executions that had ushered in Tang's rule.58 Yet, in his letter to Xiao Yu, he stubbornly defended the disgraced Governor's conduct:

  I still maintain that Military Governor Tang should not have been sent away. Driving him out was an injustice, and the situation now is growing more and more chaotic. Why do I say it was an injustice? Tang was here for three years, and he ruled by the severe enforcement of strict laws. He … [created] a tranquil and amicable environment. Order was restored, and the peaceful times of the past were practically regained. He controlled the army strictly and with discipline … The city of Changsha became so honest that lost belongings were left on the street for their owners. Even chickens and dogs were unafraid … Tang can proclaim his innocence before the whole world … [Now] the gangsters [of the old Hunanese military and political elite] … are everywhere, investigating and arresting people, and executing those they arrest … There is talk from every sector of government officials robbed and [county] magistrates defied … How strange and crazy, the doings of Hunan!59

  The letter provides an intriguing insight into Mao's cast of mind as a 22-year-old. When, in 1911, he had enlisted in the revolutionary army, he had merely done the same as thousands of other young men of his age. This time he was defying the views of the majority to defend a deeply unpopular, politically dangerous cause. ‘I'm afraid I'll get myself into trouble,’ he told Xiao Yu. ‘Don't let anyone else see this. It would be best if you burn it when you have fini
shed reading it.’

  His view of ‘Butcher’ Tang would later change. But his method of analysis – focusing on what he considered the principal aspect of the problem (in this case, the maintenance of law and order), and disregarding what was secondary (Tang's cruelty) – would form the basis of his approach to politics all his life. And his defence of authoritarianism offered a chilling hint of future ruthlessness:

  The fact that [Tang] killed well over 10,000 people was the inescapable outcome of policy. Did he kill any more than [the northern military commander] Feng [Guozhang] in Nanjing? … One can say that he manufactured public opinion, pandered to Yuan [Shikai], and slandered good men. But did not this kind of behaviour also occur [elsewhere]? … Without such behaviour, the goal of protecting the nation would be unattainable. Those who consider these things to be crimes do not comprehend the overall plan.60

  Such ideas had been foreshadowed in Mao's essay, four years earlier, praising the Legalist statesman, Shang Yang, for ‘promulgating laws to punish the wicked and rebellious’.61 But now he went much further, arguing that the killing of political opponents was not merely justified, it was inevitable.

  Mao's support of Tang's rule as exemplifying strong leadership, and his disparagement of Hunan's progressive elite, reflected his disgust at the squabbling of local politicians.62 Similar reasoning led him to find merit in Yuan Shikai. While others castigated the would be Emperor as a turncoat who had betrayed the republic and kowtowed to the hated Japanese, Mao continued to regard him as one of the three pre-eminent figures of the time, together with Sun Yat-sen and Kang Youwei.63 Not until eighteen months later, in the winter of 1917, when Hunan was once again in the throes of civil conflict and all over China military governors were degenerating into warlords, did he recognise that Yuan and Tang had been, after all, no more than tyrants, bent on their own power.64

  Mao's years at the Normal School were formative in other ways. The headstrong youngster who had been admitted in 1913, hiding his fears and self-doubt behind a show of bravado, developed into a well-liked, apparently well-adjusted young man, regarded by his professors and his friends as an exceptional student who would one day make a first-rate teacher.65

  It was a slow transition. As at Dongshan, it took him a year or more to find his feet. Xiao Yu, who became one of his earliest and closest friends, described Mao's first, hesitant approach to him in the summer of 1914:

  At that time, since I was a senior student, he did not dare speak first to me … [But] from reading [each other's] essays [which were posted up in class], we learned of each other's ideas and opinions, and thus a bond of sympathy formed between us … [After] several months … we met one morning in one of the corridors … Mao stopped in front of me with a smile. ‘Mr Xiao’ [he said]. At that time everyone in the school addressed his fellow students in English. ‘Mr Mao,’ I replied … wondering vaguely what he was about to say … ‘What is the number of your study?’ [he asked] … Naturally he knew this quite well and the question was merely an excuse to start conversation. ‘This afternoon, after class, I'd like to come to your study to look at your essays, if you don't mind … ’

  Classes finished for the day at four o'clock and Mao arrived at my study within the hour … [We] enjoyed our first talk. Finally he said, ‘Tomorrow I would like to come and ask your guidance.’ He took two of my essays, made a formal bow, and departed. He was very polite. Each time he came to see me he made a bow.66

  Mao went to some lengths to seek out those he regarded as kindred spirits. ‘Except for the sages, man cannot be successful in isolation,’ he wrote in 1915. ‘Choosing one's friends is of primary importance.’67 That year he circulated a notice to be posted up in the city's schools, inviting ‘young people interested in patriotic work’ to contact him.68 He specified that they must be ‘hardened and determined, and … ready to make sacrifices for their country’, and signed it with a pseudonym, ‘Twenty-eight Stroke Student’, which derived from the twenty-eight brush strokes required to write his name.

  At the Provincial Women's Normal School, it was suspected of being a covert appeal for female companionship, and an investigation was launched.69 But that was far from Mao's thoughts. He was merely, he explained to Xiao Yu, ‘imitating the birds who call to seek friendly voices’.70 ‘These days,’ he added, ‘if one's friends are few, one's views cannot be broad.’

  Twenty years later, he told Edgar Snow that he received ‘three and one half replies’71 – three from young men who later became ‘traitors’ or ‘ultra-reactionaries’, the ‘half reply’ from ‘a non-committal youth named Li Lisan’, then aged 15, afterwards a leader of the Communist Party and for a time, Mao's bitter opponent.72 In fact, half-a-dozen young people responded,73 and gradually a loose-knit study circle formed:

  It was a serious-minded little group of men [Mao recalled], and they had no time to discuss trivialities. Everything they did or said must have a purpose. They had no time for love or ‘romance’ and considered the times too critical and the need for knowledge too urgent to discuss women or personal matters … Quite aside from the discussions of feminine charm, which usually play an important role in the discussions of young men of this age, my companions even rejected talk of ordinary matters of daily life … [We] preferred to talk only of large matters – the nature of men, of human society, of China, the world, and the universe!74

  Influenced by Professor Yang Changji, who had become a fitness fanatic while in Japan, and by the principles Mao set out in his New Youth article in 1917, the group also followed a spartan physical regime. Every morning, they went to the well, took off their clothes and doused each other with a bucketful of cold water.75 In the holidays, they went on long hikes:

  We tramped through the fields, up and down mountains, along city walls, and across the streams and rivers. If it rained, we took off our shirts and called it a rain bath. When the sun was hot, we also doffed shirts and called it a sun bath. In the spring winds we shouted that this was a new sport called ‘wind bathing’. We slept in the open when frost was already falling and even in November swam in the cold rivers.76

  Mao's admiration for Professor Yang was unbounded. ‘When I think of [his] greatness, I feel I will never be his equal,’ he confided to a friend.77 The feeling was mutual. ‘It is truly difficult’, Yang wrote in his diary, ‘to find someone as intelligent and handsome [as Mao].’78 He was among a small group of students who went regularly to Yang's home in the evenings to discuss current events, and the professor's voluntarist, subjective approach to life – stressing the cultivation of personal virtue, will-power, steadfastness and endurance – was to have an abiding influence on him. When Yang died of cancer a few years later, the student newspaper recalled that Mao and his friend, Cai Hesen, had been his favourite students.79

  Yet Mao, in his early twenties, must also have been a cross to bear for everyone around him. The frustrated, rebellious teenager from Shaoshan was still a troubled young man, brilliant but difficult, racked by bouts of self-questioning and depression.

  One moment he was complaining: ‘Throughout my life, I have never had good teachers or friends.’ Next minute he wrote intimately to Xiao Yu: ‘Many heavy thoughts … multiply and weigh down on me … Will you allow me to release them by talking to you?’80 His obstinacy was legendary, even towards those he liked and respected, such as Yuan the Big Beard, with whom he had a furious row over the title-sheet for an essay which he refused to change. After another dispute, this time with the principal, it took the combined intervention of Yuan, Yang Changji and several other professors to prevent him being expelled.81 In the privacy of his journal he flagellated himself:

  You do not have the capacity for tranquillity. You are fickle and excitable. Like a woman preening herself, you know no shame. Your outside looks strong but your inside is truly empty. Your ambitions for fame and fortune are not suppressed, and your sensual desires grow daily. You enjoy all hearsay and rumour, perturbing the spirit and misusing time, and generally delight i
n yourself. You always emulate what the peony does, [producing green calyxes and vermilion blossoms] without any end product, but deceive yourself by saying, ‘I emulate the [humble] gourd [which has no flower but produces fruit]’. Is this not dishonesty?82

  Mao lived frugally. Xiao Yu remembered him at their first meeting as a ‘tall, clumsy, dirtily dressed young man whose [cotton] shoes badly needed repairing’.83 While others of his age were busy experimenting with the new Western fashions, he possessed only a blue school uniform, a grey scholar's gown with a padded underjacket and a pair of baggy white trousers. He was equally careless of what he ate. This was partly from necessity: the allowance he received from his father amounted only to some 25 Chinese silver dollars a year. But he was also influenced by one of his teachers, Xu Teli, a nonconformist renowned for the simplicity of his lifestyle, who always walked to school, rather than use a rickshaw or sedan chair as the other professors did.84