by Philip Short
Mao's budget was further strained by the amount he spent on newspapers and magazines, which took up, by his own estimate, almost half his income.85 His classmates remembered him sitting in the college library, making minuscule notes on long strips of paper, clipped from the sides of the pages, as an aide-memoire about foreign countries and their leaders.
He was equally diligent at his studies, but only in subjects he liked. His mood alternated wildly between fascination with what he learned and despair at his own failings.86 He railed against the college regulations for forcing him to take courses he found boring. ‘Natural sciences did not especially interest me and I did not study them, so I got poor marks,’ he recalled. ‘Most of all I hated a compulsory course in still-life drawing. I thought it extremely stupid. I used to think of the simplest subjects possible to draw, finish up quickly and leave the class.’ Once he drew a straight line with a semicircle above it, claiming that it was a scene from Li Bai's poem, ‘A Dream of Wandering on Mount Tianmu’, which describes the sun rising out of the sea. In the year-end exam, he drew an oval and said it was an egg. The teacher failed him.87
Periodically he would try to take himself in hand. ‘In the past, I had some mistaken ideas,’ he acknowledged in 1915. ‘Now I … [have] grown up a bit … Today I make a new start.’88 A few months later he was in despair again. ‘This is no place to study,’ he wrote angrily to a former teacher. ‘There is no freedom of will, the standards are too low, and the companions too evil. It is truly distressing to see my serviceable body and precious time dwindle away in pining and waiting … Schools like this are certainly the darkest of dark valleys.’89 Soon afterwards, he was enthusing once more over a new study plan:
In the early morning I study English; from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon I attend class; from four in the afternoon until dinner, I study Chinese literature; from the time the lights are lit until they are extinguished, I do homework for all classes; and after the lights are extinguished, I exercise for one hour.90
Half a year on, he was yet again ‘starting afresh … studying from morning to night without rest’,91 only to suffer another relapse. ‘Who does not want to seek advancement?’ he wrote unhappily. ‘But when one's ambitions are continuously frustrated and when one gets lost in a maze of twists and turns, one's bitterness is too much to describe. For a very young man, all this represents a world of bitterness.’92
As Mao's confidence developed, such outbursts became less frequent. In the late spring of 1917, when he was twenty-three, his schoolmates elected him ‘Student of the Year’.93 His article in New Youth, a few weeks earlier, had been the first the magazine had accepted from a student in Hunan. In other ways, too, he grew more self-assured. The deference of his early letters to Xiao Yu gave way to a more equal relationship, in which Mao, Xiao's junior, frequently appeared the dominant voice. That summer he criticised a teaching manual Xiao had written, urging him to rewrite it, ‘retaining the gems and discarding the dross’.94 Soon after this, to the dismay of their teachers, the two of them defied convention by spending their summer vacation on a month-long walking tour, begging food and lodging from Buddhist temples and from sympathetic gentry in the counties through which they passed.95
In a poem written that year, Mao likened himself to a peng, a mythical bird like the roc, which ‘thrashed a wake three thousand miles long’ as it journeyed from the Southern sea.96 Of his boyhood heroes, only the Qing Viceroy, Zeng Guofan, still commanded his admiration. Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei he both now found wanting.97
The publication of the New Youth article encouraged Mao to cast about for other ways to contribute to the building of the new China he and his friends so ardently desired. The elite, he argued, had a moral duty to help those less fortunate than themselves.
Superior men already possess lofty wisdom and morality … But the little people are pitiable. If the superior men care only for themselves, they may leave the crowd and live like hermits. There were some who did so in ancient times … [But] if they have compassionate hearts, then they [recognise] the little people as … part of the same universe. If we go off by ourselves, they will sink lower and lower. It is better for us to lend a helping hand, so that their minds may be opened up and their virtue increased.98
The opportunity to put these ideas into practice came in October 1917, when Mao was elected head of the Students’ Society, which organised extracurricular activities at the college.99 One of its first decisions was to revive an evening school for local workers which had been started six months earlier but then abandoned.100 At a time when the great majority of China's people had no education, such initiatives were ‘extremely critical’, Mao wrote. ‘Plants and trees, birds and animals, all nurture and care for their own kind. Must not human beings do the same?’ The ‘little people’ were not ‘evil by nature’ or ‘originally inferior’, they were simply unlucky, which was why ‘the humane person should show [them] sympathy’. Even advanced countries in Europe and America, he added, regarded evening schools as useful. Furthermore, they enabled students to acquire teaching experience and, most important of all, they helped build a sense of solidarity between the mass of the people and the country's educated elite:
School and society constitute two poles, two things separated by a huge gulf. Upon entering a school, the students look down on society as if they had climbed into the heavens. Society, too, looks on the schools as something sacred and untouchable. This mutual alienation and suspicion causes three evils. One is that the students cannot find jobs in society … Another evil is that society does not send its children to school … The third evil is … [public resentment leading to] the burning of schools and the blocking of funds. If these three evils can be removed … people in society will look on the students as their eyes and ears and will rely on their guidance to reap the benefits of prosperity and development. The students will look on the people in society as their hands and feet, whose help will make it possible for them to accomplish their goals. [In the end] all the people … will have graduated from [one kind of] school [or another]. One part of schooling will be the big school one attends for a while, and the whole of society will be the big school that one attends for ever.101
To this notion of an anti-elitist, open system of education, Mao joined an abhorrence of book-worship. ‘Of the little progress I have made over these last few years,’ he had written in 1915, ‘only the smaller part was achieved through books. The larger part of my gains was the result of questioning and seeking solutions to [practical] difficulties.’102 He commented approvingly on Kant's insistence that ‘our understanding must come from the facts of experience’,103 and castigated the formalism of traditional Chinese teaching methods:
In the educational system of our country, required courses are as thick as the hairs on a cow. Even an adult with a tough, strong body could not stand it, let alone those who have not reached adulthood … Speculating on the intentions of the educators, one is led to wonder whether they did not design such an unwieldy curriculum in order to exhaust the students, to trample on their bodies and ruin their lives … And if someone has an above-average intelligence, they give him all sorts of supplementary readings … How stupid!104
The ideas Mao expressed here with such passion informed his attitude to education all his life. Yet, at the same time, his views were less radical than they might sound today. Chinese pedagogy was then so dominated by rote-learning, and the curricular overload so extreme, that in 1917, seven of Mao's fellow students died, having fallen ill – so their classmates and some of their teachers believed – as a result of excessively long hours studying without proper breaks.105
For the sixty or so Changsha workers who enrolled at the evening school that November,106 these principles were reflected in the use of vernacular, rather than classical Chinese; a simplified curriculum, geared to everyday life, ‘writing letters and adding up accounts, things which all you gentlemen have need of all the time’, as Mao put it in the school
prospectus;107 and an effort to instil ‘patriotic spirit’, by encouraging, among other things, the buying of Chinese-made products rather than foreign goods.108
But even before the school had properly opened, conflicts among the military power-brokers in Beijing plunged Hunan once again into civil war, bringing destruction to the province on a scale far greater than anything Mao had witnessed before.
When Tang Xiangming had fled Changsha, in July 1916, he had been replaced, after a period of confusion, by his predecessor, the gentry leader Tan Yankai.
For a time all had gone well. Tan proceeded to install a Hunanese administration, enjoying considerable autonomy and supported by the provincial elite, similar to that which he had headed during his previous governorship, from 1911 to 1913. The new Premier in Beijing, Duan Qirui, who had been one of Yuan Shikai's principal subordinates, was too busy trying to consolidate his position against the manoeuvres of his northern rivals to be able to give much thought to bringing the province to heel.
The following summer, however, the situation changed. The power struggle in the capital achieved a farcical denouement when a conservative military leader decided to restore the Manchu Emperor to the throne, immediately if temporarily uniting all the other northern generals against him. The resulting realignment culminated in the establishment of two distinct northern militarist cliques – one, the so-called Anhui (or Anfu) group, headed by Duan Qirui; the other, the Zhili clique, led by the new President, Feng Guozhang, whose occupation of Nanjing Mao had cited a year earlier as a precedent for Tang Xiangming's harshness in Hunan. Their rivalry, in turn, would soon unleash a bloody warlord conflict that raged intermittently over central and eastern China for most of the next decade. But for the moment a truce was observed, and Duan was able to turn his attention to the unruly Hunanese.
In August 1917, he named Fu Liangzou, a relative by marriage and former Vice-Minister of War, to replace Tan as Provincial Governor. Like Tan, Fu was Hunan-born. But he had spent most of his life in the north and was regarded in his native province as a foreigner.109 Three days after taking up his appointment, he tried to remove two senior military officers whose loyalty he regarded as suspect.110 Their units mutinied, triggering a chain reaction which, by early October, had caused nearly half the troops in the province to come out in open rebellion. Two divisions of northern soldiers were despatched to suppress the revolt. But that merely convinced the independent military governors in neighbouring Guangxi and Guangdong that they, too, should intervene, to prevent the northern forces from threatening their own borders. Thousands of green-coated Guangxi infantrymen, accompanied by artillery units armed with Maxim and mountain guns, poured into Hunan, under orders to block the northern advance before it penetrated the southern part of the province.
Having twice narrowly avoided becoming a battleground between the northern and southern armies – in 1913, when the Second Revolution fizzled out, and in 1916, when Yuan Shikai's death ended the anti-Monarchical war – it looked as though, this time, Hunan's luck had run out. In Changsha, martial law was proclaimed,111 while the two armies skirmished inconclusively along a narrow front near the southern city of Hengzhou. But the combatants had reckoned without the intrigues of the politicians in Beijing. One day in mid-November, Duan Qirui was forced to resign, Governor Fu fled, the northern units withdrew, and ‘at nine o'clock [next morning], as if by electricity, the whole city was beflagged’, awaiting with trepidation the arrival of the triumphant southerners. When they arrived, ‘armed wherever bullets could be carried on the body’, as one observer put it, women and children took refuge in Red Cross shelters. But, in the event, there was little looting, and the city congratulated itself on getting off remarkably lightly.112
During these stirring times, Mao and other members of the First Normal Students’ Society organised a volunteer force, which patrolled with wooden rifles to deter malefactors.113 Mao's contribution, one of his classmates recalled, had been to teach them to cut bamboo stakes with sharpened points, to be used to put out the eyes of any soldier rash enough to try to climb over the school wall. He and his closest friends, Xiao Yu and Cai Hesen, called themselves ‘the three heroes’114 and cultivated physical toughness and a martial spirit. But while Mao had matured a great deal since the days when, as a frightened teenager, he had once hidden in a latrine to escape from brawling troops,115 there were still prudent limits to the young champions’ bravado. The First Normal School Record claimed proudly that Mao's volunteers had been ‘exceptionally efficient’.116 But the following March, when real trouble resumed, they were conspicuously absent.117 That month, Duan Qirui and his rivals agreed to make a fresh attempt to bring Hunan to heel. Now it was the turn of the Guangxi men to withdraw without a fight.
With nightfall, [a foreign resident reported] the deepest silence fell on the city. From about [8 p.m.] onwards, a succession of shots, the crash of glass and the smashing of shutters was heard from the busy South and West Streets right on to dawn … I [went] to see for myself what was happening … There was a more or less continuous stream of soldiers tracking off south. But there were also groups of a dozen … looting. They commenced with the silver ornament shops … Some eight or nine men gathered round the door and windows … The butt end of the rifles soon opened a way through the woodwork … The percentage of looted shops is great.118
By morning, there was ‘no one in charge and a very scared city’. The northern troops marched in twenty-four hours later. Duan Qirui, now back as Premier, appointed a trusted follower, Zhang Jingyao, to take over the governorship, which had been vacant since the flight of Fu Liangzou, four months earlier.
Hunan would pay dearly for that decision. ‘Zhang the Venomous’, as he was known, was a ‘cruel, sadistic dictator’, whose methods resembled those of ‘Butcher’ Tang, but on a larger scale.119 In the poorer suburbs of Changsha, foreign missionaries reported, ‘the honour of women and the possession of anything that can be turned into money is at an end’.120 One district on the outskirts of the city drew up a detailed list of the crimes committed by Zhang's men in the first few days of April:
Mrs S—, 20 years of age, [was] attacked by three soldiers at 11 a.m. and so badly abused by each of them as to be still unable to walk … L— was strung up in his own house and then pricked with bayonets. After that, a lighted candle was applied to the wounds … H— ran out to protect his daughter, a girl of eight years, who had been shot. He was also shot … A girl of 14 was violated by two men; [she] died from the injuries … A father-in-law, attempting in vain to protect his daughter-in-law, who was six months with child, by running off to the hills, was followed by the soldiers who wounded the man and abused the woman … The sickening tales run on from every other quarter.121
Along the main highway from Changsha to Pingjiang, in the north-east, ‘all the cattle have been killed; all the seed rice taken; all the inhabitants scared away’.122 Liling, sixty miles to the south, fared even worse. When an American missionary reached the town in May, he found only three people left alive, amid a wasteland of rubble in which, here and there, part of a wall was still standing. In Liling county, out of a population of 580,000, more than 21,000 people had been killed and 48,000 homes had been razed.123
From the safety of the foreign concessions in Shanghai, newspapers published angry editorials accusing ‘selfish, greedy generals’ of ‘making one of the fairest provinces in China a scene of daily ruin and lamentation’.124 Ironically, south Hunan, where the rebellion had begun, seven months before, suffered least. General Wu Peifu, whose forces had spearheaded the northern advance, halted after capturing Hengzhou and negotiated a ceasefire, ignoring Duan Qirui's demands to press on to Guangdong and leaving the southernmost part of the province under southern army control. Once again, Beijing politics were at work. Wu was a member of the Zhili clique, and saw no factional advantage, once a northern governor had been installed, in continuing to aid a cause championed by Duan and his Anfu rivals.125
From April onw
ards, Mao's college played reluctant host to a regiment of Zhang's troops, who were billeted in the classrooms. The new Governor, taking his cue from ‘Butcher’ Tang, five years earlier, halted the disbursement of the education budget. Teachers at First Normal went unpaid; most of the students fled; and the principal had to find the money for the meals of those who stayed out of his own pocket.126 Like Tang, too, ‘Zhang the Venomous’ set up a network of informers and special agents to cow the population. For each alleged ‘spy’ captured, a substantial reward was paid. One man was arrested simply for wearing shoes of different colours. ‘Gruesome corpses are lying about in all sorts of uncanny places,’ one report stated, ‘some right in the heart of the city, some on the military road. There is no publicity in any part of the trial of suspects. It is only with great difficulty that [even] members of the family get to hear of the whereabouts of anyone who has disappeared.’127 The result was ‘much secret terror and very little open talk’.128
At the beginning of June 1918, Mao received his teaching diploma.129 He still had no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. ‘I find it all extremely confusing,’ he wrote to a former professor, ‘and what has its source in confusion will certainly result in confusion.’ One possibility that he considered was to start a private school, to teach ‘the essentials of Chinese studies, [after which] the students would go abroad to study … the essentials of Western thought’.130 But the times could hardly be less propitious, and such a venture would have required money, which Mao did not have.
He spent the next few weeks living with a group of friends in an abandoned classical academy on a mountain on the far side of the Xiang River, where they gathered their own firewood and drew water from a spring.131 All were members of the informal study group he had set up three years before, now renamed the Xinmin xuehui, or New People's Study Society.132 Personal connections in China are the indispensable springboard for any major endeavour, and Mao set great store by this network. The new group had been inaugurated in April, with Xiao Yu as its secretary and Mao his deputy. Among the thirteen founder members, some, including Xiao himself, would eventually go their separate ways. But the majority were to remain at Mao's side in the years of bloodshed and turbulence that followed, many at the cost of their own lives.
