Mao
Page 14
To Mao, anarchism was a revelation. Years later he acknowledged that he had ‘favoured many of its proposals’ and had spent long hours discussing its possible application in China.31 His views emerged graphically in an article written in the summer of 1919:
There is one extremely violent party, which uses the method, ‘Do unto others as they do unto you’, to struggle desperately to the end with the aristocrats and capitalists. The leader of this party is a man named Marx who was born in Germany. There is another party more moderate than that of Marx. It does not expect rapid results, but begins by understanding the common people. Men should all have a morality of mutual aid and work voluntarily. As for the aristocrats and capitalists, it suffices that they repent and turn toward the good, and that they be able to work and to help people rather than harming them; it is not necessary to kill them. The ideas of this party are broader and more far-reaching. They want to unite the whole globe into a single country, unite the human race in a single family, and attain together in peace, happiness and friendship … an age of prosperity. The leader of this party is a man named Kropotkin, who was born in Russia.32
The passage is revealing both for Mao's ignorance of Marxism and its Russian apostles – Lenin does not even get a mention – and for his explicit rejection of revolutionary violence. His ideas had matured since his passionate defence, three years earlier, of the brutal rule of ‘Butcher’ Tang, whose harsh dictatorship, he had held, had been justified because it produced tranquillity and order. As he turned twenty-five, Mao was beginning to think more deeply about means as well as ends, and the type of society that such means implied. Anarchism, with its stress on education, individual will and the cultivation of the self, accorded better than Marxism with the one-world utopianism Mao had absorbed from Kang Youwei, and with his traditional, Chinese scholar's belief in the power of virtue and example. He may not have been a full-fledged anarchist when he left Beijing, but for the next twelve months, anarchism, in the broad-church sense in which it was then understood in China, provided the frame of reference for all his political action.
The winter Mao spent in Beijing influenced him in other ways. China's capital in 1918 was a metaphor for the country's transformation, by turns painful and exhilarating, glorious and mundane.33 Behind the faded, red walls of the Forbidden City, the deposed young Emperor still lived, surrounded by more than a thousand Court eunuchs. Manchu bannermen, their families and retainers, accounted for a third of the capital's one million people. Camel trains came down from the north, from the land beyond the Great Wall. Dignitaries in richly embroidered brocade robes travelled in antiquated glass-windowed carriages, with outriders on shaggy Mongolian ponies who went ahead to clear the way.
Yet the wide, Ming-dynasty avenues, which the north wind filled each spring with choking grey, desert dust, had been macadamised, and motor-cars now careered about the city, carrying warlord generals and venal politicians, their mistresses and their bodyguards, scattering the blue-hooded Beijing carts in which lesser mortals rode. Jinrickshas, still a rarity in Changsha, jammed Beijing's streets, 20,000 of them in 1918, twice that number three years later. Foreign soldiers drilled on the glacis in front of the Legation Quarter.
Wealthy families amused themselves with sleigh-rides on the ice of the imperial lakes, pulled by coolies with iron crampons attached to their cloth shoes, while in the narrow, unpaved lanes, the children of the poor were ‘sickly and stunted, their little arms and legs like sticks’, barely surviving amid appalling deprivation. ‘Most have ulcerous sores or scars left by sores’, a visitor wrote. ‘Many exhibit oversized heads, blindness, crooked mouths, missing noses and other signs of having been maimed or crippled.’34
Yet Mao's memories in later years were not of the clash of old and new, ancient grandeur and Western modernity, or the squalor and clamour of Beijing – ‘a cacophony, a pandemonium, that had no counterpart in Europe’, as one Western resident put it35 – but of its timeless beauty:
In the parks and the old palace grounds I saw the early northern spring. I saw the white plum blossoms flower while the ice still held solid over Beihai [lake]. I saw the willows over Beihai with the ice crystals hanging from them, and remembered the description of the scene by the Tang poet, Zhen Zhang, who wrote about Beihai's winter-jewelled trees looking like ‘ten thousand peach trees blossoming’. The innumerable trees of Beijing aroused my wonder and admiration.36
Here was the same romantic young student who, three years earlier, fleeing Changsha to escape the depredations of the Guangxi army, had stopped to describe to Xiao Yu the emerald-green of the paddy fields, luxuriant with new rice-shoots. ‘Smoke hangs in the sky,’ Mao wrote then, ‘the mountain mists unfold; the gorgeous clouds intermingle; and as far as one can see, everywhere it is like a painting.’37 At First Normal, he had copied into his notebook the Lisao, the Song of Sorrow, by Qu Yuan, an ill-fated statesman of the third century bc, whom Chinese remember each spring at the Dragon Boat Festival as a paragon of princely virtue.38 Mao's love of poetry, kindled as an adolescent at Dongshan Upper Primary School, would remain with him through all the tumultuous years that followed, offering a soaring counterpoint to the brutishness of war and release from the arid logic of revolutionary struggle.
In March 1919, Mao received word that his mother's illness had grown worse. He was about to leave for Shanghai with the first group from the New People's Study Society which was setting out for France, and decided to go ahead with the trip anyway. When finally he did reach Changsha, having spent three weeks in Shanghai seeing off his friends, he found that his mother had already arrived in the city, accompanied by his younger brothers, to seek medical treatment.39 It was unsuccessful, and in October she died from what today would be an easily treatable case of lymph gland inflammation. His father, who fell ill with typhoid, followed her a few months later.40
Mao felt deep guilt, not only for having been away, but because the previous autumn he had promised himself to take her to Changsha for treatment, but had done nothing about it.41 In a letter to his uncles, he sought to justify himself: ‘When I heard [her] illness had become serious,’ he wrote, ‘[I] rushed back home to look after her.’42 As he well knew, this was untrue. After her death, he wrote, more candidly, to a close friend who had also recently lost his mother: ‘For people like us, who are always away from home and therefore unable to take care of our parents, such an occurrence especially causes sorrow.’43 Years later, his dereliction of filial duty still nagged at his conscience. In Bao'an, he pretended to Edgar Snow that his mother had died when he was a student, in what can only have been a deliberate attempt to camouflage his absence.44
To support himself, Mao took a part-time job teaching history at a local primary school.45 Almost immediately, however, Hunan, and the rest of China, were engulfed in a new political storm.46
Ever since the start of the Great War, Japan had been angling to take over the former German concession in Shandong. At the peace conference in Versailles, the Chinese government's position was that, since China had sided with the Allies, it should be permitted to recover the territory under the principle of national self-determination, championed by the American President, Woodrow Wilson. But in April it emerged that, as the price of a new Japanese loan, Premier Duan Qirui had made a secret agreement the previous autumn – which the government was now seeking to repudiate – signing away Shandong to Japanese control. Wilson, who had been supporting China, now gave up in disgust, and on April 30, 1919, he, Lloyd-George and Clemenceau – the ‘Holy Trinity’, as they were known – ratified Japan's take-over of German treaty rights.
When the news reached Beijing on Saturday, May 3, it provoked an unparalleled outpouring of rage, frustration and shame. This time anger was directed not at Japan alone, but at all the imperialist Powers, America first among them, and above all at China's own government, which had sold out the country's interests before the peace conference had even begun. A group of students in Shanghai wrote bitterly: ‘Throughout
the world, like the voice of a prophet, has gone the word of Woodrow Wilson strengthening the weak and giving courage to the struggling. And the Chinese have listened … They have been told that secret covenants and forced agreements would not be recognised. They looked for the dawn of this new era; but no sun rose for China. Even the cradle of the nation was stolen.’47
On Sunday afternoon, 3,000 young people gathered outside Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, refusing appeals from the Education Minister and the Police Chief to disperse. A manifesto was approved, drafted by Lo Jialun, a student leader from Beijing University's New Tide Society. China was facing annihilation, he wrote. ‘Today we swear two solemn oaths with all our fellow countrymen: (1) China's territory may be conquered but it cannot be given away, (2) The Chinese people may be massacred, but they will not surrender.’ The crowd, whipped up to fever pitch, called for the heads of the Communications Minister, Cao Rulin, the éminence grise of the warlord cabinet; and his two principal supporters, Zhang Zongxiang, Minister at the Chinese Legation in Tokyo, and Lu Zongyou, who were blamed collectively for arranging the fatal loan. In a solemn declaration, the leaders of the protest urged the nation to resist:
We now approach a crisis in which our country is threatened with subjugation … If her people cannot unite in indignation in a last-minute effort to save her, they are indeed a worthless race of the twentieth century and should not be regarded as human beings … As for those who willingly and traitorously sell out our country to the enemy, as a last resort we shall have to rely on pistols and bombs to deal with them. Our country is in imminent peril – its fate hangs by a thread! We appeal to you to join our struggle.48
The meeting over, they marched to the Legation Quarter. The students, including many children, carried white banners on which they had written, ‘Down with the nation-selling clique!’ and ‘Protect our country's earth!’.49 Before them went two huge five-coloured national flags and a pair of scrolls with a mock funeral inscription:
Cao Rulin, Lu Zongyou and Zhang Zongxiang will stink for a thousand years.
The students of Beijing mourn them with bitter tears.50
A delegation handed in petitions at the American, British, French and Italian missions.51 Then the cry went up: ‘On to the house of the traitor!’ The crowd surged forward to the home of Cao Rulin, in a side-street near the Foreign Ministry, which they found well-guarded by militia and police. When the police tried to move them on, five young diehards, led by a student anarchist, Kuang Husheng, leapt over the wall and broke a window to get inside. The imposing double doors were thrown open, and the students stormed in after them. An eyewitness reported:
The change which came over this procession of apparently innocent schoolboys was astounding … The 3,000 bunched up in the narrow street … went through police, gates and all in a fine indifferent frenzy and set about making a ruin of Cao's residence in the most systematic manner. They did not find the man they were looking for, however. With rare agility he went through a back window, over the back wall, and landed with a badly injured leg in another street, where he was picked up and taken to the sanctuary of a foreign hotel. Instead, the infuriated students found an unhappy victim in Zhang Zongxiang [who had been hiding with another Chinese official and a Japanese journalist] … The mob fell upon Zhang with all their fury. Everyone insisted upon hitting him at least once. He was dragged into the street and then mauled in the dust until past recognition.
Kuang and his group of anarchists then set the building on fire. In the confusion the Japanese journalist, with the help of some of the police, managed to get Zhang away to the safety of a nearby store. There another group of students found him and beat him unconscious again. Eventually reinforcements arrived, and in the ensuing melee, a number of students were injured, one of whom died later, and thirty-two were arrested. As they were marched off to prison, they were ‘heartily cheered by all foreigners and Chinese en route’, reflecting general contempt for the warlord government's cravenness.
Cao's elderly father, his son and young concubine, whom the students had allowed to leave, were then driven with a military escort to the Legation Quarter, where, in a final indignity, the legation police arrested their driver for speeding.
The May Fourth Incident, as these events were afterwards called, spawned a nationwide movement for national renewal that spread to every corner of China, triggering a tidal wave of cultural, political and social change that has been regarded ever since as one of the defining periods of modern Chinese history.
In Hunan, Zhang the Venomous issued a proclamation, forbidding agitation.52 A handful of students distributed tracts urging people to protest. But they were pitifully few compared with the thousands who gathered in other provincial capitals,53 and Zhang's troops made short work of dispersing them. The Governor was less successful in preventing an economic boycott. There was a run on Japanese-owned banks, as Chinese refused paper notes and withdrew their savings in silver; Chinese newspapers rejected Japanese advertisements; merchants refused to sell Japanese goods. The city was plastered with crudely drawn posters, depicting China's humiliation at the hands of the ‘Eastern dwarves’, and consignments of Japanese silk, smuggled in by profiteers, were publicly burned.54 But even here, Hunan was merely following the lead of other provinces, which had acted sooner and more forcefully. Zhang's condemnation of the boycott as ‘a national disgrace’ had its effect. In Changsha, there was no merchants’ strike and no Japanese shops were looted. Zhang himself noted with satisfaction that the province had been ‘quite a model [compared] to other places’.55
Mao played little part in these early stages of the campaign.
At the end of May, he had helped He Shuheng, an older fellow teacher, and Deng Zhongxia, a student he had met at the Young China meetings in Beijing, who had come to Changsha to spread word of what was happening in the capital, to set up a Hunan United Students Association, whose stated aim was ‘to restore national sovereignty and punish those who have betrayed the motherland’.56 He reportedly wrote a ‘fiery appeal’, urging nationwide resistance,57 and the association sent out inspection teams, working jointly with the trade guilds, to ensure that the boycott was complied with.
Very quickly he realised, however, that such efforts were peripheral to the main task at hand. To Mao, as to Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao in Beijing, Japan's refusal to return Shandong and the ensuing boycott were merely symptoms of China's national malaise, of which the cause, and the cure, lay far deeper.58 They were useful as a vehicle to mobilise public feeling. But if lasting change were to be achieved, the sense of national outrage would need to be channelled so as to bring about fundamental political reform. The May Fourth Incident was merely a catalyst. The energy it had released had to be made to trigger China's hoped-for renaissance, rather than being dissipated by sops, like the dismissal of Cao Rulin and his two cohorts, announced with much fanfare by the Beijing government at the beginning of June, or China's symbolic refusal, later that month, to sign the Paris peace treaty.
With this aim in mind, and with the support of the Students’ Association's Chairman, Peng Huang, a fellow member of the New People's Study Society, Mao decided to produce a weekly newspaper, Xiangjiang pinglun (Xiang River Review), whose purpose was to agitate for thoroughgoing reform.59 In a front-page editorial in the first issue, published on July 14, he nailed his colours to the mast:
Today we must change our old attitudes … Question the unquestionable. Dare to do the unthinkable … Religious oppression, literary oppression, political oppression, social oppression, educational oppression, economic oppression, intellectual oppression and international oppression no longer have the slightest place in this world. All must be overthrown under the great cry of democracy …
The time has come … The floodgates … have opened! The vast and furious tide of the new thought is already rushing, surging along both banks of the Xiang River! Those who ride with the current will live; those who go against it will die. How shall we greet it? Ho
w will we propagate it? How will we study it? How will we carry it out? This is the most urgent, most pressing task, for all of us Hunanese …60
He attempted to answer that question in a long essay entitled ‘The Great Union of the Popular Masses’, published in three consecutive issues in late July and early August.61 In it, he argued that the chances of reform were brightest when ‘the decadence of the state, the sufferings of humanity and the darkness of society have all reached an extreme’. To seize the opportunity so presented, what was needed was a ‘great union’ of all progressive forces in society – formed from ‘a multitude of small unions’ representing workers and peasants; students; teachers; and such disadvantaged groups as women and jinricksha-pullers, often regarded in the May Fourth period as symbols of the country's exploitation. If only they would struggle together, Mao wrote, no force would be able to withstand them.
Could such an enterprise really succeed? ‘Some doubts may well be expressed,’ Mao conceded. ‘Hitherto … organised undertakings on a large scale were something of which the people of our country were quite simply incapable.’ But now, he insisted, it was different. The consciousness of the Chinese masses had been raised, the Empire had been overthrown, and democracy, ‘the great rebel’, was waiting in the wings:
We are awakened! The world is ours, the state is ours, society is ours! If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act? … Ideological liberation, political liberation, economic liberation, liberation between men and women and educational liberation are all going to burst from the deep inferno where they have been confined and demand to look at the blue sky. Our Chinese people possess great inherent capacities! The more profound the oppression, the more powerful its reaction, and since this has been accumulating for a long time, it will surely burst forth quickly. I venture to make a singular assertion: one day the reform of the Chinese people will be more profound than that of any other people, and the society of the Chinese people will be more radiant than that of any other people … [and] it will be achieved earlier than that of any other place or people. Gentlemen! Gentlemen! We must all exert ourselves! We must all advance with the utmost strength! Our golden age, our age of glory and splendour, lies before us!