by Philip Short
The essay was remarkable not only for its clarity and force, its unabashed confidence in the future and its implicit exaltation of youth as the primary motor of change, but because it offered a coherent, practical programme for achieving it. That made it stand out from the flood of material being published in the 400 or more student news-sheets that sprang up in China at that time,62 fifteen of them in Changsha alone, and overnight it won Mao, and the Xiang River Review, a national reputation. The liberal philosopher, Hu Shi, who had snubbed Mao nine months earlier, described it as ‘one of the [truly] important articles’ of the time, and praised its author's ‘exceedingly far-reaching vision and effective and well-chosen arguments’.63 Li Dazhao reprinted it in the Meizhou pinglun (Weekly Review), which he edited in Beijing. The New Tide leader, Lo Jialun, another of those who had spurned Mao's overtures when he was a library assistant, said it conveyed the essence of the student movement's aims.64
More important in the long-term for Mao's development was the new emphasis he placed on organisation, which eventually would lead him to Marxism. For the moment, however, he continued to view the world revolution, which he maintained was moving inexorably eastward from Leningrad to Asia, in essentially anarchist terms. His articles dealt with educational policy, the struggle for women's rights, and such well-worn anarchist themes as ‘whether or not to retain the nation, or the family, or marriage, [and] whether property should be private or public’. The Marxist concept of class struggle, to the extent that he understood it at all, he found entirely alien: ‘[If] we use oppression to overthrow oppression,’ he wrote, ‘the result [will be] that we still have oppression. This would be not only self-contradictory, but also totally ineffectual.’ Rather than waging a ‘revolution of bombs [and] … of blood’, oppressors should be shown the error of their ways. Indeed, he used the word ‘class’ very rarely, and then usually in such un-Marxist categories as ‘the classes of the wise and of the ignorant’, or ‘the strong and the weak’.65
Writing for a wider audience gave Mao for the first time an opportunity to apply to contemporary politics the analytical tools he had developed as a student. In ‘The Great Union of the Popular Masses’, he asserted a dialectical relationship between oppression and the reaction against it, which was straight out of Paulsen's System der Ethik.66 The same sense of historical flux informed his assessment of Germany's defeat: ‘When we look at history in the light of cause and effect, joy and suffering are often closely interrelated, inseparable. When the joy of one side reaches an extreme, the suffering of the other side will inevitably also reach an extreme.’ Thus the invasion of France by the Holy Alliance in 1790 contained within it the seeds of Napoleon's rise; Napoleon's subjugation of Prussia in 1815 created the conditions for the French defeat of 1870, which in turn paved the way for Germany's defeat in 1918. Nor would it end there: the harshness of the conditions imposed by the Allies at Versailles made another cycle of conflict inevitable. ‘I guarantee’, Mao wrote, ‘that in ten or twenty years, you Frenchmen will yet again have a splitting headache. Mark my words!’67
Mao's sympathy for Germany, shared by many educated Chinese, reflected admiration for its ‘towering strength’ and ‘spirit of greatness’, which had enabled it to become the most powerful nation in Europe. Yet here, too, his sense of history gave him a prescience which few others at that time shared.
We must realise [he wrote at the end of July] that Japan and Germany are a couple of dogs, male and female, that have tried to mate on a number of occasions, and although they haven't made it up to now, their lusting after each other will never go away. If the militarist adventurers of the authoritarian Japanese government are not exterminated, if the German … government is not overthrown by revolution, and if this lustful stud and lascivious bitch are still not separated, the danger will be truly great.68
When those lines were written, he was still only twenty-five years old.
*
By the beginning of August 1919, an uneasy calm had returned to China. The government in Beijing had made symbolic amends. The strikes and demonstrations were over.
Only in Hunan did friction continue. At a meeting with student representatives, Governor Zhang, fanned by four bodyguards, yelled furiously: ‘You are not permitted to march in the streets, you are not permitted to hold meetings … You should work hard at studying and teaching. If you don't listen, I'll cut off your heads!’69 Soon afterwards the Students’ Association was banned and Peng Huang, its chairman, fled to Shanghai.70
Mao was unimpressed. On August 4, the Xiang River Review published a wickedly mischievous petition, which he himself had written, begging the Governor to allow the reopening of Changsha's leading newspaper, the Dagongbao:
We, the students, have long been worried about the Honourable Governor … We did not in the least expect that the paper would be banned, and its editor arrested, just because it published a manifesto … expressing opposition to [an] illegal election [rigged by Zhang's supporters] … We sincerely hope that Your Honour, for the sake of both interest and profit, will reach a correct decision [and release him]. In that case, the people of Hunan will forever remember your virtuous action. Otherwise … ill-informed outsiders may proclaim that this government is abolishing the right to free speech. We should guard against evil tongues more than a flooding river … Your Honour is enlightened and farsighted, and it is impossible that you do not agree with us.71
The Governor's response was predictable. Despite Mao's claim that the Review dealt solely with social and academic affairs,72 the next issue was confiscated and the journal ordered closed.73 A few days later, a group of soldiers, led by Zhang's adopted son, bayoneted to death74 two young radicals from Shanghai who were helping the students to organise the anti-Japanese boycott. The following month, Mao took over as editor of Xin Hunan (New Hunan), the weekly journal of Xiangya Medical College, a Chinese-American[Q1] teaching hospital in Changsha. In the first issue, he proclaimed defiantly: ‘Naturally we will not be concerned whether things go smoothly or not. Still less will we pay attention to any authority whatsoever.’ In October, it, too, was banned.75
That month Mao's mother died. When he resumed writing, several weeks later, for the Dagongbao, which Zhang had permitted to reopen, the plight of China's women and the strait-jacket of the Confucian family were uppermost in his mind.
During the summer, in ‘The Great Union of the Popular Masses’, he had already taken on the role of spokesperson for women's equality:
Gentlemen, we are women! … We are also human beings … [yet] we are not even allowed to go outside the front gate. The shameless men, the villainous men, make us into their playthings … But so-called ‘chastity’ is confined to us women! The ‘temples to virtuous women’ are scattered all over the place, but where are the ‘pagodas to chaste men’? … All day long they talk about something called being ‘a worthy mother and a good wife’. What is this but teaching us to prostitute ourselves indefinitely to the same man? … Oh, bitterness! Bitterness! Spirit of freedom! Where are you? … We want to sweep away all those devils who rape us and destroy the liberty of our minds and our bodies!76
In 1919, such views were widely shared among progressive young Chinese, revolted by the extremes of suffering which many Chinese women were routinely expected to endure.
That autumn, a particularly ghastly case occurred in Changsha, involving a young woman who had been affianced by her parents as the second wife of an elderly merchant. Twenty-three-year-old Zhao Wuzhen was borne in procession in her bridal sedan chair, decked out in red silk, to her future husband's home. But when the door was opened, it was discovered that, on the way, she had cut her throat with a razor.77
Mao, with bitter memories of his own arranged marriage, and still in mourning for his mother, whom he saw as having been trapped in a similarly loveless union, threw himself into the debate, publishing no fewer than ten articles in the Dagongbao in the space of a fortnight. Her family, he acknowledged, were partly to blame, by forci
ng her to marry an old man she did not love. But the root cause of the tragedy was ‘the darkness of the social system’, which had left her no alternative but to take her own life. Citing one of his favourite proverbs – ‘Better a shattered piece of jade than an unbroken pot of clay’ – he argued that what she had done was ‘an act of true courage’, and disagreed with those, like Peng Huang, who suggested that she could have found other ways of struggling against her fate:
Mr Peng wonders why Miss Zhao didn't just run away … First let me raise a few questions, after which I shall present my view.
1) Within the city of Changsha, there are more than forty pedlars [who go from house to house, selling linen goods to women in the inner quarters] … Why is this?
2) Why is it that all the lavatories in the city of Changsha are for men only, and none for women?
3) Why is it you never see women entering a barber shop?
4) Why is it single women are never seen staying in hotels?
5) Why is it you never see women going into tea-houses to drink tea?
6) Why is it that the customers in [the big shops] … are always men, never women?
7) Why is it that of all the carters in the city, not one is a woman? … Anyone who knows the answers to these questions will understand why it was that Miss Zhao could not run away … Even if [she] had wanted to, where could she have run to?78
Mao's new emphasis on social factors, and on first-hand observation, made him re-examine his political goals. To change China, he concluded, it was first necessary to change society. To change society, one must first change the system. To change the system, one must begin by changing those in power. Some of his colleagues in the New People's Study Society demurred, holding that it was the role of scholars to set forth great ideas, not to ‘concern ourselves with small problems and petty affairs’. True up to a point, Mao replied, but so long as the larger aim was not forgotten, promoting practical, political change was the ‘most economical and most effective means’ to influence the current situation and bring about fundamental reform.79
Under his influence, this pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts approach was adopted by Changsha's students that winter when renewed efforts to enforce the anti-Japanese boycott provoked a showdown with Zhang Jingyao.
On December 2, some 5,000 students and others including representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, members of the Society for Promoting National Goods, factory workers and clerks, marched to the former imperial examination hall for a rally at which they planned to burn fourteen boxes of smuggled Japanese cloth. As the proceedings neared their climax, several hundred soldiers, led by the Governor's youngest brother, Zhang Jingtang, debouched from the surrounding streets, and encircled the demonstrators, rifles at the ready. ‘What kind of people are you, making this disturbance?’ he shouted at the crowd. ‘You should realise that we Zhang brothers are the ones who give you money for your studies.’ Spurring his horse forward, he went on angrily: ‘I know how to set fire to things as well as you … I am also a military man and know how to put people to death. I'll have some of you put to death for certain if this sort of thing goes on.’ When a student protested that the rally was patriotic, he laid about him with the flat of his sword and the troops began to advance. ‘You Hunanese are bandits,’ he cried, ‘and your women are bandits too.’ The leaders of the protest were forced to kneel on the ground, while Zhang boxed their ears, and a number of arrests were made.80
The incident, trivial in itself, was the final straw for the Hunanese. Those whom Zhang had insulted were the sons and daughters of the elite. Already, that autumn, a leading Changsha banker had told a foreign acquaintance: ‘This time the trouble is [among] the gowned classes, not the short-coated masses … Better for this city to be looted and get rid of Zhang Jingyao than to have to continue longer under the present conditions.’81 After eighteen months of northern rule, the economy had collapsed.82 In many areas even the troops were no longer being paid, prompting Zhang, like other local warlords, to issue secret orders to farmers to resume opium cultivation, which, though banned by treaties with the Powers (and by a new presidential decree, issued in Beijing), generated large amounts of tax revenue.83 Now the local gentry decided the Governor would have to go.
Two weeks after the confrontation in Changsha, a delegation left secretly for Beijing to plead for Zhang's removal.84 Mao was among its members, charged with setting up a ‘People's News Agency’ to distribute information about the anti-Zhang campaign to Chinese-language newspapers.85 On December 24, the ‘news agency’ scored a notable scoop when students at Wuhan discovered forty-five sacks of opium poppy seeds, each weighing 200 lbs, in a railway freight shed, awaiting shipment to Changsha, addressed to Governor Zhang.86 For the next two months, the delegation produced a hail of petitions denouncing Zhang's ‘insatiable greed’ and ‘tyrannical rule’.87 They held a meeting, which Mao attended, with an official at the Prime Minister's Office, and Hunanese members of the National Assembly pledged to resign their seats unless Zhang was dismissed.88 But the Governor remained firmly in place, and at the end of February, the frustrated delegates decided they could do nothing more.89
In the end, when Zhang fell, four months later, it was not because of popular protests but warlord politics. In May 1920, Wu Peifu, sensing that the simmering conflict between his Zhili clique and the rival Anfu government was coming to a head, decided to aid Tan Yankai's southern forces to recover Hunan, while he himself headed north to Beijing to do battle with Duan Qirui. On June 11, the Governor fled, signalling his departure by blowing up a munitions dump. In a characteristic final gesture, he extorted one last million Chinese silver dollars from local merchants by threatening to burn down the city and execute their leaders. The arrival of the southern forces the following afternoon provoked, one resident wrote, ‘the greatest day of rejoicing I have ever seen in Changsha’, as joyful crowds marched through the streets and innumerable firecrackers exploded late into the night. Little more than a month later, Duan Qirui's armies were defeated by Wu and other Zhili generals, and the Anfu clique, which had ruled northern China for three years, was formally dissolved.90
If Mao's trip to Beijing was a failure as an exercise in practical politics, it turned out to be instrumental in his eventual conversion to Marxism. Already the previous autumn, when Zhang's crackdown on the students was at its height and the Xiang River Review had been banned, he had established a ‘Problem Study Society’, one of the aims of which was to see how the ‘union of the popular masses’ could be advanced. The society was eclectic in scope, and the list of more than a hundred issues with which it proposed to deal, ranging from ‘whether or not socialism can be established’ to such esoteric matters as ‘the problem of drilling traffic tunnels under the Bering Sea, the English Channel and the Straits of Gibraltar’, illustrated the sense of limitless possibility that the May Fourth movement unleashed.91
The society had been inspired by a celebrated debate that year between Hu Shi and Li Dazhao. Hu had argued that China needed ‘More Study of Problems; Less Talk about Isms’. Li contended that without ‘isms’ (or theories), problems could not be understood. Mao, in September 1919, was trying to straddle the two.
By then, more information about the Bolshevik revolution was becoming available. That spring the Beijing newspaper, Chenbao, began publishing translations of Japanese texts about Marxism. During the summer Li Dazhao wrote a long article for New Youth, soon republished in provincial journals all over China, entitled ‘My Marxist Views’, the second part of which dealt with Marx's economic theories. Almost overnight, Mao's vocabulary changed. For the first time he began to appreciate that the system which he wanted to transform was essentially economic in nature.92 The ‘core relationship’ of traditional marriage, he announced, was ‘economic, and thus controlled by capitalism’. If the marriage system was to change, women must obtain economic independence. If society was to change, the old economic relationships would have to go, and a new economic system mu
st be put in their place.93 A month later, Mao began referring to his colleagues in the New People's Study Society as ‘comrades’, and to working people as ‘toilers’.94
In the spring of 1920, Russia's decision to repudiate the ‘unequal treaties’, under which, like the other Powers, it had enjoyed extraterritorial rights in China, provoked a surge of popular gratitude towards the Bolshevik regime, and immense interest among Chinese radicals in the principles by which it ruled.95
Mao followed these developments closely and tried to learn all he could about the new government in Moscow. Russia, he told a friend, was ‘the number-one civilised country in the world’. He became desperate to go there, to see communism for himself, and talked to Li Dazhao about the possibility of setting up a work-study programme to send young people to Moscow, similar to the scheme under which Chinese were travelling to France. At one point he even announced that he was going to learn Russian. Yet at heart Mao remained deeply ambivalent about the benefits of foreign travel. ‘Too many people are infatuated with the two words, “going abroad”,’ he grumbled – only to add wistfully, a few lines later: ‘I think the only correct solution is for each of us to go abroad once, just to satisfy our craving for it.’ In the end, he resolved his dilemma by postponing a decision, remaining in China to study ‘for the time being’.96
Even in Beijing, however, studying the Russian experience was easier said than done.
The first[Q2] complete translation of the Communist Manifesto did not appear in book form until April 1920, when Mao was about to leave for Shanghai, and none of Lenin's writings was translated until the end of the year.97 What there was, he eagerly sought out. The Manifesto, in particular, influenced him profoundly. So did Kautsky's Class Struggle, which advocated non-violent revolution. Li Dazhao also gave him encouragement, as did Chen Duxiu, whose decision to embrace communism, Mao said later, ‘deeply impressed me at what was probably a critical period of my life’.98
