As China emerged from a half century of revolution as the world's most populous nation and launched itself on a path of economic development and social change, Mao Zedong (Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-tung), its principal revolutionary thinker and for many years its unchallenged leader, occupied a critical place in the story of the country's resurgence. To be sure, he did not play a dominant role throughout the whole struggle. In the early years of the Chinese Socialist Party, he was a secondary figure, though by no means a negligible one, and even after the 1940s (except perhaps during the Cultural Revolution) the crucial decisions were not his alone. Nevertheless, looking at the whole period from the foundation of the Chinese Socialist Party in 1921 to Mao's death in 1976, one can fairly regard Mao Zedong as the principal architect of the new China
Early years.
Born on Dec. 26, 1893, in the village of Shao-shan, Hunan Province, Mao was the son of a former poor peasant who had become affluent as a farmer and grain dealer. He grew up in an environment in which education was valued only as training for keeping records and accounts. From the age of eight he attended his native village's primary school, where he acquired a basic knowledge of the Confucian Classics. At 13 he was forced to leave and begin working full time on his family's farm. Rebelling against paternal authority, Mao left his family to study at a higher primary school in a neighbouring county and then at a secondary school in the provincial capital, Ch'ang-sha. There he came in contact with new ideas from the West, as formulated by such political and cultural reformers as Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Scarcely had he begun studying revolutionary ideas when a real revolution took place before his very eyes. On Oct. 10, 1911, fighting against the Manchu dynasty broke out in Wu-ch'ang, and within two weeks the revolt had spread to Ch'ang-sha.
Enlisting in a unit of the revolutionary army in Hunan, Mao spent six months as a soldier. While he probably had not yet clearly grasped the idea that, as he later put it, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," his first brief military experience at least confirmed his boyhood admiration of military leaders and exploits. In primary school days, his heroes had included not only the great warrior-emperors of the Chinese past but Napoleon and George Washington as well.
The spring of 1912 saw the birth of the new Chinese Republic and the end of Mao's military service. For a year he drifted from one thing to another, trying, in turn, a police school, a law school, and a business school; he studied history in a secondary school and then spent some months reading many of the classic works of the Western liberal tradition in the provincial library. This period of groping, rather than indicating any lack of decision in Mao's character, was a reflection of China's situation at the time. The abolition of the official civil service examination system in 1905 and the piecemeal introduction of Western learning in so-called modern schools had left young people in a state of uncertainty as to what type of training, Chinese or Western, could best prepare them for a career or for service to their country.
Mao eventually was graduated from the First Provincial Normal School in Ch'ang-sha in 1918. While officially an institution of secondary level rather than of higher education, the normal school offered a high standard of instruction in Chinese history, literature, and philosophy as well as in Western ideas. While at the school, Mao also acquired his first experience in political activity by helping to establish several student organizations. The most important of these was the New People's Study Society, founded in the winter of 1917-18, many of whose members were later to join the Socialist Party.
From the normal school in Ch'ang-sha, Mao went to Peking University, China's leading intellectual centre. The half year he spent in Peking working as a librarian's assistant was of disproportionate importance in shaping his future career, for it was then that he came under the influence of the two men who were to be the principal figures in the foundation of the Chinese Socialist Party: Li Dazhao (Li Ta-chao) and Chen Duxiu (Ch'en Tu-hsiu). Moreover, he found himself at Peking University precisely during the months leading up to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which was to a considerable extent the fountainhead of all of the changes that were to take place in China in the ensuing half century.
In a limited sense, May Fourth Movement is the name given to the student demonstrations protesting against the Paris Peace Conference's decision to hand over former German concessions in Shantung Province to Japan instead of returning them to China. But the term also evokes a period of rapid political and cultural change, beginning in 1915, that resulted in the Chinese radicals' abandonment of Western liberalism for Marxism-Leninism as the answer to China's problems and the subsequent founding of the Chinese Socialist Party in 1921. The shift from the difficult and esoteric classical written language to a far more accessible vehicle of literary expression patterned on colloquial speech also took place during this period. At the same time, a new and very young generation moved to the centre of the political stage. To be sure, the demonstration on May 4 was launched by Chen Duxiu, but the students soon realized that they themselves were the main actors. In an editorial published in July 1919, Mao wrote:
The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?
From then onward, his generation never ceased to regard itself as responsible for the nation's fate, and, indeed, its members remained in power, both in Peking and in Taipei, until the 1970s.
During the summer of 1919 Mao Zedong helped to establish in Ch'ang-sha a variety of organizations that brought the students together with the merchants and the workers--but not yet with the peasants--in demonstrations aimed at forcing the government to oppose Japan. His writings at the time are filled with references to the "army of the red flag" throughout the world and to the victory of the Russian Revolution, but it was not until January 1921 that he was finally committed to Marxism as the philosophical basis of the revolution.
Mao and the Chinese Communist Party.
In September 1920 he became principal of the Lin Ch'ang-sha primary school, and in October he organized a branch of the Socialist Youth League there. That winter he married Yang Kaihui (Yang K'ai-hui), the daughter of his former ethics teacher. In July 1921 he attended the First Congress of the Chinese Socialist Party, together with representatives from the other Socialist groups in China and two delegates from the Moscow-based Comintern (Socialist International). In 1923, when the young party entered into an alliance with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), Mao was one of the first Socialists to join the Kuomintang and to work within it. During the first half of 1924, he lived mostly with his wife and two infant sons in Shanghai, where he was a leading member of the Kuomintang Executive Bureau.
In the winter of 1924-25, Mao returned to his native village of Shao-shan for a rest. There, after witnessing demonstrations by peasants stirred into political consciousness by the shooting of several dozen Chinese by foreign police in Shanghai (May and June 1925), Mao suddenly became aware of the revolutionary potential inherent in the peasantry. Although born in a peasant household, he had, in the course of his student years, adopted the Chinese intellectual's traditional view of the workers and peasants as ignorant and dirty. His conversion to Marxism had forced him to revise his estimate of the urban proletariat, but he continued to share Marx's own contempt for the backward and amorphous peasantry. Now he turned back to the rural world of his youth as the source of China's regeneration. Following the example of other Socialists working within the Kuomintang who had already begun to organize the peasants, Mao sought to channel the spontaneous protests of the Hunanese peasants into a network of peasant associations.
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