by Philip Short
The sparrow sings, the nightingale dances,
And the green fields are lovely in the spring.
The pomegranate flowers crimson, the willows green-leafed,
And there is a new picture.93
Japan had become the inspiration for all those who made up what the newspapers called ‘Young China’, the reformers and intellectuals who saw their country's salvation in a modernisation movement on the lines of Japan's espousal of foreign ideas after the Meiji restoration. By its defeat of China in 1895, Japan had forced them to face the reality of their country's weakness. By its defeat of Russia ten years later, Japan had shown that an Asian army could defeat a European one. For China, the latter victory would prove a mixed blessing, since Japan replaced Russia as the dominant power in Manchuria. But to young men of Mao's generation, what mattered was that the yellow race had proved it could defeat the white.
‘At that time,’ he said, ‘I knew and felt the beauty of Japan, and felt something of her pride and might in this song of her victory over Russia.’
Starting in the 1890s, thousands of Chinese had made their way to Tokyo to soak up the new Western learning. Among the most influential were Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the architects of the Emperor Guangxu's abortive reform movement, who had fled into exile there after the reforms were crushed. Kang's great contribution to the modernisation debate had been to redefine Confucianism to make it forward-looking and therefore compatible with reform, instead of perpetually harking back to a supposed golden age in the remote past. Liang, a Hunanese, took Charles Darwin's thesis, ‘the survival of the fittest’, and applied it to China's national struggle against the encircling Powers. He argued that China had to modernise in order to survive.
Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were Young China's idols. Mao's cousin gave him two books about the reform movement, one by Liang himself. ‘I read and reread those books until I knew them by heart,’ he wrote. ‘I worshipped Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao.’
As he turned seventeen, Mao still supported the imperial system: ‘I considered the Emperor as well as most officials to be honest, good and clever men,’ he declared. ‘They only needed the help of Kang Youwei's reforms.’94
That was about to change.
I Attempts to translate Chinese names are misguided. The name Mao Zedong means literally ‘Anoint the East’ Hair, for that is what the characters ze, dong and mao individually signify. Used together in a name, however, they no more have that connotation to a Chinese than Philip signifies ‘Lover of Horses’ in English or the name, Pierre, suggests ‘stone’ to a Frenchman. There are exceptions, both in antiquity and in recent times (during the Cultural Revolution, for example, many Chinese changed their names to make them more revolutionary), but even where a name does have an unambiguous meaning, it is often not understood as such. Shaoshan, for instance, has the literal meaning, ‘Music Mountain’, but to its inhabitants it is simply the name of the village.
CHAPTER TWO
Revolution
At around noon on October 9, 1911, a partly completed bomb exploded in a house owned by a Chinese army officer in the Russian concession at Hankou, the main commercial city of central China, two days downriver from Changsha.1 The man who had been making it, Sun Wu, was the youthful leader of the Forward Together Society, a splinter group of the Tongmenghui, the secret Revolutionary Alliance led by the Cantonese anti-monarchist, Sun Yat-sen.2
Sun Wu's friends succeeded in getting him to the safety of a Japanese hospital. But the concession police searched the house, and found revolutionary flags and proclamations and a list of activists. The Qing authorities sprang into action. Thirty-two people were arrested and, next day at dawn, three of the leaders were executed. The Manchu Viceroy, Ruizheng, telegraphed Beijing: ‘Now all … is peaceful and quiet. This case was broken so early that the area was not harmed.’
The executions proved a fatal mistake. Rumours spread among the Han troops garrisoned across the river at Wuchang that the Viceroy was planning wholesale reprisals against all who were not of Manchu blood. That evening an engineering battalion mutinied. Officers who resisted were shot. Two infantry regiments joined them; then an artillery regiment. The heaviest fighting, which took several hundred lives, was around the Viceroy's yamen, which was defended by a machine-gun emplacement. In the early hours of the morning, Ruizheng fled aboard a Chinese gunboat, leaving Wuchang in the insurgents’ hands. Years of revolutionary agitation had finally paid off. Yet victory, when it came, was fiercer and bloodier than its architects had planned. The white flags of the rebels, edged with red, bore the legend, ‘Xin Han, Mie Man’ – ‘Long Live the Han, Exterminate the Manchu’.3 The Manchu 30th Regiment was virtually wiped out in a racial massacre. A civilian pogrom followed. Three days afterwards, a local missionary counted 800 Manchu corpses lying in the streets, ‘fifty being heaped together outside one gate alone’.4
Revolutionary proclamations appeared, inflaming feelings further. The ‘descendants of Holy Han’, one asserted, were ‘sleeping on brushwood and eating gall’ under the yoke of a northern, nomadic tribe.5 Another diatribe warned:
The Manchu government has been tyrannical, cruel, insane and unconscious, inflicting heavy taxations and stripping the people of their marrow … Recollect that when the Manchus first entered the Chinese domain, cities full of men and women were put to the sword without exception … To leave the wrongs of our forefathers unavenged would shame us who are gentlemen. Therefore all our brothers should … help the revolutionary army in the extirpation of such barbarous aliens … Today's opportunity is bestowed on us by Great Heaven. If we do not seize and make use of it, until what time shall we wait then?6
The outside world reserved judgement. In London, The Times reported that most educated Chinese unreservedly supported the revolution, adding snootily: ‘Little sympathy is expressed for the corrupt and effete Manchu dynasty with its Eunuchs and other barbaric surroundings.’7
But there was little sense that history was in the making, that the obscure events unfolding in Wuchang were the harbingers of millennial change for the oldest and most populous of the world's nations. No one predicted the imminent collapse of a system of rule that had endured without interruption since pre-Christian times, longer than any other in history. Indeed the prevailing view then, and for several weeks after, was that the imperial house would rally, and as had happened so often in the past, the rebellion would eventually be put down.
Chinese bonds weakened slightly, but financial markets took the view that the movement would probably be beneficial to foreign commerce with China. Even in the English-language newspapers in Shanghai, first reports of the revolution had to compete for space with the Italian bombardment of Tripoli; the assassination of Prince Troubetzkoy by a student in Novocherkassk; the illness of Prince Luitpold, the ninety-year-old Regent of Bavaria, who had caught a chill while out stag-hunting; and ‘the most brilliant wedding of the year, at St Peter's, Eaton Square, between Earl Percy and Lady Gordon Lennox’.
Only in Beijing itself was the true gravity of the situation recognised. Guards were doubled outside the palaces of the Prince Regent and other dignitaries; imperial cavalry patrolled the streets; and as reports came in of Manchu families in the provinces being hunted down and killed by revolutionary mobs, Manchu women in the capital abandoned their elaborate hair ornaments and characteristic high-soled shoes and started wearing Chinese dress.8
Mao was in Changsha when these events occurred. Six months earlier he had come by riverboat from Xiangtan, carrying with him a letter of recommendation from one of his teachers, who had helped him convince his father that he should enrol at a secondary school in the capital for students from Xiangxiang county.9
He had heard before setting out, he said later, that it was ‘a magnificent place’, with ‘many people, numerous schools and the yamen of the Governor’, but his first sight of the city as the little steamer came slowly downstream must have exceeded all his imaginings.10 A ‘perpendicular wall
, of noble grey-stone blocks’ reared up from the water's edge, fifty feet thick at its base and more than two miles long, with a forest of junks before it.11 Inland it continued for eight miles more, with ramparts 40 feet high, wide enough at the top for three carriages to ride abreast, encircling the city like a medieval fortress, which indeed it was. On each quarter, the wall was pierced by two massive gates, guarded by militiamen wearing dark blue turbans, short military cloaks with red cloud-pattern collars and brightly coloured facings, wide, loose sleeves, and cotton trousers tied at the calf. They were armed with a motley collection of spears, halberds, tridents, two-handed swords, muskets, flintlock and even matchlock guns.
Within lay a warren of grey-tiled roofs and ‘dark tunnel-like streets, burrowing away into the city's heart’, paved with granite slabs, often no more than six feet wide, and reeking with squalour and bad smells, ‘all the encumbrances and filth of too much living like spawn’, as one Western resident put it. But, hidden from view behind windowless street-walls, were also splendid mansions, where the great officials lived among ‘flower-decked courtyards, gracious reception halls with stately blackwood furniture and wall paintings on silk scrolls’, and two immense Confucian temples, with curved yellow-tiled roofs and vast teak columns, surrounded by ancient cypress trees.
In the commercial district, during business hours, the wooden shopfronts were removed, so that the shops opened directly on to the street, and bamboo matting was stretched over poles between the roofs, turning parts of the city into an immense covered arcade. Long hanging wooden shop-signs, written in gold characters on a black lacquer ground, greeted prospective customers and advertised what was on sale.
There were no bicycles, no motor-cars, no rickshaws.12 The wealthy used sedan chairs. For everyone else the main form of transport, whether for people or goods, was the humble wheelbarrow. All day long the city resounded with the deafening squeals of ungreased axles, as labourers hauled loads of coal, salt, antimony and opium; firecrackers, calico and linen; and medicinal supplies of foxglove, monkswood, and rhubarb, to the junks along the river. Water was carried in on men's backs, in buckets slung from bamboo poles, from the ‘Sand Spring’ by the South Gate. Pedlars cried their wares, or made their presence known by shaking wooden rattles and bells. The sweetmeat-seller had a tiny gong and chanted, in a thick Hunanese accent:
They cure the deaf and heal the lame,
Preserve the teeth of the aged dame!13
Daoist monks, in dark blue robes, and Buddhists, wearing saffron, walked in procession, chanting prayers for the sick. Beggars, blind or hideously disfigured, sat at the roadside asking for alms, and each year extorted ‘squeeze’ from the householders, promising in return to stay a respectable distance from their homes.
At dusk, the wooden boards were replaced on the shopfronts. The pious bowed three times, to heaven, earth and man, and placed glowing sticks of incense over their doors to protect them from evil during the night. The city gates were dosed, each secured by a huge beam which took three men to lift. There was electricity at the Governor's yamen and in the Western-style houses on an island in the river where the foreign consuls lived. But in the rest of the city, the only light was from the sputtering wicks of small oil-lamps provided by the street guilds. Later, the district gates were locked too, isolating the different wards of the city. After that, the only sound was the sharp crack of the constable's stick striking a long bamboo gong as he beat out the watches of the night.
Mao had at first been doubtful whether he would be able to stay in the city: ‘I [was] exceedingly excited, half fearing that I would be refused entrance, hardly daring to hope that I would actually become a student in this great school.’14 To his surprise, he was accepted without difficulty. In the event, however, the six months he spent at the middle school did more for his political education than for his academic progress.
Changsha had been seething with anti-Manchu feeling since the rice riots the year before. Secret societies put up placards, calling in cryptic language for the Han to rise: ‘All should bind their heads with a white kerchief and each should carry a sword … The eighteen provinces of China will be returned to the descendants of [the legendary Chinese emperor] Shen Nong.’ The slogan ‘Revolt and drive out the Manchus’ was chalked up on walls.15
That spring, soon after Mao's arrival, came news of an anti-Manchu uprising in Canton under the leadership of a Hunanese revolutionary named Huang Xing, in which seventy-two radicals had been killed. Mao read about it in the Minli Bao (People's Strength), which supported the revolutionary cause. It was the first newspaper he had seen, and he remembered afterwards how impressed he had been that it was so ‘full of stimulating material’. Here, too, he first encountered the name of Sun Yat-sen and the Tongmenghui, then based in Japan. It inspired him to write a poster, which he put up on the school wall, calling for a new government with Sun as President, Kang Youwei as Premier and Liang Qichao, Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was, he admitted later, a ‘somewhat muddled’ effort:16 Kang and Liang were both constitutional monarchists, opposed to republican government. But Mao's new willingness to renounce the Empire, and the fact that he had been moved for the first time to try to give public expression to his political ideas, showed how a few weeks in the city had already changed his thinking.
This was demonstrated most dramatically by his attitude to the queue. At Dongshan he and the other schoolboys had ridiculed one of the teachers who had had his queue cut off while studying in Japan, and now wore a false one in its place. The ‘false foreign devil’, they called him. Now, Mao and one of his friends clipped off their own pigtails in a show of anti-Manchu defiance, and when others who had promised to do likewise failed to keep their word, ‘my friend and I … assaulted them in secret and forcibly removed their queues, a total of more than ten falling victim to our shears’.17 Similar scenes had been taking place in schools in Changsha and Wuchang since the beginning of the year, horrifying traditionalists – who held that hair was a gift from one's parents and destroying it a violation of filial piety – no less than, for quite different reasons, the Manchu authorities.18
Two other events occurred in April which helped to bring the Hunan gentry on to the revolutionaries’ side. The Court announced the appointment of a cabinet, which the elite had long been demanding as a step towards constitutional government. But, to the fury of reformists, it was dominated by Manchu princes. It also became known that the government intended to nationalise the railway companies as a preliminary to accepting foreign loans to finance railroad construction, which was widely regarded as a sell-out to the Powers. These issues, Mao recalled, made the students in his school ‘more and more agitated’, and when in May the foreign loans were confirmed, most of the schools went on strike.19 With other boys of his age, he went to listen to older students making revolutionary speeches at open-air meetings outside the city walls. ‘I still remember’, he wrote later, ‘how one student, while making a speech, ripped off his long gown and said, “Let's hurry to get some military training and be ready to fight.”’20 Inflammatory handbills were posted, and the situation appeared so threatening that Britain and Japan sent gunboats. By summer, a precarious calm was restored, but anti-Manchu rallies continued at the site of the former imperial examination halls. The reformist gentry gathered under the guise of holding meetings of the Wenxue Hui, the Association for Literary Studies, to discuss the dynasty's impending collapse.21 In neighbouring Sichuan, a full-scale rebellion broke out.
On Friday, October 13, a Chinese steamer arrived in Changsha, bringing the first confused reports of the rising in Wuchang.22 The passengers spoke of fighting between army units, of the sound of firing from the military camps, and of reports of soldiers tearing off the red facings and insignia from their black winter uniforms and putting on white armbands instead.23 But nobody seemed certain who was fighting whom or what the outcome was. In 1911, the Hunanese capital was linked to the outside world by a single telegraph line to Hankou and that we
ekend it was down.24 Even the officials at the governor's yamen had no way to discover what was going on.
The following Monday, the 16th, there was a run on the provincial banks, which ended only when the Governor sent fully armed militia detachments to stand guard outside. Most schools suspended classes.25 The British consul, Bertram Giles, warned his legation in Beijing: ‘News is scarce, wild rumours are current and great excitement prevails.’26 That evening, a Japanese steamer arrived from Hankou with a thousand passengers aboard, who provided detailed accounts of the revolutionaries’ success.27 Next day, Mr Giles noted, ‘a distinct change in the situation was perceptible’.28
The new arrivals included emissaries from the Wuchang revolutionaries, who had come to urge fellow radicals in the Hunan garrison to speed up plans for their own mutiny. One of them visited Mao's school:
[He] made a stirring speech, with the permission of the principal. Seven or eight students arose in the assembly and supported him with vigorous denunciation of the Manchus, and calls for action to establish the Republic. Everyone listened with complete attention. Not a sound was heard as the orator of the revolution … spoke before the excited students.29
A few days later, Mao and a group of classmates, fired by what they had heard, decided to go to Hankou to join the revolutionary army. Their friends collected money to pay their steamer tickets. But events moved ahead of them before they could set out.
While the revolutionaries plotted, the Governor took counter-measures.30 The regular garrison troops, the 49th and 50th regiments, which were known to have been infiltrated by the radicals, were redeployed to other districts away from the provincial capital. The 600 men who remained, in a barracks outside the East Gate, were ordered to surrender their ammunition. The militia, who were judged more reliable, were substantially reinforced.