by Philip Short
The first attempt by the revolutionaries to take the city by stratagem, on Wednesday night, failed. The men at the East Gate barracks set fire to some straw in the stables, and then demanded that the city gates be opened to allow fire-engines to pass. The militia, pleading neutrality, refused. But in the confusion, the garrison men recovered most of their ammunition, which had been locked in a nearby arsenal. As a result their next foray, on Sunday morning, turned out very differently. Mao gave his own account of what he saw that day:
I went to borrow some [oilskin boots] from a friend in the army who was quartered outside the city. I was stopped by the garrison guards. The place had become very active, the soldiers … were pouring into the streets. Rebels were approaching the city … and fighting had began. A big battle occurred outside the city walls … There was at the same time an insurrection within the city, and the gates were stormed and taken by Chinese labourers. Through one of the gates I re-entered the city. Then I stood on a high place and watched the battle, until I saw the Han flag raised over the yamen.31
Even now, it makes dramatic reading. Unfortunately, so little of it is true that one might be forgiven for wondering whether Mao was there at all. There were no rebels, no battle, no insurrection and the gates were not stormed. Mr Giles, the British consul, reported drily:
At 9.30 a.m. [I was informed] … that a number of the regular troops had entered the city, where they had been joined by certain representative revolutionaries and had proceeded to the Governor's yamen … The militia, adhering to their policy of neutrality, had refused to close the city gates [which were already open for the day]; and the Governor's bodyguard, already won over, offered no resistance. By 2 p.m. the whole city was in the hands of the revolutionaries without a shot having been fired, the white [rebel] flag was flying everywhere, guards with white badges on their sleeves were patrolling the streets to keep order, and the excitement of the morning subsided as quickly as it had arisen.32
The discrepancies are a salutary reminder of the dangers of eyewitness testimony, decades after the event.33 Yet Mao's overblown description is hardly to be wondered at. As an excited teenager, he had been present at one of the defining moments of modern Chinese history. As a communist leader years later, his memories were of what the day should have been, rather than what it was.
The Governor and most of his senior aides escaped. But the militia commander, whom the soldiers blamed for confiscating their ammunition, was led off to the East Gate and beheaded. Several other officials were executed near the yamen, their ‘gory heads and trunks’ left lying in the street.34
Both in Wuchang, where the civilian revolutionary leaders were thrown into disarray by the raid on Sun Wu's bomb factory, and in Changsha, where their plans had been delayed by the Governor's countermeasures, the driving force behind the uprisings consisted of radical non-commissioned officers and rank-and-file troops. Once victory had been achieved, there was considerable confusion over who should head the new revolutionary order.
In Hubei, a brigade commander, Li Yuanhong, who had initially opposed the mutiny, agreed reluctantly to be sworn in as Military Governor.35 The same day he issued a proclamation renaming the country the Republic of China, little guessing that less than six months later, he would become Vice-President in Beijing and, eventually, Head of State.
The situation in Changsha was more complicated. Within hours of the uprising, the flamboyant young leader of the Hunan branch of the Forward Together Society, Jiao Dafeng, was proclaimed Military Governor, with a leading member of the city's reformist elite, Tan Yankai, as his civil counterpart.36 A dashing figure, who rode through the streets on horseback to wild acclamations from the populace, Jiao had close ties with Hunan's secret societies. Their leaders flocked to the provincial capital to help him consolidate his power (and to share the spoils of victory), turning the Governor's yamen, in the words of one contemporary source, into ‘a sort of bandits’ lair’.37
This was not what Changsha's reformist gentry had anticipated. Four days after the uprising, Consul Giles reported that tensions within the ruling group had reached such a pitch that ‘revolvers were drawn and bayonets fixed’.38 Then Jiao made the fatal error of sending his own loyal units to help the revolutionaries at Wuchang. On October 31, Jiao's deputy was ambushed outside the North Gate and decapitated, whereupon, in the consul's words, ‘the soldiers rushed into the city with his head and killed Jiao in his yamen’.39 Jiao Dafeng was twenty-five years old. He had been Governor for just nine days.
Mao saw the two men's bodies lying in the street. Years later, he would remember their deaths as an object lesson in the perils of revolutionary enterprise. ‘They were not bad men,’ he said, ‘and [they] had some revolutionary intentions.’ They were killed, he added, because ‘they were poor and represented the interests of the oppressed. The landlords and merchants were dissatisfied with them.’40 It was not quite that simple. Jiao's regime was too short-lived for anyone to have known what his policies might have been. But certainly the provincial elite saw him as a threat. His successor, the reformist Tan Yankai, who was sworn in as Governor later the same day, was one of their own, a Hanlin scholar from an eminent gentry family.
The situation in Changsha, and in the Yangtse Valley as a whole, remained extremely volatile. A pathetic edict, issued in the name of the six-year-old Emperor, declared:
The whole Empire is seething. The minds of the people are perturbed … All these things are my own fault. Hereby I announce to the world that I swear to reform … [In] Hubei and Hunan … the soldiers and people are innocent. If they return to their allegiance, I will excuse the past. Being a very small person standing at the head of my subjects, I see that my heritage is nearly falling to the ground. I regret my fault and repent greatly.41
Early in November, rumours swept Hong Kong that Beijing had fallen and the imperial family been taken prisoner, provoking ‘extraordinary scenes of enthusiasm’. It proved to be untrue, but residents in the capital reported that they were in ‘a state of siege’ and cannon were being mounted on the walls of the Forbidden City. Then came news, immediately denied, that the Emperor had fled to Manchuria.42 Yet at the same time there were signs that the Empire was fighting back. Only four provincial capitals were firmly in revolutionary hands.43 Troops loyal to the Throne counter-attacked at Hankou using German-made incendiary shells, and most of the Chinese city was burned to the ground. Soon afterwards, imperial forces seized Nanjing. Any Chinese found without a queue was summarily executed. Students who, like Mao, had sheared them off earlier in the year, now hid in terror.44
With the outcome apparently hanging in the balance, Mao revived his earlier plan to join the revolutionary forces. A student army had been organised but, considering that its role was unclear, he decided to enlist instead in a unit of regular troops.45 Many others were doing the same. Recruitment in Hunan in the first weeks of the revolution exceeded 50,000.46 Given the prevailing uncertainty and the violence being meted out to the losers, it was an act of no little courage. Many of the new recruits were being sent to Hankou, where the revolutionaries were under fierce attack from imperial army units. One foreign resident described the fighting there as ‘possibly the bloodiest … that has yet taken place. Day and night now for four days the battle has been raging … The slaughter on both sides is terrific.’47 Even for those, like Mao, who remained in Changsha, life under martial law was brutal and often perilously short. Consul Giles reported: ‘Brawls are continually taking place, either among the soldiers themselves or between them and the civilians … One man alleged to be a Manchu spy was hacked to pieces in the street by the soldiery. His head was then cut off and borne to the Governor's yamen. Another man was triced up on to a sort of triangle … and riddled with bullets.’48
There were attempts at mutiny, and on one occasion Mao's regiment was called out to prevent several thousand rebellious troops from entering the city.49 A senior Chinese commander complained that the men were totally without discipline
: ‘They regard destruction as meritorious action and disorder as correct conduct. Insolence is equated with equality and coercion with freedom.’50 As anarchy loomed, the American Legation in Beijing ordered its citizens to leave Hunan until stability was restored.
The company to which Mao belonged was quartered at the Court of Justice, which had been set up in the former provincial assembly building. The new recruits spent much of their time doing chores for the officers and fetching water from the Sand Spring by the South Gate.51 Many were illiterate, ‘chair-bearers, ruffians and beggars’, whose idea of soldiering was to assume the poses of military figures in traditional Chinese opera, as one contemporary source witheringly put it.52 Mao made himself popular by writing letters for them. ‘I knew something about books,’ he said later, ‘and they respected my “great learning”’. For the first time in his life he came into contact with workers, two of whom, a miner and an ironsmith, he particularly liked.53
But there were limits to his revolutionary zeal. ‘Being a student,’ he explained, ‘[I] could not condescend to carrying [water]’, as the other soldiers did. Instead, he paid pedlars to carry it for him, demonstrating precisely the same scholarly elitism that he would spend his later years condemning. ‘I felt that intellectuals were the only clean people in the world … I did not mind wearing the clothes of other intellectuals … but I would not wear clothes belonging to a worker or peasant, believing them to be dirty.’ Some of the men in his regiment vowed to take a reduced monthly food allowance of two silver dollars until the revolution triumphed,54 but Mao took the full seven dollars. After paying for food and water-carrying, he spent whatever was left on newspapers, of which he became an avid reader, a habit that he retained all his life.
In early December, two events occurred which signalled the end of Manchu resistance. Imperial troops abandoned Nanjing, their last major southern stronghold. And Yuan Shikai, former Viceroy of Zhili and the leading military power-broker in north China, whom the Court had summoned to act as interim Premier, approved a ceasefire at Wuchang.
In Changsha, the news provoked another orgy of forcible queue-cutting, this time carried out by troops. The British consul, Bertram Giles, was outraged:
I protested strongly [to] … the authorities, [telling them] that one of the first duties of a government was to preserve the public peace, and that if they allowed the soldiery to commit assault wholesale with impunity, then they could no longer lay claim to the title of Government but were merely an anarchical faction.55
Others, with a better sense of humour, saw the farcical side:
Farmers and peasants … came in from the countryside to the city gates, carrying their huge loads of rice or vegetables, or trundling their heavy wheelbarrows. The guards rushed out, seized every man's queue, and hacked it off with a sword or clipped it off with huge scissors. For many a man it was like parting with a limb to lose the queue which he had brushed and braided so painstakingly since early boyhood. We saw some of them on their knees, kowtowing to the guards as they pled for respite. Others actually fought the soldiers and many tried to run away … But before the week was out, all the city-dwellers and many of the villagers of central China were largely rid of this mark of Manchu control.56
Ever wary of the winds of political change, many at first kept a false queue coiled under their turbans, ready to let down should the Manchus return. But that was not to be. On New Year's Day, 1912, the veteran revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen, was sworn in at Nanjing as China's first President. To mark the occasion, the authorities in Changsha held a military parade: ‘Bugles were blown, flags were waved, bands played and the soldiers sang lustily … Every shop displayed a coloured flag. Two border strips of red with a central strip of yellow.’57 There was talk of sending an expeditionary force to Beijing to make Yuan Shikai and the northern military accept Sun's leadership, and mass meetings were held to oppose Yuan's nomination as Head of State. But, as Mao remembered it, ‘just as the Hunanese were preparing to move into action, Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai came to an agreement, the scheduled war was called off.’58 On February 12, the Emperor abdicated, and two days later Sun stepped down in Yuan's favour.
Mao remained in the army until the spring. Then the cost of maintaining the swollen ranks of the revolutionary forces imposed wholesale demobilisation.59 ‘Thinking the revolution was over,’ Mao said later, ‘I … decided to return to my books. I had been a soldier for half a year.’60
CHAPTER THREE
Lords of Misrule
For a few glorious months, China abandoned itself to a turbulent confusion of new fashions, new ideas, new enthusiasms and new hopes, as the dead hand of dynastic orthodoxy was suddenly thrown off. Hunan's new Governor, Tan Yankai, was by his own lights a liberal, opposed equally to imperialism and to centralised control by Beijing. Under his regime, opium-growing was stopped and importation of the drug prohibited. New, independent courts were established in every district. For a time, a free press was permitted, to the dismay of the British consul, who protested vehemently at its outbursts against the Powers. The provincial administration encouraged the development of local industry to try to check the outflow of funds abroad, and the education budget tripled, financed partly by punitive land taxes imposed on conservative gentry families regarded as pro-Manchu. ‘Modern schools sprang up like bamboo shoots after the spring rain,’ Mao remembered.1 So did wine-shops, theatres and brothels.2 Even foreigners in Changsha caught the spirit of the times. ‘The new men really do want to be good rulers,’ one wrote, ‘[and] they have on the whole done very well.’3
As always in periods of revolutionary flux, the first changes were symbolic. Teenage girls started to bob their hair and to appear in public unchaperoned. Their mothers timidly approached foreign doctors to ask whether anything could be done for their crippled lily feet.4 The demise of the queue opened an exotic new world for shaven Chinese heads. ‘People are wearing billycocks, bishop's hats, blue velveteen jockey caps, anything they can lay their hands on,’ commented one bemused correspondent. ‘The old red turban with its round button [has been] … forbidden by revolutionary law, for the button was the mark of honour under the Manchu rule … Felt hats, cotton hats, abound, but the funniest sight of all is to see a company drilled by a captain wearing a silk top hat.’5
Bizarre and confused it may have been, but it spoke of a sea change in the public mood. Large numbers of Chinese for the first time began to question traditional values and behaviour. The slow accretion of foreign influences, kept at bay by the conservative gentry who took their cue from the Court, abruptly became a flood, which in the course of the next decade would provoke an intellectual ferment unmatched in Chinese history.
To Mao, eighteen years old and newly demobilised, it was a time of muddle, uncertainty and endless possibilities, which he seized with all the naive optimism of youth:
I did not know exactly what I wanted to do. An advertisement for a police school caught my eye and I registered for entrance to it. Before I was examined, however, I read an advertisement of a soap-making ‘school’. No tuition was required, board was furnished and a small salary was promised. It was an attractive and inspiring advertisement. It told of the great social benefits of soap-making, how it would enrich the country and enrich the people. I changed my mind about the police school and decided to become a soap-maker. I paid my [silver] dollar registration fee here also.
Meanwhile a friend of mine had become a law student and he urged me to enter his school. I also read an alluring advertisement of this law school, which promised many wonderful things. It promised to teach students all about law in three years and guaranteed that at the end of this time they would instantly become mandarins … I wrote to my family, repeated all the promises of the advertisement and asked them to send me tuition money …
Another friend counselled me that the country was in economic war and what was most needed were economists who could build up the nation's economy. His argument prevailed and I spent another dollar to
register in [a] commercial middle school … I actually enrolled there and was accepted … [But then] I read [an advertisement] describing the charms of a higher commercial public school … I decided it would be better to become a commercial expert there, paid my dollar and registered.6
The higher commercial school turned out to be a disaster. Although his father, pleased that he had finally seen sense and was embarking on a potentially profitable business career, provided his tuition fees readily enough, Mao discovered that most of the courses were taught in English, of which he knew little more than the alphabet. After a month, he left in disgust.
The next of what he would later call these ‘scholastic adventures’ took him to the First Provincial Middle School, a large, well-respected establishment which specialised in Chinese literature and history. He came top in the entrance exam, and for a while it seemed he had found what he was looking for. But after a few months he left this school, too, citing its ‘limited curriculum’ and ‘objectionable regulations’, and instead spent the autumn and winter of 1912 studying on his own in the city's newly opened public library. By his own account he was ‘very regular and conscientious’, arriving each morning as it opened, pausing just long enough to buy two rice-cakes for lunch, and staying until the reading room closed for the night. In later life, he described the time he spent there as ‘extremely valuable’. But his father thought otherwise and after six months cut off his allowance.
Having no money concentrates the mind. Like generations of students before and since, Mao was forced, as he put it, to begin ‘thinking seriously of a “career”’. He thought of becoming a teacher, and in the spring of 1913 saw an advertisement for a training college, the Hunan Fourth Provincial Normal School:
I read with interest of its advantages: no tuition [fees] required, and cheap board and cheap lodging. Two of my friends were also urging me to enter. They wanted my help in preparing entrance essays. I wrote of my intention to my family and I received their consent. I composed essays for my two friends and wrote one of my own. All were accepted – in reality, therefore, I was accepted three times … [After this] I … managed to resist the appeals of all future advertising.