by Philip Short
The society was one of the first of many progressive student associations formed in China at that time – among them the Fu she (Renaissance Society), in Beijing; and the Juewu she (Awakening Society), founded by Zhou Enlai in Tianjin – as patriotic young people sought a response to the depredations of the warlords and the pressures of the imperialist Powers. One of Mao's classmates, Luo Xuezan, explained in a letter to his family that summer:
You should know that the foreigners want to take China's land, they want to take China's money and they want to harm China's people … I can't live with that prospect and do nothing about it. So now … [we are] trying to set up an association … [which will work] to make China strong, so that the Chinese people can find a new way. Our aim is to look forward to the day of China's resurrection.133
The very name, New People's Study Society, reflected the transition through which the country was passing. Xinmin has a dual meaning – ‘new people’, or ‘renovate the people’ – which gives it a radical, almost revolutionary consonance. Liang Qichao had used it in the title of his reformist journal, Xinmin congbao (New People's Magazine), fifteen years before. But it was also a classical term,134 found in the Confucian texts. To ‘renovate the people’ was the Confucian scholar's duty.
Ambivalence towards China's classical heritage was a hallmark of the time.
At the evening school which Mao had helped to organise, the pupils bowed each night three times before a portrait of the Sage.135 Yet he, and others of his generation, were increasingly critical of orthodox Confucian virtues.136 ‘Our country's three bonds must go,’ he wrote in the summer of 1917, referring to the three relations which were at the core of Confucian morality, between prince and minister, father and son, and husband and wife.137 He denounced ‘the churches, the capitalists, monarchy and the state’ as ‘the four evil demons of the world’,138 and urged ‘a fundamental change’ in national attitudes.139
But where others simply rejected the past, Mao sought a synthesis that would reconcile the traditional dialectic of the country's ancient ways of thought with Western radicalism. The vision that resulted was astonishingly modern:
All phenomena in the world are simply a state of constant change … The birth of this is necessarily the death of that, and the death of that is necessarily the birth of this, so birth is not birth and death is not destruction …
I used to worry that our China would be destroyed, but now I know that this is not so. Through the establishment of a new political system, and a change in the national character, the German states became the German Reich … The only question is how the changes should be carried out. I believe that there must be a complete transformation, like matter that takes form after destruction, or like the infant born out of its mother's womb … In every century, various nationalities have launched various kinds of great revolutions, periodically cleansing the old and infusing it with the new, all of which are great changes involving life and death, formation and demise. The demise of the universe is similar … I very much look forward to its destruction, because from the demise of the old universe will come a new universe, and will it not be better than the old universe? …
I say: the concept is reality, the finite is the infinite, the temporal senses are the super-temporal senses, imagination is thought, form is substance, I am the universe, life is death and death is life, the present is the past and the future, the past and the future are the present, small is big, the yang is the yin, up is down, dirty is clean, male is female, and thick is thin. In essence, the many are one, and change is permanence.
I am the most exalted person, and also the most unworthy person.140
Those words, written at the age of twenty-four, eerily foreshadowed events half a century later, when Mao, at the apex of his power, would unleash a continuous revolution of wrenching, convulsive change to bend the thinking of a quarter of humanity to conform to his will, when instability would indeed become permanent and harmony, struggle.
Achieving the ‘complete transformation’ of China and maintaining the momentum of the dialectic which was destined to bring it about were to be the overriding goals of Mao's political life. He knew already that it could not be done piecemeal. A guiding ideology would be required:
Those who wish to move the world must move the world's hearts and minds, [and] … to move people's hearts one must have great ultimate principles. Today's reforms all begin with minor details such as the parliament, the constitution, the presidency, the cabinet, military affairs, business and education – these are all side issues … Without ultimate principles, such details are merely superfluous … For the ultimate principles are the truths of the universe … Today, if we appeal to the hearts of all under heaven on the basis of great ultimate principles, can any of them fail to be moved? And if all the hearts in the realm are moved, is there anything that cannot be achieved?141
What such principles might be was another matter. But to Mao and his idealistic little group of graduates, contemplating the benighted rule of Zhang Jingyao, it must have been clear they would not be found in Changsha. Early in May 1918, Luo Zhanglong, one of the six founder members of Mao's original study circle, set out for Japan.142 Mao's old teacher, Professor Yang, who was now in Beijing, wrote with news of a programme to help Chinese students to go to France. In June, the members of the New People's Study Society decided to send Cai Hesen to the capital to find out more.143 Two months later, Mao followed with a group of twenty others. Before leaving, he visited his mother in Xiangxiang and reassured her, disingenuously: ‘Sightseeing is the only aim of our trip, nothing else.’144
CHAPTER FOUR
A Ferment of ‘Isms’
‘Beijing is like a crucible’, Mao wrote, ‘in which one cannot but be transformed.’1 As the train drew slowly past its massive grey-brick walls, beside the crenellated battlements of the Tartar City, antique symbol of China's departed power and glory, to come to a halt in the new Western-style railway station, symbol of its need for foreign techniques and ideas, the young provincial student from the south entered a world in political and intellectual ferment. He would emerge from it, seven months later, with very different notions of how China should be saved.
Even before he left Changsha, Mao had serious doubts as to whether he wanted to go with the others to France. One difficulty was money. Although he could raise the 200 yuan for the boat fare, he told a friend, he could not get the additional hundred yuan he would need for language training. Language, in fact, seems to have been the nub of the problem: Mao struggled to master English all his life, and though eventually he learned to read with the help of a dictionary, speaking it was completely beyond him. French, he evidently concluded, was bound to be still worse. His ear for language was so poor that even mandarin lessons were a trial, and to the end of his days he conserved a thick Hunanese brogue which fellow provincials immediately identified as the speech of a Xiangtan man. There were other considerations, too. Mao still saw his future as a teacher. ‘Of course, going [for language training] is one thing to do,’ he conceded, ‘but it is not as beneficial as engaging in education … Education is inherently superior.’ He also persuaded himself that it was important that not all the leaders of the New People's Study Society leave China at the same time. If Cai Hesen and Xiao Yu went to France, he reasoned, he should stay behind to ensure that the society continued to promote reform. Yet had language not been such an insurmountable obstacle, the other factors might not have loomed as large.2
Talking later to Edgar Snow, he put a different gloss on it. ‘I felt that I did not know enough about my own country, and that my time could be more profitably spent in China,’ he said. ‘I had other plans.’3
Professor Yang, in whose house Mao and Xiao Yu stayed for a time after their arrival in Beijing, provided a letter of introduction to the university librarian, Li Dazhao, who found him a job as an assistant.4 Li was only five years older than Mao, but his intellectual status and national prominence set him a generation apart. A
well-built, dignified man, with piercing eyes and a bristling black moustache, whose small wire-rimmed spectacles made him look like a Chinese Bakunin, Li had recently joined Chen Duxiu, the head of the Department of Letters, as co-editor of Mao's favourite magazine, New Youth. Working in such surroundings, in a room beside Li's office in the south-east tower of the old university library, not far from the Forbidden City, should have been everything Mao could have wished for. He had obtained, he told his family proudly, ‘a position … as a staff member of Beijing University’.5 It sounded wonderful. But the reality was a crushing disappointment:
My office was so low that people avoided me. One of my tasks was to register the names of people who came to read newspapers, but to most of them I didn't exist as a human being. Among those who came to read, I recognised the names of famous leaders of the [Chinese] ‘renaissance’ movement, men … in whom I was intensely interested. I tried to begin conversations with them on political and cultural subjects, but they were very busy men. They had no time to listen to an assistant librarian speaking southern dialect.6
In the winter of 1918, Mao was once again a small fish in a very big pond. In his reminiscences, nearly twenty years later, one can still sense a lingering resentment. When he tried to ask a question after a lecture by Hu Shi, who had pioneered the use of the vernacular in literature and was then completing his seminal Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy, the great man, two years Mao's senior, discovering that his questioner was not a student but a mere library assistant, brushed him aside.7 Younger student leaders like Fu Sinian, soon to found the Xin chao (New Tide) Society, the most influential of the Beijing University reform groups, were equally distant.8
To compound his problems, life in the capital was expensive and the eight silver dollars a month he was paid – half the wage of a rickshaw coolie – covered only the barest necessities. With Xiao Yu and six other Hunanese students, he rented a room in a traditional grey-tiled Beijing house, a single-storey dwelling built around the four sides of a small courtyard, about two miles from the university, in the Sanyanjing (Three Eyes Well) area near Xidan, a bustling commercial street west of the Forbidden City. It had no running water and no electric light. The eight young men possessed between them only one warm coat, which meant that in the coldest weather, when the temperature fell to 10 degrees below freezing, they had to take turns to go out. There was a small pot-bellied Chinese stove for cooking, but they had no money to buy the compacted blocks of coal dust and clay which were used to heat the kang – the traditional northern brick bed, covered with felt, with a brazier underneath – and at night they huddled together for warmth. ‘When we were all packed fast on the kang, there was scarcely room enough for any of us to breathe,’ Mao recollected. ‘I used to have to warn people on either side of me whenever I wanted to turn over.’9
Gradually, however, he began to find his way in the city. One of those who encouraged him was Shao Piaoping, a writer who headed the Journalism Research Society, whom Mao remembered, years afterwards, as ‘a liberal, and a man of fervent idealism and fine character’.10 Li Dazhao took him to a preparatory meeting where there was discussion of establishing a Marxist Study Society and he became a member of a patriotic association called Young China.11 There he was introduced to Chen Duxiu, whose insistence on the total transformation of traditional Chinese culture as a prerequisite to modernisation influenced him, he said later, ‘perhaps more than anyone else’.12 Young men of Mao's generation at that time viewed Chen's role in China as comparable to that of Tolstoy in Russia.13 ‘We regard Mr Chen as a bright star in the world of thought,’ he wrote later. ‘Anyone with a reasonably clear mind assents to the opinions he expresses.’14 Mao also attended meetings of the Philosophy Society, and he and his companions immersed themselves in the ‘latest new theories’ being aired in the discussion groups and magazines that sprang up all over the campus that winter and the following spring.15
Like other educated young Chinese, Mao was still ‘looking for a road’,16 bewildered yet fascinated by a cornucopia of Chinese and Western ideas which alternately reinforced and contradicted each other: ‘My mind was a curious mixture of ideas of liberalism, democratic reformism, and utopian socialism,’ he recalled. ‘I had somewhat vague passions about “nineteenth-century democracy”, utopianism and old-fashioned liberalism, and I was definitely anti-imperialist and anti-militarist.’17
The utopianism came from Jiang Kanghu, the anarchist-influenced leader of the Chinese Socialist Party, whose writings Mao had first encountered as a soldier during the 1911 revolution in Changsha; and from Kang Youwei, who had tried to unite the materialist universality of Euclidian mathematics with traditional Chinese idealism, picturing a realm of Great Harmony in which the family and the nation would wither away and the citizens of the world would live in self-governing economic communities without distinction of race or sex.18 At one point, carried away by such notions, Mao himself imagined a time when ‘all under heaven will become sages … We may destroy all secular laws, breathe the air of harmony and drink the waves of a crystal clear sea.’19 A few months later, he pulled himself up: ‘I am sure that once we entered [such a world],’ he wrote, ‘competition and friction would inevitably break forth.’20 Yet the visionary in Mao never quite let go of Kang's romantic, utopian dreaming. There would always be a part of him that longed to be a sage-king, free, as he put it, to roam ‘a heaven-made world, wishing to share his celestial transformation with all living beings.’21
From Liang Qichao he drew the conviction that no new order could be built unless the old were destroyed. Adam Smith, Huxley and Spencer furnished what he termed his ‘old-fashioned liberalism’, while the Ming philosopher and strategist, Wang Yangming, inspired him to link man to society, theory to practice, knowledge to will, and thought to action. From the Hunanese Ming patriot, Wang Fuzhi, came the image of a world in constant flux, in which the mutability of things, driven by the dialectical contradictions inherent in the material world, was the basic principle moving history forward.22
Mao's assimilation of these men's ideas was not uncritical. He tried to weigh each proposition before approving or rejecting it, and often embraced a concept only to discard it a few months later.23 In the process, he strove for an approach to politics which, in his own words, combined ‘the clarity that comes from introspection and … the knowledge that come from observing the outside world’.24
The goal was to find a unifying doctrine that would weld these disparate elements into a coherent whole.
Marxism was not his first choice. In 1918, none of Marx's works, or Lenin's, was available in Chinese translation. That spring, an account of the Bolshevik Revolution had appeared in a small Shanghai anarchist magazine.25 But its circulation was limited, and in November, when Li Dazhao published in New Youth the first substantial article on the subject in Chinese, the topic was so unfamiliar that the printer at one point transliterated ‘Bolshevism’ as ‘Hohenzollern’. Even Li, despite his enthusiastic assertion that ‘the world of tomorrow … will assuredly belong to the Red flag’, did not seem very sure what the new Bolshevik Party really represented. ‘What kind of ideology is it?’ he asked. ‘It is very difficult to explain it clearly in one sentence.’ None the less, he told his readers, it was clear that the Bolsheviks were revolutionary socialists who followed the doctrines of ‘the German economist, Marx’, and aimed to destroy national boundaries and the capitalist system of production.26
Mao must have read this article, but it does not seem to have made much impression on him and he never referred to it subsequently. Instead, he was drawn to anarchism, which at that time was being vigorously promoted by Chinese exile groups in Paris and Tokyo. Its attraction lay in its rejection of authority, which resonated with Young China's attempts to break free from the stifling conventions of the Confucian family system, and its vision of social change engendering a new era of peace and harmony. The work-study programme to send young Chinese to France, in which Mao and his New Peop
le's Study Society were participating, had been established by Chinese anarchists. When educated Chinese talked of ‘social revolution’, it was usually anarchism, not Marxism, that they had in mind.27 Even Li Dazhao's chiliastic description of Bolshevism as an ‘irresistible tide’, ushering in the dawn of freedom, was couched in anarchist terms. ‘There will be no congress, no parliament, no prime minister, no cabinet, no legislature and no ruler,’ he had written. ‘There will be only the joint soviets of labour, which … will unite the proletariat of the world and create global freedom … This is the new doctrine of the twentieth-century revolution.’28 Right up to the early 1920s, Chinese Marxists and anarchists continued to view each other as siblings in the same socialist family, fighting the same battle by different means.
Under the influence of its radical chancellor, Cai Yuanpei, Beijing University became a major centre of anarchist activity.29 Classes were offered in Esperanto, the anarchists’ chosen language for their new frontier-free world. Students secretly circulated copies of the Fuhuzhi (Collected Essays on Tiger Taming) by Liu Shifu, founder of the quaintly named Huiming xueshe, the Society of Cocks Crowing in the Dark, which advocated ‘communism, anti-militarism, syndicalism, anti-religion, anti-family, vegetarianism, and international language and universal harmony’.30