Mao

by Philip Short

  But Mao was still a long way from accepting Marxism as a doctrine. While at the beginning of June Chen was already on the point of setting up a ‘communist group’ in Shanghai,99 Mao was enthusiastically promoting the Japanese ‘New Village’ movement, which envisaged the establishment of communes based on Kropotkin-style mutual aid, shared resources, and work and study, as a first step towards the peaceful creation of a classless, anarchist society. Manual labour was compulsory, and to reduce the gap between town and country, and between students and society, members were required to go out among the peasantry to spread modern ideas, much as students in Russia were sent to the villages to spread Bolshevism.100

  That summer, after several such schemes had collapsed, in Beijing and elsewhere, Mao conceded that the communes were impractical.101 But he did not abandon the ‘New Village’ concept altogether: he would later found a ‘Self-study University’ in Changsha, based on the principles of communal living, whose members were pledged to teach, study, and ‘practice communism’. In July 1920 he set up a Cultural Book Society to disseminate in the province the new literature which the May Fourth movement had spawned.102 Once again, Marxism was not a major influence. The society sold more copies of Kropotkin, Hu Shi and John Dewey, than of Kautsky or Marx. Mao at that time considered Dewey, who taught that ‘education is life, school is society’, to be one of the ‘three great contemporary philosophers’, along with Bertrand Russell and the French thinker, Henri Bergson.103

  Years later, in Bao'an, Mao told Edgar Snow that by the summer of 1920, he considered himself a Marxist.104 That was untrue. He admitted to a friend at the time that he still did not know what to believe.105 Indeed, far from being a source of enlightenment, Mao's Marxism that summer was just another element of confusion. He castigated himself for not being better organised: ‘I am too emotional and have the weakness of being vehement,’ he confessed to one of his former teachers. ‘I cannot calm my mind down, and I have difficulty in persevering. It is also very hard for me to change. This is truly a most regrettable circumstance!’ He wished he had X-ray eyes, he went on, so that he could read more widely. ‘I would like very much to study philology, linguistics and Buddhism, but I have neither the books nor the leisure to study them, so I slack off and procrastinate … It is hard for me to live a disciplined life.’106

  The desire to study Buddhism may sound strange in a man of strong radical beliefs. But to Mao, in 1920, Chinese culture was still the foundation on which everything else had to be built and it would remain so for the rest of his life. Nor was that unusual.107 Others of his generation sought to ground Western ideas of socialism in the teachings of Mozi, a neglected fourth-century BC philosopher who had identified with the common people and preached universal love, and of Mencius, who had written of an ancient system of shared ownership of fields.

  Mao never repudiated the ideas of his youth. His thinking developed by accretion. The idealism he absorbed from Paulsen and Kant was overlain with the pragmatism of Dewey; the liberalism of John Stuart Mill with social Darwinism; Adam Smith with T. H. Huxley. Liang Qichao's constitutionalism gave place to the socialism of Jiang Kanghu and Sun Yat-sen. The utopianism of Kang Youwei prepared the way for anarchism and Marxism. All this ‘modern knowledge’ was buttressed by a classical inheritance – from Wang Yangming of the Ming to the Song neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi; from the great Tang essayist, Han Yu, to Qu Yuan of the Warring States – which itself was anchored in the bedrock of the traditional Chinese amalgam of Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism which Mao had absorbed in his childhood in the village schools of Shaoshan. Each layer subsumed the others. Nothing was ever lost.

  One result was a remarkable capacity, which grew more pronounced as Mao aged, for metaphor and lateral thinking. But more crucially, his approach to Marxism, when finally he embraced it, was coloured by other, very different intellectual traditions.

  The Cultural Book Society stocked, alongside anarchist texts, such determinedly traditional offerings as a repunctuated edition of Water Margin in classical Chinese.108 And in the spring of 1920, when Mao was finally able to do some of the sightseeing he had spoken of two years before, it was to the classical sites of antiquity that his footsteps first turned:

  I stopped at Qufu, and visited Confucius’ grave. I saw the small stream where Confucius’ disciples bathed their feet, and the little town where the sage lived as a child. He is supposed to have planted a famous tree near the historic temple dedicated to him, and I saw that. I also stopped by the river where Yan Hui, one of Confucius’ famous disciples, had once lived, and I saw the birthplace of Mencius. On this trip I climbed Taishan, the sacred mountain of Shandong, where General Feng Yuxiang retired and wrote his patriotic scrolls … I walked around Dongting lake, and I circled the wall of Baodingfu. I walked on the ice of the Gulf of Beihai. I walked around the wall of Xuzhou, famous in [the novel], The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and around Nanjing's wall, also famous in history … These seemed to me then achievements worth adding to my adventures …109

  As that account, sixteen years later, to Edgar Snow, made clear, to Mao the journey back through China's past was in its way as much an accomplishment as his journey into the new, foreign world of the ‘isms’ which held the key to China's future.

  *

  Well before Zhang Jingyao was forced to abandon the governorship of Hunan, a lively debate developed over how the province should be ruled once he went. The Republic of China, which Sun Yat-sen had founded, was now widely viewed as a failure. Since 1913, Hunan had been ruled by three northern warlords – ‘Butcher Tang, Fu the Tyrant and Zhang the Venomous’ – each worse than the one before. Tens of thousands of Hunanese had died in a futile civil war; hundreds of thousands had lost their homes. Among the provincial elite, the barbarism of the last two years had convinced conservatives and progressives alike that Hunan would be far better off under Hunanese control. From there it was but a small step to proposing that the province declare its independence – not just in words, but in fact – first from the government in Beijing and then from the rest of China. In 1920, the new watchwords were self-rule and self-government. The slogan, ‘Hunan for the Hunanese!’, resonated anew, and the old ‘independent kingdom’ mentality, on which nineteenth-century travellers had remarked, underwent a dramatic revival.

  Mao was initially sceptical. ‘I do not really understand just how we should [do this],’ he wrote in March of that year. ‘Since it is a province within China, it would not be easy for Hunan to establish its independence, unless the whole situation changes in future and our status becomes like that of an American or German state.’110

  But less than three weeks later he was won over, and joined Peng Huang in founding an ‘Association for Promoting Reform in Hunan’, based in Shanghai and subsidised by a group of wealthy Hunanese businessmen. The overthrow of Governor Zhang, he warned, risked being a ‘tiger's head with a snake's tail’ – a brave beginning not followed through. The ‘evil system’ itself had to be changed, or another warlord would take Zhang's place. But to change the system throughout China was not possible. The best approach, therefore, was to start in one local area, in this case, Hunan, applying the principle of self-determination, in the hope that it would become a model for other provinces to follow. Then, eventually, all would ‘join together in providing a general solution to the problems of the whole country.’111

  In June 1920, ten days after Zhang fell, Mao took these arguments a step further in a letter published in the Shanghai newspaper, Shenbao:

  From now on the essential things for us to do are … to abolish the military governorship, cut back the military forces, and … to build the people's rule … There is no hope of fully establishing people's rule in China within the next twenty years. [So] during this period, Hunan had best protect its own boundaries and implement its own self-rule … without bothering about the other provinces or the central government. Thus it can [become like] one of the [American] states … a hundred years ago … By bringing in
to full play the spirit of the people of Hunan, we can create a Hunanese civilisation within the territory of Hunan … For the past four thousand years, Chinese politics has always opted for grand outlines of large-scale projects with big methods. The result has been a country outwardly strong but inwardly weak; solid at the top but hollow at the bottom; high-sounding on the surface but senseless and corrupt underneath. Since the founding of the Republic, famous people and great men have talked loudly about the constitution, the parliament, the presidential system and the cabinet system. But the more noisily they talk, the bigger the mess they make. Why? Because they try to build on sand, and the edifice collapses even before it is completed. We want to narrow the scope and talk about self-rule and self-government in Hunan.112

  For the next two months, Hunanese of all social strata, from the peasantry in their burnt-out villages to the great merchants in the cities, were too busy trying to repair their shattered livelihoods after the  destruction wrought by Zhang's army to give much thought to politics. In July Mao returned to Shaoshan, where he spent several weeks with his brothers, looking after the affairs of the family which, as the eldest son, he now headed.113 In Changsha, Tan Yankai began, for the third time in his career, to piece together what had survived of the provincial administration. But he refused the now hated title of dujun, or Military Governor, preferring instead to be called ‘Commander-in-Chief’ of the forces which had liberated the city.

  Hunan was thus in name, and in fact, independent of Beijing's control, but the form of its future government was undecided. In late August, this issue was addressed by Xiong Xiling, a Hunanese scholar who had been Prime Minister in the early years of the Republic. He proposed that the new Governor be elected by a college composed of local assembly-men and members of educational and business associations.114 Counter-proposals followed, and when Mao returned to Changsha at the beginning of September, he found the debate once more in full swing. He immediately contributed an essay of his own, published in the Dagongbao. ‘A storm of change is rising throughout the entire world,’ he proclaimed; ‘the call for national self-determination echoes to the heavens.’ Hunan should become the first of ‘twenty-seven small Chinas’ which would break free from ‘foundationless big China’, inaugurating a process of change that would lead to a ‘thoroughgoing general revolution’ of new progressive forces.115

  Tan Yankai hesitated. Self-government would confer a broad-based legitimacy that would make his position less vulnerable to the ambitions of local military commanders. But he wanted to ensure that the deliberations remained firmly under his own control.

  In mid-September, therefore, Tan summoned a convention of gentry and officials to begin drafting a new constitution. When this was criticised as too narrow, he suggested giving the provincial assembly the task. To Mao, Peng Huang, and their ally, the Dagongbao editor, Long Jiangong, that was unacceptable, too. ‘If we want self-government,’ Long wrote, ‘we cannot rely on this small number of people from a special class … We must find salvation for ourselves! … We must throw off the snare of top-down rule!’ They proposed a constitutional convention, elected through universal suffrage by all the people of Hunan over the age of eighteen (or in one of Mao's early proposals, over fifteen).116

  A petition to this effect was approved at a public meeting Mao chaired on October 8, at which he urged his fellow townspeople not to let slip the chance the self-government movement was offering:

  Citizens of Changsha! … If you succeed, [the] 30 million people [of Hunan] will benefit. If you fail, 30 million people will suffer. You must know that your responsibility is not light. The political and social reforms of the Western countries all started with movements of the citizens. Not only did the great transformations in Russia … and other countries which have shocked the world recently originate with the citizens, but even in the Middle Ages it was the citizens alone who wrested the status of ‘freemen’ from the autocrats … Citizens! Arise! The creation of Hunan's future golden age is being decided now.117

  Two days later, on the Chinese Republic's National Day, a huge demonstration wound its way in pouring rain through the narrow streets of the old inner city, banners flying and bands playing, to the Governor's yamen, where a copy was presented to Tan.118 The North China Herald reported at length on the event under the headline, ‘Provincial Home Rule in China: Every Province its Own Master’:

  The document was the work of three gentlemen: Mr Long [Jiangong], the editor of the Dagongbao; Mr Mao [Zedong] of the First Normal School; and Mr Peng [Huang], a bookseller … Of the 430 [signatories] … about 30 [were said to] be connected with the press of the city; perhaps 200 were teachers or men of the scholar class; about 150 [were] merchants, and, say, 50 [were] working men. It is interesting that not only were working men invited to sign but that representatives of their class stood side by side with some of the most cultured men in the city as members of the deputation of 15 which took the document to the governor … There can be no doubt that the eyes of China are fixed on Hunan at this juncture. Hunan has a chance that [other provinces] have not … If Hunan does act, its example will spread.119

  But even as the petition was delivered, Tan was having second thoughts. As the campaign had gathered pace, it had grown more radical. The petitioners wanted a political system based on ‘democracy and socialism’, and had hinted that if they did not get it ‘a bloody revolution’ might ensue. In his articles in the Dagongbao, Mao had stated explicitly that their object was not to have ‘one Hunanese’ – in other words, Tan – rule Hunan, ‘[for then] the ruler is made master and those he rules are made slaves’; the aim was ‘rule by the people’.

  In fact, this was largely rhetoric. Mao himself conceded that, in a country where 90 per cent of the population was illiterate, a mass-based Leninist-style revolution to ‘make a clean sweep of the reactionary parties and wash away the upper and middle classes’ was not possible. The best that could be hoped for was to create a movement of the educated elite, to ‘push things forward’ from the outside.120

  But even with those caveats, conservatives were alarmed. ‘Hunanese civilisation’ was one thing; ‘people's rule’ was quite another.

  During the National Day march, a group of demonstrators, disregarding the organisers’ warnings against disorderly conduct, had climbed on to the roof of the provincial assembly building – symbol of elitist rule – and, amid cheers and ribaldry from below, ripped down the Assembly's flag.121 The following day, Tan seized on this incident as proof that the kind of popular self-government the radicals were advocating was unworkable, and announced that he was withdrawing his support.

  The movement then collapsed. On November 1, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, both of whom were then visiting China, addressed a conference in Changsha on constitutional issues, in which Mao also took part. But no conclusion was reached. A few weeks later, Tan was repaid for his timidity when a local army commander, Zhao Hengti, overthrew him in just the kind of military power-play he had been hoping a popular mandate would prevent.122

  Zhao ordered the drafting of a provincial constitution of his own, which was published the following April and promulgated in January 1922. But it was only a pale shadow of the ‘total self-rule’ that Mao and his friends had been fighting for.123 For a time Zhao maintained friendly relations with the southern government in Canton, and became known as a leading proponent of federalism in China. In reality, however, one warlord had replaced another, as Mao had warned might happen. Zhao continued as Governor until 1926, when he was overthrown in his turn by another rebellious military officer.

  To Mao, the failure of the independence movement was a grievous disappointment. All his efforts over the past year, he told friends, had been ‘to no avail’. The Hunanese had shown themselves to be ‘muddle-headed, with neither ideals nor long-term plans. In political circles, they are lethargic and extremely corrupt, and we can say that there is absolutely no hope for political reform.’ It was time to start afresh, he wrote, to ‘car
ve out a new path’.124

  Characteristically, this provoked a feverish bout of soul-searching, as he reproached himself for everything from emotional shortcomings to lack of progress in his studies.125 But instinctively he felt the way ahead lay through the New People's Study Society, which had languished during the campaign against Zhang, and whose future role and activities were now the subject of intense debate.

  What was needed, Mao believed, was a ‘dedicated group of comrades’, sharing common goals, who would combine their intellectual resources to work out a joint strategy for thoroughgoing reform. They should work quietly behind the scenes, without ‘seeking for vain glory or trying to cut a figure’, and should ‘absolutely not jump on the political stage to [try to] grasp control’. Secondly, in order to ‘overthrow and sweep away the old order’, it was necessary to mobilise ‘the people of the whole country, not [just] a few bureaucrats, politicians and military men’. An ‘ism’ – any ‘ism’ – required a movement to put it into effect, and the movement, in turn, required a broad popular base.126 As Mao put it in a letter to his friend Luo Zhanglong in November 1920:

  We really must create a powerful new atmosphere … To [do this] naturally requires a group of hard-working and resolute people, but even more than that it requires an ism that everyone holds in common. Without an ism, the atmosphere cannot be created. I think our study society should not merely be a gathering of people bound by sentiment; it must become a group of people bound together by an ism. An ism is like a banner; only when it is raised will the people have something to hope for and know in which direction to go.127