Mao

by Philip Short

  But the question remained: which ‘ism’? Already, that July, sharp differences had emerged among the sixteen members of the group in France. At a meeting in Montargis, sixty miles south of Paris, where they had gone for language studies, Cai Hesen had argued that China needed a Russian-style revolution. Xiao Yu disagreed, proposing instead a moderate anarchist-inspired reform programme, similar to that which Mao had championed in the Xiang River Review a year earlier, based on education and mutual aid. The differences were papered over with a compromise that the society's guiding principle would be ‘to reform China and the world’.128 But afterwards Xiao and Cai wrote separately to Mao, setting out their rival positions. The main mission of socialism, Cai argued, was to destroy the capitalist economic system, using the dictatorship of the proletariat as its weapon:

  I don't think anarchism will work in the world today, because obviously there exist two antagonistic classes in this world. In overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, there is no way the reactionary classes can be suppressed save by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Russia is a clear illustration. Therefore I think that in the future reform of China … we must first organise a Communist Party, because it is the initiator, propagandist vanguard and operational headquarters of the revolutionary movement.129

  Cai was not alone in drawing this conclusion. In an article in New Youth that summer, Chen Duxiu called for ‘revolutionary means [to] be used to establish a state of the working class’.130

  In Changsha in September, Mao and Peng Huang, with the backing of a wealthy sympathiser in the provincial administration, set up a Russia Study Society,131 which, over the next three months, recruited more than a dozen young Hunanese, including such future communist luminaries as Ren Bishi and Peng Shuzhi, to go to Moscow to attend the newly established University of the Toilers of the East.132 It was headed by one of Chen Duxiu's friends, He Minfan, the principal of the Wang Fuzhi Academy, an old-fashioned literary scholar with a flowing white beard falling on to his formal silk gown, who had developed, somewhat improbably, a keen interest in socialism.133 Mao was listed as its secretary and was the moving force behind it.[Q3]

  A month later, He Minfan set up a Marxist Study Circle on the model of those established in Beijing and Shanghai by Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Besides himself and Mao, there were three other founding members: Peng Huang, He Shuheng and another teacher. Soon afterwards they began discussing the establishment of a Socialist Youth League branch.134 [Q4]

  Yet Mao was a reluctant convert. Where Cai Hesen understood at once that Bolshevism was the answer to China's problems, and embraced it enthusiastically, Mao came to it despite himself. ‘Cai is the theorist, Mao the realist’, their friends used to say. In the end, it was realism that led Mao to endorse what he called Russian ‘terrorist tactics’. It was, he told Cai, ‘a last resort’ after ‘other, better means’ – a reference to the self-government movement and the anarchist ‘new village’ experiment – had failed. ‘Russian-style revolution’ looked like being the only one that would work:135

  The Russian method represents a road newly discovered after all the other roads have turned out to be dead ends. This method alone has more potential than other methods of transformation … Social policy is no method at all, because all it does is patch up some leaks. Social democracy resorts to a parliament as its tool for transforming things, but in reality the laws passed by a parliament always protect the propertied class. Anarchism rejects all authority, and I fear that such a doctrine can never be realised. The moderate type of communism, such as the extreme freedom advocated by [Bertrand Russell], lets the capitalists run wild, and therefore it will never work either. The radical type of communism, or the ideology of the workers and the peasants, which employs the method of class dictatorship, can be expected to achieve results. Hence it is the best method to use.136

  The alternative, advocated by Xiao Yu, was to use ‘the method of education’, to persuade the bourgeoisie of the error of their ways, so that ‘it would not be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and bloody revolution’. In theory, Mao wrote in December, this would of course be best. But in practice it was not possible. ‘Historically no despot, imperialist or militarist, has ever stepped down of his own free will without waiting for people to overthrow him’:

  Education requires: (1) money, (2) people, and (3) institutions. In today's world, money is entirely in the hands of the capitalists. Those in charge of education are all either capitalists or the slaves of capitalists … If you teach capitalism to children, these children, when they grow up, will in turn teach capitalism to a second generation of children. If education has thus fallen into the hands of the capitalists, it is because they have ‘parliaments’ to pass laws protecting the capitalists and handicapping the proletariat. They have ‘governments’ to execute these laws and to enforce actively the advantages and prohibitions they contain. They have ‘armies’ and ‘police’ to provide passive guarantees for the safety and happiness of the capitalists and to repress the demands of the proletariat. They have ‘banks’ as their treasury to ensure the circulation of their wealth. They have factories, which are the instruments by which they monopolise the commodities produced. Consequently, unless the communists seize political power … how could they take charge of education? … That is why I believe the method of education is not feasible …137

  He concluded that Xiao Yu's view was untenable, and expressed ‘profound approbation for the views of [Cai] Hesen’. On New Year's Day, 1921, eighteen members of the New People's Study Society made their way through a snowstorm to a meeting at the Cultural Bookstore in Changsha, where, after two days’ discussion, they voted by a margin of twelve to three, with three members undecided, in favour of Bolshevism as the society's common goal.138 By now the Marxist Study Circle had been transformed into an embryonic ‘communist group’.139 On January 13, the Hunan branch of the Socialist Youth League, composed mainly of students and New People's Study Society members, held its inaugural meeting. From Shanghai, Mao had received copies of an underground journal, ‘Communist Party’ (Gongchandang), which Chen Duxiu's group had launched on November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and of a draft Party Manifesto, issued at about the same time. It called for common ownership of the means of production, the abolition of the state and the creation of a classless society, and declared:

  The instrument to defeat capitalism is class struggle … [The] task is to organise and concentrate the power of this class struggle and to make the force opposing capitalism stronger … The objective is to organise some large industrial associations … and also to organise a revolutionary, proletarian political party – the Communist Party. The Communist Party is to guide the revolutionary proletariat to fight against capitalists and to seize political power from them … Power will be placed in the hands of workers and peasants, just as the Russian Communist Party did in 1917.140

  A few days after the inauguration of the Youth League, Mao wrote to Cai Hesen, explicitly rejecting anarchism as a practical political doctrine, and endorsing Marx's ‘materialist conception of history’ as the philosophical basis for the new party they were planning to create.141 His conversion was complete.

  Mao's Marxism would always retain an anarchist tincture. But the long search for an ‘ism’ was over.

  *

  Becoming a Marxist was not the only change in Mao's life in 1920. His personal circumstances altered markedly too. As a student, he had been proverbially penniless, and remained so after he graduated. Much of the time he borrowed to get by, relying on the Confucian tradition of mutual aid, whereby friends who have money help those who have not (in the knowledge that one day the roles may be reversed, and they will be helped in turn). None the less, it was a precarious existence. He recounted, years later, how his much-vaunted sightseeing trip that spring had almost ended in disaster when he ran out of money soon after leaving Beijing:

  I did not know how I was to get any further. But as the
Chinese proverb says, ‘Heaven will not delay a traveller’, and a fortunate loan of 10 yuan from a fellow student … enabled me to buy a ticket as far as Pukou [not far from Shanghai] … On the way [I visited the classical sites] … But when I reached Pukou I was again without a copper … Nobody had any money to lend me; I did not know how I was to get out of town. But the worst of the tragedy happened when a thief stole my only pair of shoes! Ai-ya! What was I to do? But again, ‘Heaven will not delay a traveller’, and I had a very good piece of luck. Outside the railway station I met an old friend from Hunan, and he proved to be my ‘good angel’. He lent me money for a pair of shoes, and enough to buy a ticket to Shanghai.142

  In Shanghai, Mao was reduced to taking in washing to help pay for the room he shared with three Hunanese students. Doing washing was not so bad, he told friends, but he had to spend most of his earnings on tramcar fares in order to collect and deliver it.143

  Once back in Changsha, however, his fortunes improved dramatically. In September 1920 he was appointed principal of the primary school attached to First Normal, which gave him for the first time a regular, well-paid job, and a status that accorded with his increasingly influential role in provincial politics. It also made possible the second big change in Mao's life. That winter he married Yang Kaihui, the twenty-year-old daughter of his ethics professor at First Normal, Yang Changji, who had died in Beijing the previous January.144

  In the liberal circles in which Mao moved, relations between the sexes in China in the early part of the century were not that different from those in contemporary Europe or America. Like all Chinese cities, Changsha had its entertainment district, known as the ‘willow lane quarter’, where singing girls entertained the wealthy, and common prostitutes, the poor. As in Edwardian Britain or belle époque France, brothel-going attracted no social stigma. Indeed, so universal was the practice that every new radical group which claimed to have China's future at heart, from the anarchist ‘Six No's Society’, founded by Cai Yuanpei in 1912, to Mao's New People's Study Society, laid down as a condition of membership that those who joined must abstain from visiting prostitutes to show their moral commitment to the reformist cause.145

  There is an early hint of Mao's own attitude in a memorial poem for a schoolfriend, which he wrote in 1915 at the age of twenty-one: ‘Together we denounced the licentious, but how shall we purge the evil in ourselves?’ Two years later, he likened the heroic drive of great men to ‘the irresistible sexual desire for one's lover, a force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped’. Sex and food, he wrote then, were the two basic human instincts.146

  By his own account, Mao fell in love with Yang Kaihui during the winter of 1918, when he was working as an assistant librarian at Beijing University.147 But it appears that at that stage he had no opportunity to declare his feelings and in any case he was too shy. Meals at the professor's home, according to Xiao Yu, always took place in complete silence,148 and even in a liberal household it was not considered proper for young people of opposite sexes to be alone together. But from this time on, Mao's writings began to sound a more romantic note. ‘The power of the human need for love is greater than that of any other need,’ he proclaimed.149 ‘Unless people have yielded to the irresistible natural force of love, they either … start big rows [after marriage], turning the bedroom into a battlefield of deadly mutual hostility, or find themselves a world of secret amours “amid the mulberry fields of the Pu River.”’I

  The course of love, however, did not run smooth. Back in Changsha a year later he was smitten by another young woman, Tao Yi, who became his first serious girlfriend.150 She was an early member of the New People's Study Society, and their romance evidently lasted through most of the spring and summer of 1920, when they worked together in the Hunan self-government movement and on setting up the Cultural Book Society. Then they drifted apart, and in the autumn Mao was back courting Kaihui.151 He told her about Russia and this wonderful new idea called communism, and persuaded her to join the Youth League. His enthusiasm overcame their shyness. ‘I saw his heart,’ she wrote later, ‘and he saw mine’.152

  Cai Hesen and his girlfriend, Xiang Jingyu, had written in the meantime from Paris to say they had decided to flout convention, and instead of getting married, had concluded ‘a union based on love’. Mao was lost in admiration:

  I think we should regard Xiang and Cai as our leaders and organise an ‘Alliance for the Rejection of Marriage’ [he wrote]. Those who have marriage contracts should break them (I am opposed to humanism!). Those who do not have marriage contracts should not enter into them … I think that all those men and women who live under the marriage system are nothing but a ‘rape brigade’. I have long since proclaimed that I would not join this rape brigade.153

  Yet less than three months later, he did marry. Yang Kaihui's family no doubt insisted on it. For a professor's daughter to marry a peasant's son, even one who had become as prominent as Mao, was enough of a social gamble, without adding to it the opprobrium that in Changsha, far more than in France, would attach to an irregular union. In any case, the kind of marriage Mao railed against was the traditional one arranged by a matchmaker. To him, the criterion of marriage was that ‘the man and the woman both know in their hearts that they have a deep and mutual affection for each other’.154 The key to happiness was free choice.

  In the autumn of 1921, they moved into a small house in an area called Clearwater Pond, just outside Changsha's Small East Gate.155 For the next few years, perhaps for the only time in Mao's life, he had a truly happy family to come home to. His first son, Anying, was born in October 1922; the second, Anqing, in November 1923; the youngest, Anlong, in 1927. It was a surprisingly traditional Chinese household: his mother-in-law lived with them and Kaihui stayed at home with the children, while Mao roamed far and wide, working for the cause to which they were both now committed. As the years passed, the cause took over, and the family was left behind.

  I This has been a synonym for illicit love-affairs since ancient times. The phrase derives from a line in the Liji, or Book of Rites, which links debauchery on the banks of the Pu River with the ruin of the State of Wei.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Comintern Takes Charge

  On Friday, 3 June, 1921, the Lloyd Triestino steamer, the Acquila, docked at Shanghai after a six-week voyage from Venice. Among the passengers who disembarked was a Dutchman. Powerfully built, in his late thirties, with close-cropped dark hair and a swarthy moustache, he reminded those who met him of a Prussian army officer.1 He had had a trying journey. Even before he took ship, he had been arrested in Vienna, where he had gone to obtain a Chinese visa. A week later the Austrian police released him, but not before notifying the governments of all the countries for which he had entry permits in his passport. At Colombo, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong, the British posted police guards at the docks to prevent him going ashore. The Dutch Legation in Beijing asked the Chinese government to deny him entry too, but received no reply.2 Shanghai was a law unto itself, where Beijing's writ did not run. It was the soft, wet maw of China, which, with each new tide, sucked in the dispossessed, the ambitious and the criminal – ruined White Russian families, Red adventurers, Japanese spies, stateless intellectuals, scoundrels of every stripe – and sent out in return idealistic youths, seeking foreign learning in Tokyo and Paris. The Chinese called the city a ‘hot din of the senses’. To foreigners, it was ‘the Whore of the East’. The aesthete, Sir Harold Acton, remembered it as a place where ‘people had no idea how extraordinary they were; the extraordinary had become ordinary; the freakish commonplace’. Wallis Simpson was rumoured to have posed nude, with only a lifebelt round her, for a local photographer.

  Eugene O'Neill, accompanied by a Swedish masseuse, had a nervous breakdown in Shanghai. Aldous Huxley wrote of its ‘dense, rank, richly clotted life … nothing more intensely living can be imagined.’ The journalist, Xia Yan, saw ‘a city of 48-storey skyscrapers, built upon 24 layers of hell’.3

&nb
sp; Mr Andresen, as the Dutchman called himself, proceeded along the bund, past the towering, granite-built citadels of British capitalism – the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Customs House with its mosaic ceiling of Yangtse river junks, Jardine & Matheson, and the East Asiatic Company – past the park with its apocryphal sign, ‘Chinese and dogs not allowed’,4 past the Seamen's Hostel and Suzhou Creek, to take a room at the Oriental Hotel.5

  As he looked around him, at the pavements crowded with Chinese men, wearing long gowns and Panama hats; immaculately dressed taipans in chauffeur-driven sedans; nightclubs full of Eurasian taxi-dancers, where young expatriates caroused through the night; ragged coolies, glistening with sweat, straining at huge loads; the textile mills, in which women and children worked fourteen-hour shifts; and the filthy slums across the river, where this emerging new proletariat lived, he might have been forgiven for feeling a surge of missionary zeal. For Hendricus Sneevliet, to give him his real name, also known as Martin Ivanovich Bergman, Comrade Philipp, Monsieur Sentot, Joh van Son and Maring, amid a host of other aliases, was a missionary of a kind. He had been sent to China by Lenin as the first representative of the Comintern, the Communist International, to help the Chinese comrades organise a party which would give fraternal support to the Bolshevik leadership in ‘Mekka’, as he referred to Moscow, and help spread the worldwide revolution in which they all fervently believed.6

  Sneevliet was not the first Russian emissary to China. Initial contact had been made in January 1920. Then in April, with the Comintern's approval, Grigorii Voitinsky had been sent on a fact-finding visit by the Vladivostok branch of the Bolshevik party's Far Eastern Bureau. Its headquarters were at Chita (Verkhneudinsk), the capital of the Soviet Far Eastern Republic, a vast territory nominally independent from Moscow which extended from the Chinese border to southern Siberia. The Bureau engaged in constant turf battles with the Far Eastern Republic's Foreign Ministry, with the ‘Eastern People's Section’ of the Russian party's Siberian Bureau, based at Irkutsk, and occasionally, for good measure, with the Comintern itself. The result was that more than a dozen Russian agents, often at cross purposes with each other, were active in China that year, as well as a number of Korean communists, some of whom claimed to represent the Comintern and who were also divided among themselves. The Chinese were equally disorganised. Voitinsky found himself confronted by a range of Chinese claimants to Soviet support. Most were anarchists who saw the Comintern as a potential source of money and recognition. One such movement, the Great Unity Party (Datongdang), succeeded for a time in gaining acceptance by the Bureau in Vladivostok as an authentic ‘socialist, communist’ organisation. Another briefly existed as a Chinese branch of the Russian Communist Party. It was not until after Sneevliet's arrival that the Comintern, at its Third Congress in Moscow in June 1921, recognised Chen Duxiu's movement as the only legitimate communist force in China, rejecting the claims of four other self-proclaimed Chinese communist organisations. By then the Russians had got their own act together, having amalgamated the Chita and Vladivostok operations into the Comintern's Far Eastern Secretariat which replaced the ‘Eastern People's Section’ in Irkutsk.7