Mao
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4. Pantsov and Levine, p. 13.
5. The main source of information about Mao's home life during his childhood is his own account given to Edgar Snow in the summer of 1936, when he was 42 years old (Snow, Red Star over China [rev. edn], London, Pelican Books, 1972, pp. 151–62). Secondary sources include the books by the Xiao brothers, who became Mao's close friends when he was in his early twenties (Emi Siao, Mao Tse-tung; and Siao [Xiao] Yu, Mao Tse-tung and I were Beggars, Syracuse University Press, New York, 1959). Those parts of Xiao Yu's book dealing with Mao's earliest years appear to be largely fictional. The semi-official biography by Li Rui (The Early Revolutionary Activities of Comrade Mao Tse-tung, M. E. Sharpe, White Plains, NY, 1977) in so far as it deals with Mao's childhood is based on Mao's reminiscences to Snow.
6. He also used the courtesy name Yichang (ibid., p. 12). Edgar Snow, in Red Star over China (Victor Gollancz, 1937), transliterated his father's name as Jen-sheng (in the Wade-Giles system, or Rensheng in pinyin). In the revised edition of Snow's book (Penguin, 1972, p. 152), the name Shun-sheng is added in brackets. Shunsheng appears on Mao's father's tombstone, which dates from the 1950s. The error may well have arisen because in Hunanese dialect the two characters Ren and Shun are pronounced similarly.
7. Xiangtan county was at this time among the most productive in Hunan, itself the third richest rice-growing province in China (McDonald, Angus W., Jnr, The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978, pp. 7 and 275).
8. Yang Zhongmei, Hu Yaobang: a Chinese biography, M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York, 1988, p. 5.
9. The house had an additional wing, comprising a further three rooms, which were occupied by the family of the labourer Mao's father employed.
10. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese dollar, or yuan, fluctuated in value between 50 US cents and 1.4 US dollars, depending on the price of silver.
On the basis of Mao's figures, the family had a cash income from farming of at least 50 silver dollars a year when they owned two-and-a-half acres of land (25 piculs of surplus rice, at 2,000 cash a picul) and, subsequently, more. In a year of shortage, when prices rose, they probably earned two to three times that amount. This was supplemented by the profits from his father's rice-trading, and interest paid on the mortgages he bought.
11. Mao came close to acknowledging this when he told Red Guard leaders in July 1968: ‘My father was bad. If he were alive today he should be [struggled against].’ (Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought, pt II (JPRS-61269-2], Joint Publications Research Service, Arlington, VA, February 1974, p. 389).
12. O'Sullivan, Mortimer, ‘Report of a Journey of Exploration in Hunan from 14th December 1897 to March 1898’ Shanghai, North China Herald Office, 1898, p. 4. Other sources suggest the population was about 300,000.
13. Quan Yanchi, Mao Zedong: Man not God, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1992, pp. 90–4.
14. Dr Zhisui Li in the 1960s (Private Life of Chairman Mao, pp. 77 and 103) and Edgar Snow in the 1930s both noted that he had ‘the personal habits of a peasant’ (Red Star over China, pp. 112–13). His former bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, described him as ‘a rustic’ (Quan Yanchi, p. 90).
15. Little, Archibald J., Through the Yang-tse Gorges, or Trade and Travel in Western China [3rd edn], London, 1898, pp. 167–8.
16. Li Zhisui, pp. ix, 100 and 107. Li Yinqiao confirms Mao's aversion to washing, stating that he used soap only ‘to remove grease or inkstains from his hands’ (Quan Yanchi, p. 96). See also Siao Yu, pp. 85–6, 152 and 257.
17. Quan Yanchi, p. 65; Siao Yu, p. 86; Li Zhisui, p. 103.
18. Snow, pp. 112–13.
19. Quan Yanchi, pp. 111–12.
20. In Mao's own account of his early life (Snow, pp. 151–62), it is unclear whether his age is counted by the Western or the Chinese system (which adds a year). I have assumed the former. Six is the usual age at which peasant children start helping their parents.
21. Williams, S. Wells, The Middle Kingdom [rev. edn], New York, 1883, vol. 1, p. 525.
22. Macgowan, Rev. John, Lights and Shadows of Chinese Life, Shanghai, North China Daily News and Herald Press, 1909, pp. 57–8.
23. Williams, p. 544. Smith, Arthur H., Chinese Characteristics, Shanghai, 1890, p. 386.
24. Williams, p. 542: ‘Tradesmen, mechanics and country gentlemen … put their sons into shops or counting houses to learn the routine of business with a knowledge of figures and the style of letter-writing; they are not kept at school more than three or four years, unless they mean to compete in the examinations.’
25. Snow, pp. 153–6, 159.
26. Macgowan, pp. 59–63. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, p. 220, also notes that ‘great harshness is certainly common’ among schoolteachers.
27. Snow, p. 153.
28. Emi Siao, p. 15.
29. Chinese Repository, vol. 4, Canton, July 1835, pp. 105–18.
30. Macgowan, p. 64. Chinese Repository, 4, p. 105.
31. Smith, Arthur H., The School System of China, East of Asia, vol. 3, p. 4, Shanghai, 1904.
32. Williams, 1, pp. 526–7.
33. Ibid., p. 541. Macgowan, p. 66. Justus Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese, New York, 1865, p. 378.
34. Chinese Repository, 4, pp. 153–60, 229–43, 287–91, 344–53; 5, pp. 81–7, 305–16; 6, 185–8, 393–6, 562–8. Williams, pp. 527–41.
35. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, p. 323. Claude Cadart and Cheng Yingxiang, L'Envol du Communisme en Chine (Mémoires de Peng Shuzhi), Paris, 1983, pp. 14 and 36–7.
36. From the Three Character Classic (Chinese Repository, 4, p. 111).
For the duration of primary schooling, see Williams, 1, p. 541; Macgowan, p. 66; Cadart and Cheng, p. 37. Mao himself recalled that by the time he left the school he was already reading Water Margin and other popular historical romances (Snow, pp. 153–6).
37. Snow, p. 153.
38. Ibid., pp. 154 and 156.
39. From Odes for Children (Chinese Repository, 4, p. 288).
40. Snow, p. 156.
41. Sanziqing, Beijing, 1979 (mimeographed), lines 258–63. This translation is based on Chinese Repository, 4, p. 110.
42. Snow, p. 156.
43. Vsevolod Holubnychy, ‘Mao Tse-tung's Materialistic Dialectics’, CQ, 19, 1964, pp. 16–17.
44. Mao did not read a Marxist book until he was 26.
45. Professor Lucian Pye has based an entire book on the premise that Mao's character and behaviour throughout his adult life were decisively influenced by his feelings of abandonment on the birth of his younger brother. The argument is cleverly pursued, but fails to explain why every other firstborn child in China, deprived of maternal affection by the appearance of a sibling, did not also turn into a revolutionary leader (Pye, Lucian W., Mao Tse-tung: The Man in the Leader, Basic Books, New York, 1976). There is in fact no evidence that Mao was more affected by his brother's birth than any other normal child.
46. ‘Mao Zedong's funeral oration in honour of his mother’ (Oct. 8,1919), in Schram, Stuart R. (ed.), Mao's Road to Power, vol. 1: The Pre-Marxist Period: 1912–1920, New York, 1992, p. 419.
47. Chinese Repository, 6, pp. 130–42.
48. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, p. 202.
49. Snow, pp. 154–5.
50. The strongest evidence for this is Mao's statement that the only way to silence his father was to ensure that he could find nothing to criticise. The same thing is hinted at elsewhere; at one point Mao refers to his father's ‘favourite accusations’ against him, implying systematic fault-finding.
51. Pantsov and Levine, pp. 25–6.
52. ‘A daughter-in-law is regarded as a servant for the whole family, which is precisely her position, and in getting a servant it is obviously desirable to get one who is strong and well-grown’ (Smith, Chinese Characteristics, p. 292).
53. Williams, p. 787.
54. Snow, p. 172. Mao himself says simply, ‘My parents … married me.’ But marriage i
n China at that time consisted not of a single ceremony but of a whole series of steps, starting with an exchange of horoscopes and the choice of a propitious day, and continuing with exchanges of gifts and the payment, by the bridegroom's family, of the marriage portion. The couple were considered to be married only after the bride had moved into her parents-in-law's home, where she would now live, had sipped wine with her new husband and, together with him, had kowtowed to Heaven and Earth and to the ancestral tablets (ceremonies still practised in rural China in the 1990s). According to the Shaoshan Mao shi zupu [The Chronicle of the Shaoshan Mao Clan], Quanguo tushuguan wenxian sowei fuzhi zhongxin, Beijing, 2002, Vol 7, p. 387, Mao and Luo Yigu had a son named Yuanzhi who was raised by a family named Yang. No other evidence for the existence of such a child has been found, although the name is intriguing: Yuan was the root for given names of the 21st generation of the Mao clan, to which Zedong's children belonged. After the May Fourth movement, that tradition was abandoned and Mao's sons, born in the 1920s, all received given names with the root An.
55. Snow, p. 157.
56. Oral source, Shaoshan, May 1999; Pantsov and Levine, p. 27.
57. In June 1915, Mao told Xiao Yu that he had no particular desire to return home for the summer holiday (Schram, Mao's Road, 1, p. 62); Xiao himself, commenting on this incident, wrote that Mao ‘had no warm sentimental feeling for his home’ (Mao Tse-tung and I, p. 84). His mother fell ill the following year (Schram, 1, p. 92), and apparently returned to Xiangxiang in the autumn of 1917. By August 1918, Mao was writing to his maternal uncles: ‘I am deeply grateful that my mother has lived in your house for a long time.’ She came to Changsha for medical treatment in the summer of 1919 (Ibid., pp. 174 and 317).
58. Ibid., p. 317.
59. Snow, pp. 157 and 159–60. The school, in the neighbouring county of Xiangxiang, was officially classed as an ‘upper primary school’.
60. Ibid., p. 156.
61. Ibid., pp. 160, 168, 170 and 175.
62. O'Sullivan, p. 2.
63. NCH, April 22 1910.
64. O'Sullivan, p. 7.
65. Parsons, William B., ‘Hunan: the Closed Province of China’, in National Geographic Magazine, vol. XI, New York, 1900, pp. 393–400.
66. ‘Hunan: A Record of a Six Weeks’ Trip', NCH, June 12 and 19, July 3, 10 and 17, 1891.
67. O'Sullivan, p. 2; Hillman, Lt.-Com. H.E., RN, Report on the Navigation of Tung Ting Lake and the Siang and Yuan Rivers (Upper Yangtse) with descriptions of the three principal towns, Changsha, Siangtan, Chang Teh, in the province of Hunan, China, London, HMSO, 1902, p. 17. The unanimity of early Western writers about the character of the Hunanese and the contrast with other parts of China is striking.
68. Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, vol. 22, Paris, 1736, pp. ix et seq.
69. NCH, April 22 1910.
70. Sir Claude Macdonald, British Minister at Beijing, to the Zongli Yamen, 19 February 1898, quoted in Little, pp. xxi–xxiv.
71. Cadart and Cheng, pp. 28 and 50.
72. Ibid., pp. 42–3; Snow, p. 161. Tongluocun in Shaoyang county in Hunan, the home village of Peng Shuzhi, later one of Mao's colleagues in the CCP Politburo in the 1920s, was smaller and more remote than Shaoshan but apparently no worse informed. Unlike Mao, Peng recalls a proclamation of the Emperor's death being posted up within weeks.
73. Schram, Stuart R., Mao Tse-tung (rev. edn), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967, p. 21. Mao probably obtained this book from a cousin (Schram, Road to Power, 1, p. 59).
74. A small, private electricity plant, commissioned by the provincial Governor, functioned intermittently in Changsha from 1897. Telegraph service to Xiangtan was established the same year, despite strong opposition from conservative gentry who feared the poles would disrupt the fengshui, the geomantic harmony of wind and water. The first foreign steamer, the German tug Vorwaerts, reached Xiangtan in 1900. Mao may have heard rumours of the ‘foreign fireboat’, but he cannot have seen it until he first visited the city at the age of 17. Changsha had a telephone system by 1910; the railway came seven years later. (Preston, T. J., ‘Progress and Reform in Hunan Province’, East of Asia, vol. 4, pp. 210–19, Shanghai, 1905; NCH, April 29 1910, p. 249; Hillman, p. 3; O'Sullivan, pp. 6–7.)
75. Snow, pp. 156–7 and 159.
76. Ibid., p. 156.
77. Ibid., p. 158. Mao implies that the riots (of which he gives a somewhat distorted account) took place when he was about 14, in 1908. They were in fact two years later.
78. NCH, June 10 1910, p. 616; July 1 1910, pp. 23–4; Esherick, Joseph W., Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976, p. 130.
79. NCH, April 22 and 29 1910. A worker's monthly ration of 45 catties of rice then cost two silver dollars, at a time when the poorest labourers earned less than one silver dollar a month, from which they also had to feed their families.
80. Esherick, p. 126.
81. Report from Xiangtan, dated April 22, in NCH, May 6 1910. The same story was reported from Hankou (Wuhan), in NCH, April 29 1910. The best account of the riots is in Esherick, pp. 130–8. The incident involving the water-carrier's suicide is confirmed in contemporary reports from the Japanese consul in Changsha.
82. Esherick, p. 133.
83. NCH, April 29 1910.
84. NCH, May 6 1910.
85. NCH, April 29 and May 13, 1910.
86. Snow, p. 158.
87. Mao says this incident took place in Shaoshan (Ibid., pp. 158–9), but had a rebellion broken out in Mao's own small village, he would surely have described it differently. The North China Herald (June 17 and July 1 1910) reports what are apparently the same events as occurring at Huashi, in Xiangtan county, close to Liushan.
88. Snow, p. 159.
89. Ibid., p. 160.
90. Emi Siao, p. 18; and Xiao Yu, pp. 20–1.
91. Mao says simply, ‘I went to the school with my cousin and registered.’ Xiao Yu (pp. 21–6) gives a highly coloured account of Mao, arriving alone with a bundle of belongings on a carrying-pole and pleading with the headmaster to accept him, if only for a five-month trial period. A more credible explanation is that Mao arrived at the school in August 1909, when only five months of the school year remained. Mao himself says he entered the school at 16, which would date his arrival to the spring of 1910; but since, by his own account, he spent nearly two years there, it must have been earlier than that. Xiao Yu says Mao was 15 when he went there.
92. Xiao Yu's description of Mao's behaviour here has a ring of truth to it (pp. 27–30).
93. Snow, p. 161.
94. Ibid., pp. 161–2.
CHAPTER 2 REVOLUTION
1. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China, pp. 179–82; NCH, Oct. 14 1911, p. 105.
2. Esherick, pp. 153–5.
3. NCH, Oct. 21 1911, pp. 143 and 152.
4. Ibid., p. 143; The Times, London, Oct. 15 1911.
5. NCH, Nov. 11 1911, p. 354.
6. Ibid., Oct. 28 1911, p. 227.
7. The Times, London, Oct. 14 1911.
8. NCH, Oct. 14 1911, p. 103; Oct. 21, p. 143; and Nov. 11, p. 360 (on the hunting down of Manchu women at Yichang). The seriousness with which the Throne viewed the rising is reflected in the abject imperial edict issued on October 30 (NCH, Nov. 4, p. 289) and cited in Ch. 2.
9. Siao, Emi, Mao Tse-tung: His Childhood and Youth, p. 22. Mao himself claimed that he walked all the way to Changsha (Snow, Red Star over China, p. 163).
10. Snow, p. 163.
11. For accounts of early twentieth-century Changsha, see Hume, Edward H., Doctors East, Doctors West: An American Physician's Life in China, Allen & Unwin, London, 1949; Parsons, William B., An American Engineer in China, McClure, Phillips, New York, 1900; and Hobart, Alice Tisdale, The City of the Long Sand, Macmillan, New York, 1926. Further information appears in O'Sullivan, Mortimer, ‘Journey of Exploration’, and in Stokes, Anson Phelps, A Visit to Yale in China: June 1920, Yale Foreign Missionar
y Society, New Haven, 1920.
12. Dr Hume says ‘jinrickshas’ arrived in Changsha only after the 1911 revolution (p. 113). According to Stokes, they were still uncommon in 1920 (p. 6).
13. Hume, p. 98.
14. Snow, p. 163.
15. Esherick, pp. 141 and 162.
16. Mao, SW3, p. 73.
17. Snow, pp. 163–4.
18. Esherick, p. 162, quoting Minli bao, Jan. 4 1911.
19. Esherick, pp. 165–8; Snow, p. 164.
20. Schram, Mao's Road, 1, pp. 405–6 (Aug. 4 1919).
21. Hume, pp. 160 and 235.
22. Esherick, pp. 199–201.
23. NCH, Oct. 14 1911, p. 105; Oct. 21, pp. 144–5 and 152.
24. On October 12 the Japanese consul in Hankou reported that the telegraph lines to Changsha were ‘cut off’ (NCH, Oct. 14 1911, p. 104). On October 14 they were still ‘badly impaired’ (NCH, Oct. 21, p. 131).
25. NCH, Nov. 4 1911, p. 295.
26. Bertram Giles, Telegram no. 22 of Oct. 16 1911, F0228/1798, Public Records Office, London.
27. Esherick, p. 200.
28. Giles, Despatch no. 44 of Nov. 2 1911, F0228/1798.
29. Snow, pp. 164–5.
30. Esherick, p. 200; Giles, Despatch no. 44; NCH, Nov. 4 1911, p. 288.
31. Snow, p. 165.
32. Giles. Despatch no. 44.
33. See also Schram, Mao Tse-tung, p. 33.
34. Giles, Despatch no. 44. NCH, Nov. 4 1911, p. 288.
35. Esherick, pp. 182–6.
36. Ibid., pp. 204–10; McCord, Edward A., The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, pp. 74–6.
37. Esherick, pp. 58–65 and 155–7.
38. Giles, Despatch no. 44; see also Esherick, p. 209.
39. Giles, Despatch dated Nov. 17 1911, F0228/1798.
40. Snow, p. 166.
41. NCH, Nov. 4 1911, p. 289.
42. NCH, Nov. 11 1911, pp. 361–2, 364 and 366.
43. Up to the end of the first week in November, the revolutionaries had occupied Wuchang, Changsha, Xian (which fell the same day as Changsha) and Yunnan-fu. Fuzhou and Canton followed a week later.