The first of these was a strike by construction workers and carpenters, who hitherto had been organized along traditional guild lines. At the site of the Hunan Self-Study University in Changsha, Mao got to know some of the carpenters repairing the old buildings. He talked to them about their labor contracts and their pay scales, and persuaded one of the carpenters to join the Communist Party. The choice was a good one, and the chosen carpenter turned out to be a natural leader and a brilliant organizer. Working along with Mao, who had been given the sonorous title by the Party of “Secretary to the Hunan Of fice of the Secretariat of the Chinese Labor Organization,” in September and October 1922 the carpenter led a series of rallies, demonstrations, and work stoppages that brought a major raise in the workers’ basic hourly wages.
Another strike, in November 1922, came from the lead-type compositors and printers, who had formed their own union in 1920 but had later split apart along the lines of their specific skills—lithographers, press operators, printers, and typesetters. That Mao was now well known in Changsha for his organizational skills but was not yet perceived to be a dangerous radical can be seen from the fact that in the settlement of the strike that followed, he was called in by the newspaper proprietors as a “mediator.” In this role, and with the strong solidarity of the workers behind him, he was instrumental in gaining virtually all of their demands.
In one of the careful synopses of current politics, replete with facts and figures that had become his hallmark, Mao estimated that by early 1923 there were twenty-three major workers’ organizations in Hunan, with a membership of around 30,000 workers. In the same period there had been ten strikes, involving a total of 22,250 workers, of which nine were “victorious or semi-victorious.” In addition to the two above, Mao included in his list of workers’ organizations miners (in coal, zinc, and lead mines), railway employees, machine-shop operators, mint workers, garment workers, silk factory employees, electrical workers, barbers, boot- and shoemakers, and rickshaw pullers. Mao himself had been involved in the strategic planning of several of these other strikes, some of which had been led and directed by his former Changsha schoolmates, now returned from their work-study experience in France (where sev eral of them had already joined the Communist Youth League or the Communist Party). Mao’s two younger brothers were also active in strike work, one as the organizer of a consumer cooperative in the collieries, and the other in the workers’ club at the lead mines. And Mao’s wife, Yang Kaihui—though pregnant with their first child—had been working among the peasants who lived near the areas where the miners had been on strike, helping to push for women’s rights and better educational facilities. It was an impressive record.
The world of Hunanese activism, however, was not the center of Communist Party politics as a whole. Under instructions from the Comintern, and with Maring still in China to see that the orders were followed, the Chinese Communist Party was being pushed into an alliance with Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang Nationalist Party. Mao was almost certainly among the Communists who found this a dangerous policy: he was learning that workers were building up their own solidarity against the forces of the bourgeoisie, and even against the foreigners, though the antagonism of the militarists—who could be the most savage of strikebreakers—was unpredictable and had already wreaked havoc in Hunan. Also, as an early member of the Party, it was hardly up to him to protest publicly. Chen Duxiu, however, whom Mao had so long admired, had no such inhibitions. Chen listed a number of reasons for his opposition to Maring’s plans that the Communists should join with the Nationalists, such as the completely different aims and policies of the two parties, and the fact that the Nationalist Guomindang was cooperating actively with the United States and northern warlords, as well as corrupt pro-Japanese politicians, so that to join them would drive all the youth away from their “faith” in the Communist Party. Chen added that the Nationalists had no tolerance for the ideas of new members and “used lies as power.”
The Second Communist Party Congress, at which these and other crucial issues concerning the role of the proletariat in the current struggle were discussed, had convened in Shanghai from July 16 to 23, 1922. Presumably Mao was invited to be there, since he had attended the First Congress, and had been serving ever since as head of the Hunan labor secretariat, with success. Yet he missed the meetings altogether. The only explanation that he ever gave, many years later, was a curious and incomplete one: “I forgot the name of the place where it was to be held, could not find any comrades, and missed it” It is certainly true that on some earlier occasions Mao had admitted to being somewhat scatterbrained—he once told a correspondent that he had lost his letter in the middle of reading it—but the explanation remains strange. Mao knew Shanghai fairly well by this time, after three visits of which two were fairly lengthy, and had many Party contacts. On the other hand, one could argue, Shanghai was a huge city subdivided into many subsections, including two international settlements; Yang Kaihui was five months pregnant; he had been overworked for a long time; and several other delegates also missed the meeting, including Li Dazhao and the whole Canton delegation. The twelve delegates attending reached enough consensus about the need for a Communist alliance with the bourgeoisie to issue a statement agreeing that they would cooperate with Sun Yat-sen and other Guomindang Nationalist Party leaders.
There were various reasons for this decision, besides Party loyalty to the dictates from Moscow. A massive strike of seamen in Hong Kong in which the Nationalist organizers had been active had ended triumphantly for the workers in May 1922, raising the Guomindang’s prestige as an inherently revolutionary organization. Despite the strike successes the Communist Party itself was still dangerously small: the twelve delegates in 1922 represented a total China-wide Communist membership of 195, a fourfold increase from the year before but hardly an overwhelming number. Besides, of the 195, only around thirty were workers. Also, the Communist Party in China had almost no money whatever. Most of the members had no jobs or other sources of income. Expenses for the central organs of the party during the fall and winter of 1921 to 1922 had totaled 17,500 Chinese dollars, of which the Comintern provided 16,665 dollars. The projected budget for the following year was all expected to come from the same Comintern sources. However, it was only after another special meeting, convened by Maring at Hangzhou in August 1922, that it was made mandatory for all Communists to join the Guomindang Nationalist Party, as what was called “a bloc within.” Many of the Communist leaders joined right away, including Li Dazhao and even Chen Duxiu, despite the earlier misgivings. Mao, however, seems to have delayed joining the Nationalist Party until early in 1923. Perhaps the final spur for him was the savage suppression in February 1923 of the railway workers’ union by a northern warlord in whose progressive potential the Communist Party had once believed. Many workers were killed, and the union leader was publicly beheaded. Clearly the dangers confronting the workers from militarists were nationwide, and Hunan was no different from anywhere else. By the summer of 1923, Mao was definitely a member of the Nationalist Party. Yet despite this new alliance, growth for the Communists continued to be slow and difficult, with the Party membership climbing only up to 420 by June 1923, of whom 37 were women, 164 were workers, and 10 were in jail.
Mao’s career trajectory now began to change, as he was caught up in the swirl of official political business. Though Yang Kaihui was pregnant again by the spring of 1923, Mao had to leave home in June to attend the Third Congress of the Communist Party. This one was held in Canton—Mac did not get lost, though he had not visited the city before—and he dutifully endorsed the declarations concerning alliance with the Guomindang. At this congress Mao was elected to the Communist Party’s ruling Central Executive Committee, and named head of the Party’s organization department. Though a major advancement, the latter post had its problems for family life, as Mao had to proceed to Shanghai, which he reached in July. The news from Changsha was alarming. A new militarist clamped his hold over the city
, new levels of violence erupted in Hunan, many schools were closed, and several of the unions Mao himself had helped to found the year before were suppressed. Dramatically reversing the position on Hunan’s independence he had taken not so long before, Mao as a Party spokesman now wrote, “We have always opposed a federation of self-governing provinces,” on the grounds that it would simply be “a federation of military governors in their separatist regimes.”
In September, Mao left Shanghai to rejoin his wife and reached Changsha on September 16, 1923. There he found two major armies drawn up facing each other along the Xiang River, and was so nervous for his family that he routed his political correspondence via a private courier and asked his political contacts to write to him under an assumed name. Mao also found he could not afford the new tasks that had fallen on his shoulders. He told his contacts in the Nationalist Party that he would need at least 100 Chinese dollars each month to run the operation they envisioned in Changsha, and to rent the necessary office space. It was in these rather dispiriting circumstances that Yang Kaihui and Mao’s second child was born, sometime in November 1923—another boy, whom they named Anqing.
Mao stayed with Yang Kaihui through December, skipping the Communist Central Executive Committee’s meeting that he should have attended in Shanghai. Instead, he sent the committee a pessimistic report on the Hunan situation. Mao noted in the report that peasant organizations—formerly reaching up to ten thousand members in the area south of Changsha—led by the Socialist Youth League, had been crushed, partly because of an extremist policy of “economic agitation” that alienated even the moderately prosperous middle peasants, and partly because of counterforce from the militarist’s troops. Only fourteen people had joined the Communist Party in Changsha during the previous four months, and another thirty or so in strike centers outside the city. Widespread closure of Changsha’s factories due to the incessant warfare had impoverished the workers, and the workers’ clubs had all closed down or become totally inactive.
But even if Party leaders had excused Mao’s absence in December, new orders from the Comintern to forge a United Front with the Guomindang made it imperative for him to attend the first National Guomindang Congress, scheduled for January 1924 in Canton. Mao must have felt he had no choice but to go. Yang Kaihui, though a Communist Party member herself, clearly felt it was Mao’s duty to stay with her and the two children, now aged fourteen months and one month, trapped in a war-torn city. Though there are no surviving personal letters between Mao and Yang, Mao had kept his love of Chinese poetry ever since his schooldays, and used poems to express his private emotions to his close friends. It is a poem to Yang Kaihui, dating from December 1923, which, despite its formal meter and cross-references to other poems from the classical canon, gives us the clearest view of their tangled emotions at this intensely difficult moment in their lives:Waving farewell, I set off on my journey.
The desolate glances we give each other make things
worse,
Yet again emphasizing our bitter feelings.
Eyes and brows reflect your tension,
As you hold back hot tears that seek to flow.
I know you have misunderstood our past exchanges;
What drifts before our eyes are clouds and fog,
Even though we thought none knew each other as well
as you and I.
When people feel such pain,
Does Heaven know?
At dawn today, thick frost on the way to East Gate,
A fading moon and half the sky reflected in our patch of
pond—
Both echo our desolation.
The sound of the train’s whistle cuts straight through
me.
From this time on I’ll be everywhere alone.
I’m begging you to sever these tangled ties of emotion.
I myself would like to be a rootless wanderer,
And have nothing more to do with lovers’ whispers.
The mountains are about to tumble down.
Clouds dash across the sky.
January 1924 in Canton was frenetic for Mao. He took an active part in the key political debates, became familiar with the new figures in the political scene, and showed an ability to concentrate a discussion and bring it to a vote in an effective yet consensus-building way. After the congress, Mao was elected an alternate member of the Guomindang’s own Central Executive Committee, and he attended four successive meetings of the Guomindang Central Party Bureau, again making substantive suggestions on funding and administrative procedures. From February through the fall of 1924, Mao was stationed in Shanghai, working both in senior Guomindang positions (where he also kept the minutes) and in his Communist Party positions; much of his work centered on making the United Front a reality, by defining the role that members of each party should play in the proceedings of the other, a delicate and demanding job, and one with dangers of misapprehension by both sides. In June 1924, Yang Kaihui came to join him in Shanghai, at least for a time. (They had a nanny now, to help them with the two children.)
By July, Mao was growing convinced that the Guomindang alliance with the Communists might not be tenable much longer, and with Chen Duxiu he cosigned a position paper to the Communists, urging them to consider the contingency of withdrawing. The Guomindang right wing was gaining ground, they argued, and intent on placating the militarists and the merchants by suppressing movements of the workers and peasants. Mao signed a second important circular on September 10, concerning warlords in central China, and a third in November on party work and policies toward Sun Yat-sen. Then suddenly, in December, Mao pulled out altogether and went home to Changsha. In February 1925 he traveled deeper into the countryside, back to his native village of Shaoshan in Xiangtan county. For almost a year he attended no meetings of either political party, and was dropped from his important committees one by one.
Mao told his Communist superiors that he was exhausted, and there is no need to doubt it. He also, one may assume, wanted to spend time with his family. A third reason—though where to place it in terms of the other two is unclear—was that he wanted to work with the peasants on his own former home turf, where he knew their ways and their dialects, their tragedies and their hopes. A corollary to that reason would be that Mao wanted to build a base of his own, in a region and among people he trusted and understood. Even though, in a rather abstract way, the Comintern and the Communist Party (and even the Guomindang) had espoused the cause of peasant liberation with various degrees of rhetoric, those pronouncements were no substitute for trying to understand rural China on the ground that one knew best. Elsewhere in China, especially on the southeast coast, a few other pioneers had embarked on the formation of peasant associations and cooperatives or had begun to push for some release from harsh tenantry terms, or even for redistribution of land. Yang Kaihui may have shared this interest, and certainly there had been several experiments in Hunan—their extent, as well as their collapse, had been reported by Mao (in absentia) to the Communist Central Executive Committee in late 1923.
During this time, Mao did not write about his experiences in the countryside, and his usual spate of journalistic reportage came to a complete halt. He seemed to have at last abandoned the roles of reporter and teacher that he had declared to be his lifelong ambitions back in 1921 at the New People’s Study Society meetings. The silence is complete from December 1924 through October 1925; but that October he returned to Guang zhou suddenly and took up work once again, this time in the Guomindang propaganda department. His pronouncements were once again in favor of the United Front, against imperialism and the militarists, and for the social revolution of the proletariat. In January 1926 he was asked to include his views on the peasantry within the context of a joint report to the Cuo mindang Congress, but there is still little indication of his recent thinking on the topic, or of his own experiences in Hunan. Then on February 14, 1926, Mao sent a brief note to the Guomindang secretariat stating that his “mental ailment
” had “increased in severity,” and requesting two weeks’ leave. His stand-in was to be Shen Yanbing (later, under the name Mao Dun, to be one of China’s most celebrated Communist writers).
Shen later noted that Mao took this brief leave to go back to Hunan to check on the potential of the peasant movement there. If that was accurate, it shows Mao’s “mental ailment” was a specious excuse, and his political focus beginning to coalesce. From this time forward, Mao’s rural activism manifested itself in numerous ways, starting with propaganda work for the Communists and the Guomindang, continuing with his summaries of the role of the Chinese peasants in various revolutionary settings of the past, and on to his own return to teaching, this time as the director of the classes in the Peasant Training Institute between May and September 1926, in which role his passions for exposition and research could be combined. Mao’s field notes from one of his research trips back to his birthplace of Xiangtan county in 1926 show his amazing grasp of detail: in assessing a peasant family budget he calculated not only land acreage and usury rates but also the price and use of lard, salt, lamp oil, tea, seed, and fertilizer, as well as costs and maintenance of draft animals and farm tools. (He subdivided hoes into three categories according to their weight and cost.) Firewood and fuel, clothing and home weaving, winnowing fans and rice sifters—nothing was unimportant to Mao.
This period of Mao’s deepening interest in recording—and ultimately changing—the realities of rural China overlapped with momentous changes in Chinese politics. The United Front of the Communists and the Guomindang seemed to be working, and to hold firm even after Sun Yat-sen’s death from cancer in 1925. Massive popular movements against foreign imperialism in China came into being in mid-1925, sparked in part by the shooting of civilian Chinese demonstrators by British forces seeking to protect foreign lives and property. Workers began to take a prominent part in politics, and Communist Party membership expanded dramatically: still under a thousand in early 1925, the Communist Party had expanded to over 57,000 members by the spring of 1927.
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