by Jung Chang
In this and other conversations, Mao poured scorn on his fellow Chinese. “The nature of the people of the country is inertia,” he said. “They worship hypocrisy, are content with being slaves, and narrow-minded.” This was a common enough sentiment among the educated at the time, when people were casting around for explanations for why China had been so easily defeated by foreign powers and was trailing so badly in the modern world. But what Mao said next was uncommon extremism. “Mr. Mao also proposed burning all the collections of prose and poetry after the Tang and Sung dynasties in one go,” a friend wrote in his diary.
This is the first known occasion when Mao mentioned one theme that was to typify his rule — the destruction of Chinese culture. When he first said it in that moonlit monastery, it had not sounded totally outlandish. At that time of unprecedented personal and intellectual freedom, the freest moment in Chinese history, everything that had been taken for granted was questioned, and what had been viewed as wrong proclaimed as right. Should there be countries? Families? Marriage? Private property? Nothing was too outrageous, too shocking, or unsayable.
IT WAS IN THIS ENVIRONMENT that Mao’s views on morals took shape. In the winter of 1917–18, still a student as he turned twenty-four, he wrote extensive commentaries on a book called A System of Ethics, by a minor late-nineteenth-century German philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen. In these notes, Mao expressed the central elements in his own character, which stayed consistent for the remaining six decades of his life and defined his rule.
Mao’s attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, “I,” above everything else: “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others … People like me want to … satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.”
Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. “People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.” “I am responsible only for the reality that I know,” he wrote, “and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don’t know about the past, I don’t know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.” He explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations. “Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself … I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.”
Mao did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally. A good name after death, he said, “cannot bring me any joy, because it belongs to the future and not to my own reality.” “People like me are not building achievements to leave for future generations.” Mao did not care what he left behind.
He argued that conscience could go to hell if it was in conflict with his impulses:
These two should be one and the same. All our actions … are driven by impulse, and the conscience that is wise goes along with this in every instance. Sometimes … conscience restrains impulses such as overeating or over-indulgence in sex. But conscience is only there to restrain, not oppose. And the restraint is for better completion of the impulse.
As conscience always implies some concern for other people, and is not a corollary of hedonism, Mao was rejecting the concept. His view was: “I do not think these [commands like ‘do not kill,’ ‘do not steal,’ and ‘do not slander’] have to do with conscience. I think they are only out of self-interest for self-preservation.” All considerations must “be purely calculation for oneself, and absolutely not for obeying external ethical codes, or for so-called feelings of responsibility …”
Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao’s outlook.
These attributes he held to be reserved for “Great Heroes”—a group to which he appointed himself. For this elite, he said:
Everything outside their nature, such as restrictions and constraints, must be swept away by the great strength in their nature … When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses, they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible. Their power is like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, and like a sex-maniac on heat and prowling for a lover … there is no way to stop them.
The other central element in his character which Mao spelled out now was the joy he took in upheaval and destruction. “Giant wars,” he wrote, “will last as long as heaven and earth and will never become extinct … The ideal of a world of Great Equality and Harmony [da tong, Confucian ideal society] is mistaken.” This was not just the prediction that a pessimist might make; it was Mao’s desideratum, which he asserted was what the population at large wished. “Long-lasting peace,” he claimed:
is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace … When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another … which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored … Human nature loves sudden swift changes.
MAO SIMPLY COLLAPSED the distinction between reading about stirring events and actually living through cataclysm. He ignored the fact that, for the overwhelming majority, war meant misery. He even articulated a cavalier attitude towards death:
Human beings are endowed with the sense of curiosity. Why should we treat death differently? Don’t we want to experience strange things? Death is the strangest thing, which you will never experience if you go on living … Some are afraid of it because the change comes too drastically. But I think this is the most wonderful thing: where else in this world can we find such a fantastic and drastic change?
Using a very royal “we,” Mao went on: “We love sailing on a sea of upheavals. To go from life to death is to experience the greatest upheaval. Isn’t it magnificent!” This might at first seem surreal, but when later tens of millions of Chinese were starved to death under his rule, Mao told his inner ruling circle it did not matter if people died — and even that death was to be celebrated. As so often, he applied his attitude only to other people, not to himself. Throughout his own life he was obsessed with finding ways to thwart death, doing everything he could to perfect his security and enhance his medical care.
When he came to the question “How do we change [China]?” Mao laid the utmost emphasis on destruction: “the country must be … destroyed and then reformed.” He extended this line not just to China but to the whole world — and even the universe: “This applies to the country, to the nation, and to mankind … The destruction of the universe is the same … People like me long for its destruction, because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better!”
These views, worded so clearly at the age of twenty-four, remained at the core of Mao’s thinking throughout his life. In 1918, he had little prospect of putting them into practice and they had no impact, though he seems to have been someone who made an impression. His teacher Yang Chang-chi wrote of him in his diary of 5 April 1915: “My student Mao Tse-tung said that … his … father was a peasant and is now turning into a merchant … And yet, he [Mao] is so fine and outstanding. Really hard to come by … As peasant stock often produces extraordinary talents, I encouraged him …” But Mao did not appear to have leadership qualities. Another teacher of his said later that he showed “no special talent for leadership” at school. When he tried to form a sort of club and put up notices, only a few people turned up and it did not come to anything. When a dozen friends formed a New People’s Study Society in April 1918, Mao was not elected its leader.
HE EVEN FOUND IT HARD to get a job after he graduated from the teacher-training college in June 1918. At the time, it was common for young graduates to aspire to go abroad to study. For those whose families could not afford to support them, as in Mao’s case, there was a scheme to go to France on a work-and-study program. France needed manpower after
losing so many young men in the First World War (one of the jobs Chinese laborers had been brought in to do was to remove corpses from the battlefields).
Some of Mao’s friends went to France. Mao did not. The prospect of physical labor put him off. And another factor seems to have played a part — the requirement to learn French. Mao was no good at languages, and all his life spoke only his own local dialect and not even the putonghua—“common speech”—that his own regime made its official language. In 1920, when going to Russia was in vogue, and Mao fancied going (he told a girlfriend “my mind is filled with happiness and hope” at the thought), he was deterred by having to learn Russian. He made a stab at it, taking lessons from a Russian émigré (and agent), Sergei Polevoy. But according to Polevoy the other students teased Mao when he could not even master the alphabet, and he left in a huff. Unlike many of his radical contemporaries, including most of the future Chinese Communist leaders, Mao went to neither France nor Russia.
Instead, after leaving the college, Mao borrowed some money and set out for Peking, the capital, to try his luck. Peking in 1918 was one of the most beautiful cities in the world, where in front of magnificent palaces camels strolled in the streets. The imperial gardens near where Mao took lodgings had just been opened to the public. When winter came, he and his friends — all southerners who had seldom seen snow or ice — would marvel at the frozen lakes, encircled by drooping willows heavy with icicles and wide-open winter plums.
But life in the capital was harsh. The great freedom and opportunities that modernization had introduced to China had brought little material advantage, and much of the country was still extremely poor. Mao stayed with seven other friends in three tiny rooms. Four of them squeezed onto one kang, a heated brick bed, under a single quilt, packed so tight that when one of them needed to turn, he had to warn the men on either side. Between the eight of them, they had only two coats, and had to take turns going out. As there was heating in the library, Mao went there to read in the evenings.
Mao got nowhere in Peking. For a while he found work as a junior librarian, earning 8 yuan a month — a living wage. One of his jobs was to record the names of people who came to read the newspapers, many of whom he recognized as leading intellectuals, but he made no great impression, and they paid him no attention. Mao felt snubbed, and he bore his grudges hard. He claimed later that “most of them did not treat me like a human being.” Less than six months after arriving, he left, so broke that he had to borrow money to travel home in stages. He returned to Changsha in April 1919, via Shanghai, where he saw his friends off to France. He had looked in from the outside at the intellectual and political life of cosmopolitan big cities, and now had to settle for a lowly job as a part-time history teacher in a primary school back in his home province.
Mao did not present himself as a model teacher. He was unkempt, and never seemed to change his clothes. His pupils remembered him disheveled, with holes in his socks, wearing home-made cotton shoes ready to fall apart. But at least he observed basic proprieties. Two years later, when he was teaching in another establishment, people complained about him being naked from the waist up. When asked to dress more decently, Mao retorted: “There wouldn’t be anything scandalous if I was stark naked. Consider yourself lucky I’m not completely naked.”
MAO HAD RETURNED to Changsha at a pivotal historical moment. At the time, there were a number of enclaves in China leased by foreign powers. These operated outside Chinese jurisdiction, with foreign gunboats often nearby to protect expatriates. Newly awakened public opinion in China demanded that these virtual mini-colonies be handed back. And yet, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which drew up the post — First World War settlement, and in which a Chinese delegation took part, allowed Japan to stay on in territory in Shandong which Japan had seized from Germany during the war. This infuriated nationalist sentiment. On 4 May 1919, for the first time in history, a big street demonstration took place in Peking, denouncing the government for “selling out,” and protesting against the Japanese holding on to Chinese territory. The movement ripped across China. Japanese goods were burned in cities and towns, and shops that sold them were attacked. Many Chinese were disappointed that a Republican government had not managed to obtain a better deal from foreign powers than its Manchu predecessor. The sentiment grew that something more radical must be done.
In Changsha, where there were now so many foreign interests that Japan, the US and Britain had opened consulates there, a militant student union was formed, which included teachers. Mao was actively involved as the editor of its magazine, the Xiang River Review. In the first number, he declared his radical views: “We must now doubt what we dared not doubt, employ methods we dared not employ.” It was a shoestring operation: Mao not only had to write most of the articles himself, in stifling heat, while bedbugs raced over the pile of soft-bound Chinese classics that formed his pillow, he had to sell the Review at street corners. Only five issues were published.
Mao continued to write occasional pieces in other journals. Among his output were ten articles dealing with women and the family. Mao was an advocate of women’s independence, free choice in marriage, and equality with men — views not uncommon among the radicals. These outpourings seem to have been inspired by the death on 5 October 1919 of his mother, whom he loved. He had been sending her prescriptions for her ailments, diphtheria and a lymph node condition, and had arranged for her to be brought to Changsha for treatment. There, in spring that year, she had her first and only photograph taken at the age of fifty-two, with her three sons, an image of inner peace. Mao wears an expression of quiet determination and aloofness. Unlike his two brothers, who are clad in farmers’ garments and look like gauche peasants, he has an air of grace in his long gown, the traditional attire for scholars and gentry.
In Mao’s relationship with his mother, while she seems to have shown unconditional love and indulgence for him, his treatment of her combined strong feelings with selfishness. In later life, he told one of his closest staff a revealing story: “When my mother was dying, I told her I could not bear to see her looking in agony. I wanted to keep a beautiful image of her, and told her I wanted to stay away for a while. My mother was a very understanding person, and she agreed. So the image of my mother in my mind has always been and still is today a healthy and beautiful one.” On her deathbed, the person who took priority in Mao’s consideration was himself, not his mother, nor did he hesitate to say so.
Less surprisingly, Mao treated his dying father coldly. Yi-chang died from typhoid on 23 January 1920, and before his death he longed to see his eldest son, but Mao stayed away, and showed no feeling of sadness for him.
In an article written on 21 November 1919, shortly after his mother’s death, and entitled “On Women’s Independence,” Mao claimed that “Women can do as much physical labour as men. It’s just that they can’t do such work during childbirth.” So his answer to “women’s independence” was that “women should prepare enough … before they marry so as to support themselves,” and even that “women should stockpile necessities for the period of childbirth themselves.” Evidently, as a man, Mao did not want to have to look after women. He wanted no responsibility towards them. Moreover, his insistence that women could manage the same kind of manual labor as men, which went against obvious reality, showed he felt little tenderness towards them. When he came to power, the core of his approach to women was to put them to heavy manual labor. In 1951 he penned his first inscription for Women’s Day, which went: “Unite to take part in production …”
AT THE END OF 1919, radical students and teachers in Hunan started a drive to oust the provincial warlord governor, whose name was Chang Ching-yao. Mao went with a delegation to lobby the central government in Peking, writing petitions and pamphlets on an altar in a Tibetan temple where he was staying. Although the delegation failed to achieve its goal, Mao was able as a leading Hunan radical to meet some famous personalities, including Hu Shih, a brilliant liberal figure,
and Li Ta-chao, a prominent Marxist.
But it was on his way back via Shanghai that Mao had the crucial encounter that was to change his life. In June 1920 he called on a Professor Chen Tu-hsiu, at the time China’s foremost Marxist intellectual, who was in the midst of forming a Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao had written a long article calling him “a bright star in the world of thought.” Aged forty, Chen was the undisputed leader of Chinese Marxists, a true believer, charismatic, with a volatile temper.
The idea of forming this Communist Party did not stem from the professor, nor from any other Chinese. It originated in Moscow. In 1919 the new Soviet government had set up the Communist International, the Comintern, to foment revolution and influence policy in Moscow’s interest around the world. In August, Moscow launched a huge secret program of action and subversion for China, starting a commitment of money, men and arms three decades long, which culminated in bringing the Communists under Mao to power in 1949—Soviet Russia’s most lasting triumph in foreign policy.
In January 1920 the Bolsheviks took Central Siberia and established an overland link with China. The Comintern sent a representative, Grigori Voitinsky, to China in April. In May it established a center in Shanghai, with a view, as another agent reported to Moscow, to “constructing a Chinese Party.” Voitinsky then proposed to Professor Chen that a Communist Party be set up. By June Voitinsky was reporting home that Chen was to be made Party Secretary (i.e., the head) and was contacting “revolutionaries in various cities.”
This was exactly when Mao showed up on Chen’s doorstep. He had chanced upon the emergence of the CCP. Mao was not invited to be one of the founders. Nor, it seems, was he told it was about to be formed. The eight or so founding members were all eminent Marxists, and Mao had not yet even said that he believed in Marxism. The Party was founded in August, after Mao had left Shanghai.