Red Star over China (21 page)

“My next scholastic adventure was in the First Provincial Middle School. I registered for a dollar, took the entrance examination, and passed at the head of the list of candidates. It was a big school, with many students, and its graduates were numerous. A Chinese teacher there helped me very much; he was attracted to me because of my literary tendency. This teacher lent me a book called the
Yu-p'i Tung-chien [Chronicles with Imperial Commentaries],
which contained imperial edicts and critiques by Ch'ien Lung.
^*

“About this time a government magazine exploded in Changsha. There was a huge fire, and we students found it very interesting. Tons of bullets and shells exploded, and gunpowder made an intense blaze. It was better than firecrackers. About a month later T'an Yen-k'ai was driven out by Yuan Shih-k'ai, who now had control of the political machinery of the Republic. T'ang Hsiang-ming replaced T'an Yen-k'ai and he set about making arrangements for Yuan's enthronement [in an attempted restoration of the monarchy, which speedily failed].

“I did not like the First Middle School. Its curriculum was limited and its regulations were objectionable. After reading
Yu-p'i T'ung-chien
I had also come to the conclusion that it would be better for me to read and study alone. After six months I left the school and arranged a schedule of education of my own, which consisted of reading every day in the Hunan Provincial Library. I was very regular and conscientious about it, and the half-year I spent in this way I consider to have been extremely valuable to me. I went to the library in the morning when it opened. At noon I paused only long enough to buy and eat two rice cakes, which were my daily lunch. I stayed in the library every day reading until it closed.

“During this period of self-education I read many books, studied world geography and world history. There for the first time I saw and studied with great interest a map of the world. I read Adam Smith's
The Wealth of Nations,
and Darwin's
Origin of Species,
and a book on ethics by John Stuart Mill. I read the works of Rousseau, Spencer's
Logic,
and a book on law written by Montesquieu. I mixed poetry and romances, and the tales of ancient Greece, with serious study of history and geography of Russia, America, England, France, and other countries.

“I was then living in a guild house for natives of Hsiang Hsiang district. Many soldiers were there also—'retired' or disbanded men from the district, who had no work to do and little money. Students and soldiers were always quarreling in the guild house, and one night this hostility between them broke out in physical violence. The soldiers attacked and
tried to kill the students. I escaped by fleeing to the toilet, where I hid until the fight was over.

“I had no money then, my family refusing to support me unless I entered school, and since I could no longer live in the guild house I began looking for a new place to lodge. Meanwhile, I had been thinking seriously of my ‘career' and had about decided that I was best suited for teaching. I had begun reading advertisements again. An attractive announcement of the Hunan Normal School now came to my attention, and I read with interest of its advantages: no tuition required, and cheap board and cheap lodging. Two of my friends were also urging me to enter. They wanted my help in preparing entrance essays. I wrote of my intention to my family and I received their consent. I composed essays for my two friends, and wrote one of my own. All were accepted—in reality, therefore, I was accepted three times. I did not then think my act of substituting for my friends an immoral one; it was merely a matter of friendship.

“I was a student in the normal school for five years, and managed to resist the appeals of all future advertising.
¹
Finally I actually got my degree. Incidents in my life here, in the Hunan Provincial First Normal [Teachers' Training] School, were many, and during this period my political ideas began to take shape. Here also I acquired my first experiences in social action.

“There were many regulations in the new school and I agreed with very few of them. For one thing, I was opposed to the required courses in natural science. I wanted to specialize in social sciences. Natural sciences did not especially interest me, and I did not study them, so I got poor marks in most of these courses. Most of all I hated a compulsory course in still-life drawing. I thought it extremely stupid. I used to think of the simplest subjects possible to draw, finish up quickly and leave the class. I remember once, drawing a picture of the ‘half-sun, half-rock,'
^*
which I represented by a straight line with a semicircle over it. Another time during an examination in drawing I contented myself with making an oval. I called it an egg. I got 40 in drawing, and failed. Fortunately my marks in social sciences were all excellent, and they balanced my poor grades in these other classes.

“A Chinese teacher here, whom the students nicknamed ‘Yuan the Big Beard,' ridiculed my writing and called it the work of a journalist. He despised Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, who had been my model, and considered him half-literate. I was obliged to alter my style. I studied the writings of Han Yu, and mastered the old Classical phraseology. Thanks to Yuan the Big
Beard, therefore, I can today still turn out a passable Classical essay if required.

“The teacher who made the strongest impression on me was Yang Ch'ang-chi,
²
a returned student from England, with whose life I was later to become intimately related. He taught ethics, he was an idealist and a man of high moral character. He believed in his ethics very strongly and tried to imbue his students with the desire to become just, moral, virtuous men, useful in society. Under his influence I read a book on ethics translated by Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei and was inspired to write an essay which I entitled ‘The Energy of the Mind.' I was then an idealist and my essay was highly praised by Professor Yang Ch'ang-chi, from his idealist viewpoint. He gave me a mark of 100 for it.

“A teacher named T'ang used to give me old copies of
Min Pao [People's Journal],
and I read them with keen interest. I learned from them about the activities and program of the T'ung Meng Hui. One day I read a copy of the
Min Pao
containing a story about two Chinese students who were traveling across China and had reached Tatsienlu, on the edge of Tibet. This inspired me very much. I wanted to follow their example; but I had no money, and thought I should first try out traveling in Hunan.

“The next summer I set out across the province by foot, and journeyed through five counties. I was accompanied by a student named Hsiao Yu.
³
We walked through these five counties without using a single copper. The peasants fed us and gave us a place to sleep; wherever we went we were kindly treated and welcomed. This fellow, Hsiao Yu, with whom I traveled, later became a Kuomintang official in Nanking, under Yi Pei-ch'i,
⁴
who was then president of Hunan Normal School. Yi Pei-ch'i became a high official at Nanking and had Hsiao Yu appointed to the office of custodian of the Peking Palace Museum. Hsiao sold some of the most valuable treasures in the museum and absconded with the funds in 1934.
⁵

“Feeling expansive and the need for a few intimate companions, I one day inserted an advertisement in a Changsha paper inviting young men interested in patriotic work to make a contact with me. I specified youths who were hardened and determined, and ready to make sacrifices for their country. To this advertisement I received three and one half replies. One was from Lu Chiang-lung, who later was to join the Communist Party and afterwards to betray it. Two others were from young men who later were to become ultrareactionaries. The ‘half reply came from a noncommittal youth named Li Li-san. Li listened to all I had to say, and then went away without making any definite proposals himself, and our friendship never developed.
^*

“But gradually I did build up a group of students around myself, and the nucleus was formed of what later was to become a society
^*
that was to have a widespread influence on the affairs and destiny of China. It was a serious-minded little group of men and they had no time to discuss trivialities. Everything they did or said must have a purpose. They had no time for love or ‘romance' and considered the times too critical and the need for knowledge too urgent to discuss women or personal matters. I was not interested in women. My parents had married me when I was fourteen to a girl of twenty, but I had never lived with her—and never subsequently did. I did not consider her my wife and at this time gave little thought to her. Quite aside from the discussions of feminine charm, which usually play an important role in the lives of young men of this age, my companions even rejected talk of ordinary matters of daily life. I remember once being in the house of a youth who began to talk to me about buying some meat, and in my presence called in his servant and discussed the matter with him, then ordered him to buy a piece. I was annoyed and did not see that fellow again. My friends and I preferred to talk only of large matters—the nature of men, of human society, of China, the world, and the universe!

“We also became ardent physical culturists. In the winter holidays we tramped through the fields, up and down mountains, along city walls, and across the streams and rivers. If it rained we took off our shirts and called it a rain bath. When the sun was hot we also doffed shirts and called it a sun bath. In the spring winds we shouted that this was a new sport called ‘wind bathing.' We slept in the open when frost was already falling and even in November swam in the cold rivers. All this went on under the title of ‘body training.' Perhaps it helped much to build the physique which I was to need so badly later on in my many marches back and forth across South China, and on the Long March from Kiangsi to the Northwest.
⁶

“I built up a wide correspondence with many students and friends in other towns and cities. Gradually I began to realize the necessity for a more closely knit organization. In 1917, with some other friends, I helped to found the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui. It had from seventy to eighty members, and of these many were later to become famous names in Chinese communism and in the history of the Chinese Revolution. Among the better-known Communists who were in the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui were Lo Man (Li Wei-han), now secretary of the Party Organization Committee; Hsia
Hsi,
^*
now in the Second Front Red Army; Ho Shu-heng, who became high judge of the Supreme Court in the Central Soviet regions and was later killed by Chiang Kai-shek (1935); Kuo Liang, a famous labor organizer, killed by General Ho Chien in 1930; Hsiao Chu-chang,
^†
a writer now in Soviet Russia; Ts'ai Ho-sen, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, killed by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927; Yeh Li-yun, who became a member of the Central Committee, and later ‘betrayed' to the Kuomintang and became a capitalist trade-union organizer; and Hsiao Chen, a prominent Party leader, one of the six signers of the original agreement for the formation of the Party, who died not long ago from illness. The majority of the members of the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui were killed in the counterrevolution of 1927.
^‡

“Another society that was formed about that time, and resembled the Hsin-min Hsueh-hui, was the ‘Social Welfare Society' of Hupeh. Many of its members also later became Communists. Among them was Yun Tai-ying, who was killed during the counterrevolution by Chiang Kai-shek. Lin Piao, now president of the Red Army University, was a member. So was Chang Hao, now in charge of work among White troops [those taken prisoner by the Reds]. In Peking there was a society called Hu Sheh, some of whose members later became Reds. Elsewhere in China, notably in Shanghai, Hangchow, Hankow, and Tientsin,
^§
radical societies were organized by the militant youth then beginning to assert an influence on Chinese politics.

“Most of these societies were organized more or less under the influences of
Hsin Ch'ing-nien [New Youth
], the famous magazine of the literary renaissance, edited by Ch'en Tu-hsiu.
⁷
I began to read this magazine while I was a student in the normal school and admired the articles of Hu Shih and Ch'en Tu-hsiu very much. They became for a while my models, replacing Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Kang Yu-wei, whom I had already discarded.

“At this time my mind was a curious mixture of ideas of liberalism,
democratic reformism, and Utopian socialism. I had somewhat vague passions about ‘nineteenth-century democracy,' utopianism, and old-fashioned liberalism, and I was definitely antimilitarist and anti-imperialist.

“I had entered the normal school in 1912. I was graduated in 1918.”

During Mao's recollections of his past I noticed that an auditor at least as interested as I was Ho Tzu-ch'en, his wife. Many of the facts he told about himself and the Communist movement she had evidently never heard before, and this was true of most of Mao's comrades in Pao An. Later on, when I gathered biographical notes from other Red leaders, their colleagues often crowded around interestedly to listen to the stories for the first time. Although they had all fought together for years, very often they knew nothing of each other's pre-Communist days, which they had tended to regard as a kind of Dark Ages period, one's real life beginning only when one became a Communist.

It was another night, and Mao sat cross-legged, leaning against his dispatch boxes. He lit a cigarette from a candle and took up the thread of the story where he had left off the evening before:

“During my years in normal school in Changsha I had spent, altogether, only $160—including my numerous registration fees! Of this amount I must have used a third for newspapers, because regular subscriptions cost me about a dollar a month, and I often bought books and journals on the newsstands. My father cursed me for this extravagance. He called it wasted money on wasted paper. But I had acquired the newspaper-reading habit, and from 1911 to 1927, when I climbed up Ching-kangshan, I never stopped reading the daily papers of Peking, Shanghai, and Hunan.