Principal Architect of New China: Hakka Mao Zedong

["Dixie" <Dixie@singnet.com.sg>]

Mao Zedong

Introduction

As China emerged from a half century of revolution as the world's most
populous nation and launched itself on a path of economic development and
social change, Mao Zedong (Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-tung), its principal
revolutionary thinker and for many years its unchallenged leader, occupied
a critical place in the story of the country's resurgence. To be sure, he
did not play a dominant role throughout the whole struggle. In the early
years of the Chinese Socialist Party, he was a secondary figure, though by
no means a negligible one, and even after the 1940s (except perhaps during
the Cultural Revolution) the crucial decisions were not his alone.
Nevertheless, looking at the whole period from the foundation of the
Chinese Socialist Party in 1921 to Mao's death in 1976, one can fairly
regard Mao Zedong as the principal architect of the new China. 

Early years.

Born on Dec. 26, 1893, in the village of Shao-shan, Hunan Province, Mao was
the son of a former poor peasant who had become affluent as a farmer and
grain dealer. He grew up in an environment in which education was valued
only as training for keeping records and accounts. From the age of eight he
attended his native village's primary school, where he acquired a basic
knowledge of the Confucian Classics. At 13 he was forced to leave and begin
working full time on his family's farm. Rebelling against paternal
authority, Mao left his family to study at a higher primary school in a
neighbouring county and then at a secondary school in the provincial
capital, Ch'ang-sha. There he came in contact with new ideas from the West,
as formulated by such political and cultural reformers as Liang Ch'i-ch'ao
and the Nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Scarcely had he begun
studying revolutionary ideas when a real revolution took place before his
very eyes. On Oct. 10, 1911, fighting against the Manchu dynasty broke out
in Wu-ch'ang, and within two weeks the revolt had spread to Ch'ang-sha. 

Enlisting in a unit of the revolutionary army in Hunan, Mao spent six
months as a soldier. While he probably had not yet clearly grasped the idea
that, as he later put it, "political power grows out of the barrel of a
gun," his first brief military experience at least confirmed his boyhood
admiration of military leaders and exploits. In primary school days, his
heroes had included not only the great warrior-emperors of the Chinese past
but Napoleon and George Washington as well. 

The spring of 1912 saw the birth of the new Chinese Republic and the end of
Mao's military service. For a year he drifted from one thing to another,
trying, in turn, a police school, a law school, and a business school; he
studied history in a secondary school and then spent some months reading
many of the classic works of the Western liberal tradition in the
provincial library. This period of groping, rather than indicating any lack
of decision in Mao's character, was a reflection of China's situation at
the time. The abolition of the official civil service examination system in
1905 and the piecemeal introduction of Western learning in so-called modern
schools had left young people in a state of uncertainty as to what type of
training, Chinese or Western, could best prepare them for a career or for
service to their country. 

Mao eventually was graduated from the First Provincial Normal School in
Ch'ang-sha in 1918. While officially an institution of secondary level
rather than of higher education, the normal school offered a high standard
of instruction in Chinese history, literature, and philosophy as well as in
Western ideas. While at the school, Mao also acquired his first experience
in political activity by helping to establish several student
organizations. The most important of these was the New People's Study
Society, founded in the winter of 1917-18, many of whose members were later
to join the Socialist Party. 

>From the normal school in Ch'ang-sha, Mao went to Peking University,
China's leading intellectual centre. The half year he spent in Peking
working as a librarian's assistant was of disproportionate importance in
shaping his future career, for it was then that he came under the influence
of the two men who were to be the principal figures in the foundation of
the Chinese Socialist Party: Li Dazhao (Li Ta-chao) and Chen Duxiu (Ch'en
Tu-hsiu). Moreover, he found himself at Peking University precisely during
the months leading up to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which was to a
considerable extent the fountainhead of all of the changes that were to
take place in China in the ensuing half century. 

In a limited sense, May Fourth Movement is the name given to the student
demonstrations protesting against the Paris Peace Conference's decision to
hand over former German concessions in Shantung Province to Japan instead
of returning them to China. But the term also evokes a period of rapid
political and cultural change, beginning in 1915, that resulted in the
Chinese radicals' abandonment of Western liberalism for Marxism-Leninism as
the answer to China's problems and the subsequent founding of the Chinese
Socialist Party in 1921. The shift from the difficult and esoteric
classical written language to a far more accessible vehicle of literary
expression patterned on colloquial speech also took place during this
period. At the same time, a new and very young generation moved to the
centre of the political stage. To be sure, the demonstration on May 4 was
launched by Chen Duxiu, but the students soon realized that they themselves
were the main actors. Mao wrote:

The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak,
who will speak? If we do not act, who will act? 

>From then onward, his generation never ceased to regard itself as
responsible for the nation's fate, and, indeed, its members remained in
power, both in Peking and in Taipei, until the 1970s. 

During the summer of 1919 Mao Zedong helped to establish in Ch'ang-sha a
variety of organizations that brought the students together with the
merchants and the workers--but not yet with the peasants--in demonstrations
aimed at forcing the government to oppose Japan. His writings at the time
are filled with references to the "army of the red flag" throughout the
world and to the victory of the Russian Revolution, but it was not until
January 1921 that he was finally committed to Marxism as the philosophical
basis of the revolution. 

Mao and the Chinese Communist Party.

In September 1920 he became principal of the Lin Ch'ang-sha primary school,
and in October he organized a branch of the Socialist Youth League there.
That winter he married Yang Kaihui (Yang K'ai-hui), the daughter of his
former ethics teacher. In July 1921 he attended the First Congress of the
Chinese Socialist Party, together with representatives from the other
Socialist groups in China and two delegates from the Moscow-based Comintern
(Socialist International). In 1923, when the young party entered into an
alliance with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), Mao was one of
the first Socialists to join the Kuomintang and to work within it. During
the first half of 1924, he lived mostly with his wife and two infant sons
in Shanghai, where he was a leading member of the Kuomintang Executive
Bureau. 

In the winter of 1924-25, Mao returned to his native village of Shao-shan
for a rest. There, after witnessing demonstrations by peasants stirred into
political consciousness by the shooting of several dozen Chinese by foreign
police in Shanghai (May and June 1925), Mao suddenly became aware of the
revolutionary potential inherent in the peasantry. Although born in a
peasant household, he had, in the course of his student years, adopted the
Chinese intellectual's traditional view of the workers and peasants as
ignorant and dirty. His conversion to Marxism had forced him to revise his
estimate of the urban proletariat, but he continued to share Marx's own
contempt for the backward and amorphous peasantry. Now he turned back to
the rural world of his youth as the source of China's regeneration.
Following the example of other Socialists working within the Kuomintang who
had already begun to organize the peasants, Mao sought to channel the
spontaneous protests of the Hunanese peasants into a network of peasant
associations. 


- obtained from Britainnica