Mao: The Unknown Story

The wife of a Shanghai delegate hailed from the lakeside town, and she rented a pleasure boat, in which the delegates sat at a polished table where food, drinks and mahjong sets had been laid. A thick carved wooden screen separated this inner chamber from the open, but sheltered, front of the boat, where the delegate’s wife sat with her back against the screen. She told us how, when other boats passed, she would tap on the screen with her fan, and inside the mahjong tiles would click loudly as they were shuffled. Soon it started to pour, and the boat was enveloped in rain. In this dramatic setting, the Chinese Communist Party was proclaimed — somewhat inconclusively, as without Moscow’s men present no program could be finalized. The congress did not even issue a manifesto or charter.

The delegates were given another 50 yuan each as return fare. This enabled Mao to go off and do some sightseeing, in comfort, in Hangzhou and Nanjing, where he saw his girlfriend Si-yung again.

DEPENDENCE ON MOSCOW and Moscow’s money remained a sore point for many in the Party. Professor Chen, who came to Shanghai in late August to take up the post of Secretary, informed his comrades: “If we take their money, we have to take their orders.” He proposed, in vain, that none of them should be full-time professional revolutionaries, but instead should have independent jobs, and use them to spread the ideas of revolution.

Chen argued vehemently with Maring about the latter’s insistence that the CCP was automatically a branch of the Comintern, and particularly over the notion that Nikolsky had to supervise all their meetings. “Do we have to be controlled like this?” he would shout. “It simply isn’t worth it!” Often he would refuse to see Maring for weeks running. Chen would yell, bang his palm on the table, and even throw teacups around. Maring’s nickname for him was “the volcano.” On the frequent occasions when Chen exploded, Maring would go next door to have a smoke while Chen tried to simmer down.

But without Moscow’s funding the CCP could not even begin to carry out any activities such as publishing Communist literature and organizing a labor movement. Over a nine-month period (October 1921–June 1922), out of its expenditure of 17,655 yuan, less than 6 percent was raised inside China, while over 94 percent came from the Russians, as Chen himself reported to Moscow. Indeed, there were many other Communist groups in China at the time — at least seven between 1920 and 1922, one claiming as many as 11,000 members. But without Russian funds, they all collapsed.

Unlike Chen, Mao showed no qualms about taking Moscow’s money. He was a realist. Russian funding also transformed his life. After the congress he began to receive 60–70 yuan a month from the Party for the Hunan branch, soon increased to 100, and then 160–170. This large and regular income made a tremendous difference. Mao had always been short of money. He had two jobs, headmaster and small-time journalist, and he dreaded having to depend on these two occupations to make his living. In two letters written in late November 1920 to a friend, he had complained bitterly, saying: “a life just using the mouth and brain is misery to the extreme … I often go without a rest for 3 or 4 hours [sic], even working into the night … My life is really too hard.”

Then he had told some friends: “In the future, I most likely will have to live on the salaries of these two jobs. I feel that jobs that use only the brain are very hard, so I am thinking of learning something that uses manual labour, like darning socks or baking bread.” As Mao had no fondness whatever for manual labor, to volunteer such an idea showed he had reached a dead end.

But now he had a comfortable berth as a subsidized professional revolutionary. He gave up journalism, and even resigned his job as headmaster, able at last to enjoy the kind of existence he could hitherto only dream about. It seems to be now that he developed his lifelong habit of sleeping late into the day and staying up reading at night. In a letter to his old best friend Siao-yu written two months after the 1st Congress, he was almost ecstatic:

I am now spending most of my time nursing my health, and have become much fitter. Now I feel extremely happy, because, apart from getting healthier, I don’t have any burden of work or responsibility. I am busy having good food every day, both indulging my stomach and improving my health. I also can read whatever books I want to read. It is really “Wow, what fun.”

To be able to eat his fill and read to his heart’s content was Mao’s idea of the good life.