Mao: The Unknown Story

In October 1921 he was able to set up house with Kai-hui, in a place called Clear Water Pond, and had enough money to afford servants. It was a lovely spot, where water flowed into a large pond and changed from muddy to clear, giving the place its name. The house was a traditional building, with black wooden beams and motley brick walls, overlooking fields of vegetables and backing on to low hills.

In theory, the house was the office of the Hunan Party branch. As the provincial Party leader, one of Mao’s main tasks was to recruit members, but he did not throw much zeal into the cause. When he had first been asked to recruit for the Youth League in November 1920, he had delegated the job to someone else and gone off on holiday with his girlfriend Si-yung, claiming that he was off “to research education.”

Unlike most founding dictators — Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler — Mao did not inspire a passionate following through his oratory, or ideological appeal. He simply sought willing recruits among his immediate circle, people who would take his orders. His first recruit, his friend and bookshop manager Yi Li-rong, described how, soon after Mao came back from the 1st Congress, he called Yi out of the bookshop. Leaning against a bamboo fence in the yard, he told Yi that he ought to join the Party. Yi muttered some reservations about having heard that millions had died in the Russian Revolution; but, as he said, Mao “asked me to join and so I joined.” This was how Mao set up his first Party branch in Changsha. It consisted of just three men: himself, Yi, and the friend he had taken to the 1st Congress.

The next to join were members of Mao’s family — his wife and his brothers, whom he had sent for from the village. Tse-min had been running the family business and was smart with money. He took charge of Mao’s finances. Mao summoned more relatives from their village to Changsha, and doled out various jobs. Some entered the Party. Outside his circle of family and friends, his recruiting was sparse. Mainly, he trawled very close to home.

Actually, at the time, quite a lot of young people in Hunan were attracted to communism, including the man who was to become Mao’s No. 2 and president of China, Liu Shao-chi, and a number of other future Party leaders. But they were introduced to the Party not by Mao but by a Marxist in his fifties called Ho Min-fan, who had been county chief of Changsha. Min-fan sponsored Liu and others for membership in the Socialist Youth League in late 1920, and made the introductions for them to go to Russia. He himself did not get to go to the Party’s 1st Congress because the invitation was sent to Mao, who was extremely jealous of Min-fan, especially of his success at recruiting. When Liu Shao-chi returned from Moscow in 1922, Mao grilled him about how Min-fan had achieved this.

Once Mao became official CCP branch boss, he schemed to oust his unwitting rival. Min-fan ran a public lecture center which occupied a fine property, a grand clan temple called Boat Mountain. Claiming to need it for Party purposes, Mao moved in, together with his group, and made life so impossible for Min-fan that he ended up leaving both the premises and the Party milieu. Mao told Liu Shao-chi a year later that Min-fan, Liu’s mentor, had been “disobedient. So we drove him out of Boat Mountain.” By using the word “disobedient,” especially about someone much older, Mao was revealing his thuggish side. He had not behaved this way in his earlier persona. When he first met his friend, the liberal Siao-yu, Mao had bowed to show respect. He had been courteous to his peers and superiors alike. A taste of power had altered his behavior. From this time on, Mao’s friendships were only with people who would not challenge him, and these were largely apolitical. He was not friends with any of his political colleagues, and hardly ever socialized with them.

Removing Min-fan was Mao’s first power struggle. And he won. Under Mao, there was no Party committee. Meetings were rare. There was just Mao giving orders, though he took care to report regularly to Shanghai, as required.

MAO WAS DOING NOTHING about another major task, which was to organize labor unions. He felt no more sympathy for workers than he did for peasants. Writing to a friend in November 1920, in which he complained about his own conditions as an intellectual, he remarked: “I think labourers in China do not really suffer poor physical conditions. Only scholars suffer.”

In December 1921, workers in Anyuan, an important mining center straddling the Hunan — Jiangxi border, wrote asking the Communists for help, and Mao went up to the mine — the first time on record that he went near any workers. He stayed a few days and then left, delegating the practical work to someone else. After this brief dip in the grimy world of the coal miners, he told Shanghai that he had come “to his wits’ end” with “the workers organisation.”