Mao: The Unknown Story

The Manchu court had promised a constitutional monarchy, but the Republicans were dedicated to getting rid of the Manchus entirely. To them Manchu rule was “foreign” domination, as the Manchus were not Han Chinese, the ethnic group that formed the bulk — about 94 percent — of the population. The Republicans lit sparks through newspapers and magazines that had sprung up all over China in the previous decade, and through the entirely new practice of public debates, in what had hitherto been an almost totally private society. They formed organizations, and launched several — unsuccessful — armed uprisings.

Mao quickly caught up on the issues through newspapers, which he read for the first time now, at the age of seventeen — the start of a lifelong addiction. He wrote his first, rather confused, political essay expressing Republican views, and pasted it up on a wall at his school, in line with the latest trend. Like many other students in the school, he cut off his pigtail, which, as a Manchu custom, was the most obvious symbol of imperial rule. With a friend, he then ambushed a dozen others and forcibly removed their queues with scissors.

That summer, extremely hot and humid as usual in Changsha, students debated feverishly about how to overthrow the emperor. One day, in the middle of an impassioned discussion, a young man suddenly tore off his long scholar’s gown, threw it on the ground and yelled: “Let’s do some martial exercises and be prepared for war [against the emperor]!”

In October an armed uprising in neighboring Hubei province heralded the Republican Revolution. The Manchu dynasty that had ruled China for over 260 years crumbled, and a republic was declared on 1 January 1912. The child emperor, Pu Yi, abdicated the following month.

Yuan Shih-kai, military chief of the country, became the president, succeeding the interim provisional president, Sun Yat-sen. The provinces were controlled by army strongmen with allegiance to Yuan. When Yuan died in 1916, the central government in Peking weakened, and power fragmented to the provincial chiefs, who became semi-independent warlords. Over the following decade, they fought spasmodic wars, which disrupted civilian life in combat zones. But otherwise the warlords left most people relatively unaffected. Indeed, the rather loosely governed fledgling republic opened up all sorts of career opportunities. The young Mao faced a dazzling range of choices — industry, commerce, law, administration, education, journalism, culture, the military. He first enlisted in one of the Republican armies, but left within months, as he did not like the drilling, or chores like carrying water for cooking, which he hired a water vendor to do for him. He decided to go back to school, and scanned the array of advertisements in the papers (the ads, colorful and rather sophisticated, were also a new thing in China). Six institutions drew his attention, including a police college, a law college — and a school that specialized in making soap. He picked a general high school and stayed for six months before boredom drove him out to study by himself in the provincial library.

At last Mao found something he loved doing. He spent all day there, devouring new books, including translations of Western writings. He said later that he was like a buffalo charging into a vegetable garden and just gobbling down everything that grew. This reading helped free his mind of traditional constraints.

But his father threatened to cut him off unless he got into a proper school, so Mao entered a teacher-training college. It required no tuition fees and offered cheap board and lodging — like other such colleges in those days, as part of China’s efforts to promote education.

This was spring 1913, and Mao was nineteen. The college embodied the open-mindedness of the time. Even its building was European style, with romanesque arches and a wide columned porch, and was suitably called yang-lou—“Foreign Building.” The classrooms had smart wooden floors and glass windows. The students were exposed to all sorts of new ideas and encouraged to think freely and organize study groups. They turned out publications about anarchism, nationalism and Marxism, and for a while a portrait of Marx hung in the auditorium. Mao had earlier come across the word “socialism” in a newspaper. Now he encountered “communism” for the first time. It was a period of real “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom”—a phrase Mao invoked for a moment under his own rule later, but without allowing a tiny fraction of the freedom he himself had enjoyed as a young man.