Mao: The Unknown Story

1. ON THE CUSP FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN (1893–1911 AGE 1–17)

MAO TSE-TUNG, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. He was born into a peasant family in a valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland of China. The date was 26 December 1893. His ancestors had lived in the valley for five hundred years.

This was a world of ancient beauty, a temperate, humid region whose misty, undulating hills had been populated ever since the Neolithic age. Buddhist temples dating from the Tang dynasty (AD 618–906), when Buddhism first came here, were still in use. Forests where nearly 300 species of trees grew, including maples, camphor, metasequoia and the rare ginkgo, covered the area and sheltered the tigers, leopards and boar that still roamed the hills. (The last tiger was killed in 1957.) These hills, with neither roads nor navigable rivers, detached the village from the world at large. Even as late as the early twentieth century an event as momentous as the death of the emperor in 1908 did not percolate this far, and Mao found out only two years afterwards when he left Shaoshan.

The valley of Shaoshan measures about 5 by 3.5 km. The 600-odd families who lived there grew rice, tea and bamboo, harnessing buffalo to plough the rice paddies. Daily life revolved round these age-old activities. Mao’s father, Yi-chang, was born in 1870. At the age of ten he was engaged to a girl of thirteen from a village about ten kilometers away, beyond a pass called Tiger Resting Pass, where tigers used to sun themselves. This short distance was long enough in those years for the two villages to speak dialects that were almost mutually unintelligible. Being merely a girl, Mao’s mother did not receive a name; as the seventh girl born in the Wen clan, she was just Seventh Sister Wen. In accordance with centuries of custom, her feet had been crushed and bound to produce the so-called “three-inch golden lilies” that epitomized beauty at the time.

Her engagement to Mao’s father followed time-honored customs. It was arranged by their parents and was based on a practical consideration: the tomb of one of her grandfathers was in Shaoshan, and it had to be tended regularly with elaborate rituals, so having a relative there would prove useful. Seventh Sister Wen moved in with the Maos upon betrothal, and was married at the age of eighteen, in 1885, when Yi-chang was fifteen.

Shortly after the wedding, Yi-chang went off to be a soldier to earn money to pay off family debts, which he was able to do after several years. Chinese peasants were not serfs but free farmers, and joining the army for purely financial reasons was an established practice. Luckily he was not involved in any wars; instead he caught a glimpse of the world and picked up some business ideas. Unlike most of the villagers, Yi-chang could read and write, well enough to keep accounts. After his return, he raised pigs, and processed grain into top-quality rice to sell at a nearby market town. He bought back the land his father had pawned, then bought more land, and became one of the richest men in the village.

Though relatively well off, Yi-chang remained extremely hardworking and thrifty all his life. The family house consisted of half a dozen rooms, which occupied one wing of a large thatched property. Eventually Yi-chang replaced the thatch with tiles, a major improvement, but left the mud floor and mud walls. The windows had no glass — still a rare luxury — and were just square openings with wooden bars, blocked off at night by wooden boards (the temperature hardly ever fell below freezing). The furniture was simple: wooden beds, bare wooden tables and benches. It was in one of these rather spartan rooms, under a pale blue homespun cotton quilt, inside a blue mosquito net, that Mao was born.

MAO WAS THE third son, but the first to survive beyond infancy. His Buddhist mother became even more devout to encourage Buddha to protect him. Mao was given the two-part name Tse-tung. Tse, which means “to shine on,” was the name given to all his generation, as preordained when the clan chronicle was first written in the eighteenth century; tung means “the East.” So his full given name meant “to shine on the East.” When two more boys were born, in 1896 and 1905, they were given the names Tse-min (min means “the people”) and Tse-tan (tan possibly referred to the local region, Xiangtan).

These names reflected the inveterate aspiration of Chinese peasants for their sons to do well — and the expectation that they could. High positions were open to all through education, which for centuries meant studying Confucian classics. Excellence would enable young men of any background to pass imperial examinations and become mandarins — all the way up to becoming prime minister. Officialdom was the definition of achievement, and the names given to Mao and his brothers expressed the hopes placed on them.

But a grand name was also onerous and potentially tempted fate, so most children were given a pet name that was either lowly or tough, or both. Mao’s was “the Boy of Stone”—Shi san ya-zi. For this second “baptism” his mother took him to a rock about eight feet high, which was reputed to be enchanted, as there was a spring underneath. After Mao performed obeisance and kowtows, he was considered adopted by the rock. Mao was very fond of this name, and continued to use it as an adult. In 1959, when he returned to Shaoshan and met the villagers for the first — and only — time as supreme leader of China, he began the dinner for them with a quip: “So everyone is here, except my Stone Mother. Shall we wait for her?”

Mao loved his real mother, with an intensity he showed towards no one else. She was a gentle and tolerant person, who, as he remembered, never raised her voice to him. From her came his full face, sensual lips, and a calm self-possession in the eyes. Mao would talk about his mother with emotion all his life. It was in her footsteps that he became a Buddhist as a child. Years later he told his staff: “I worshipped my mother … Wherever my mother went, I would follow … going to temple fairs, burning incense and paper money, doing obeisance to Buddha … Because my mother believed in Buddha, so did I.” But he gave up Buddhism in his mid-teens.

Mao had a carefree childhood. Until he was eight he lived with his mother’s family, the Wens, in their village, as his mother preferred to live with her own family. There his maternal grandmother doted on him. His two uncles and their wives treated him like their own son, and one of them became his Adopted Father, the Chinese equivalent to godfather. Mao did a little light farm work, gathering fodder for pigs and taking the buffalo out for a stroll in the tea-oil camellia groves by a pond shaded by banana leaves. In later years he would reminisce with fondness about this idyllic time. He started learning to read, while his aunts spun and sewed under an oil lamp.

MAO ONLY CAME back to live in Shaoshan in spring 1902, at the age of eight, to receive an education, which took the form of study in a tutor’s home. Confucian classics, which made up most of the curriculum, were beyond the understanding of children and had to be learned by heart. Mao was blessed with an exceptional memory, and did well. His fellow pupils remembered a diligent boy who managed not only to recite but also to write by rote these difficult texts. He also gained a foundation in Chinese language and history, and began to learn to write good prose, calligraphy and poetry, as writing poems was an essential part of Confucian education. Reading became a passion. Peasants generally turned in at sunset, to save on oil for lamps, but Mao would read deep into the night, with an oil lamp standing on a bench outside his mosquito net. Years later, when he was supreme ruler of China, half of his huge bed would be piled a foot high with Chinese classics, and he littered his speeches and writings with historical references. But his poems lost flair.

Mao clashed frequently with his tutors. He ran away from his first school at the age of ten, claiming that the teacher was a martinet. He was expelled from, or was “asked to leave,” at least three schools for being headstrong and disobedient. His mother indulged him but his father was not pleased, and Mao’s hopping from tutor to tutor was just one source of tension between father and son. Yi-chang paid for Mao’s education, hoping that his son could at least help keep the family accounts, but Mao disliked the task. All his life, he was vague about figures, and hopeless at economics. Nor did he take kindly to hard physical labor. He shunned it as soon as his peasant days were over.

Yi-chang could not stand Mao being idle. Having spent every minute of his waking hours working, he expected his son to do the same, and would strike him when he did not comply. Mao hated his father. In 1968, when he was taking revenge on his political foes on a vast scale, he told their tormentors that he would have liked his father to be treated just as brutally: “My father was bad. If he were alive today, he should be ‘jet-planed.’ ” This was an agonizing position where the subject’s arms were wrenched behind his back and his head forced down.

Mao was not a mere victim of his father. He fought back, and was often the victor. He would tell his father that the father, being older, should do more manual labor than he, the younger — which was an unthinkably insolent argument by Chinese standards. One day, according to Mao, father and son had a row in front of guests. “My father scolded me before them, calling me lazy and useless. This infuriated me. I called him names and left the house … My father … pursued me, cursing as well as commanding me to come back. I reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any nearer … My father backed down.” Once, as Mao was retelling the story, he laughed and added an observation: “Old men like him didn’t want to lose their sons. This is their weakness. I attacked at their weak point, and I won!”

Money was the only weapon Mao’s father possessed. After Mao was expelled by tutor no. 4, in 1907, his father stopped paying for his son’s tuition fees and the thirteen-year-old boy had to become a full-time peasant. But he soon found a way to get himself out of farm work and back into the world of books. Yi-chang was keen for his son to get married, so that he would be tied down and behave responsibly. His niece was at just the right age for a wife, four years older than Mao, who agreed to his father’s plan and resumed schooling after the marriage.

The marriage took place in 1908, when Mao was fourteen and his bride eighteen. Her family name was Luo. She herself had no proper name, and was just called “Woman Luo.” The only time Mao is known to have mentioned her was to the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, when Mao was strikingly dismissive, exaggerating the difference in their ages: “When I was 14, my parents married me to a girl of 20. But I never lived with her … I do not consider her my wife … and have given little thought to her.” He gave no hint that she was not still alive; in fact, Woman Luo had died in 1910, just over a year into their marriage.

Mao’s early marriage turned him into a fierce opponent of arranged marriages. Nine years later he wrote a seething article against the practice: “In families in the West, parents acknowledge the free will of their children. But in China, orders from the parents are not at all compatible with the will of the children … This is a kind of ‘indirect rape.’ Chinese parents are all the time indirectly raping their children …”

As soon as his wife died, the sixteen-year-old widower demanded to leave Shaoshan. His father wanted to apprentice him to a rice store in the county town, but Mao had set his eye on a modern school about 25 kilometers away. He had learned that the imperial examinations had been abolished. Instead there were modern schools now, teaching subjects like science, world history and geography, and foreign languages. It was these schools that would open the door out of a peasant’s life for many like him.

IN THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY, China had embarked on a dramatic social transformation. The Manchu dynasty that had ruled since 1644 was moving from the ancient to the modern. The shift was prompted by a series of abysmal defeats at the hands of European powers and Japan, beginning with the loss to Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42, as the powers came knocking on China’s closed door. From the Manchu court to intellectuals, nearly everyone agreed that the country must change if it wanted to survive. A host of fundamental reforms was introduced, one of which was to install an entirely new educational system. Railways began to be built. Modern industries and commerce were given top priority. Political organizations were permitted. Newspapers were published for the first time. Students were sent abroad to study science, mandarins dispatched to learn democracy and parliamentary systems. In 1908, the court announced a program to become a constitutional monarchy in nine years’ time.

Mao’s province, Hunan, which had some 30 million inhabitants, became one of the most liberal and exciting places in China. Though landlocked, it was linked by navigable rivers to the coast, and in 1904 its capital, Changsha, became an “open” trading port. Large numbers of foreign traders and missionaries arrived, bringing Western ways and institutions. By the time Mao heard about modern schools, there were over a hundred of them, more than in any other part of China, and including many for women.

One was located near Mao: Eastern Hill, in the county of the Wens, his mother’s family. The fees and accommodation were quite high, but Mao got the Wens and other relatives to lobby his father, who stumped up the cost for five months. The wife of one of his Wen cousins replaced Mao’s old blue homespun mosquito net with a white machine-made muslin one in keeping with the school’s modernity.

The school was an eye-opener for Mao. Lessons included physical training, music and English, and among the reading materials were potted biographies of Napoleon, Wellington, Peter the Great, Rousseau and Lincoln. Mao heard about America and Europe for the first time, and laid eyes on a man who had been abroad — a teacher who had studied in Japan, who was given the nickname “the False Foreign Devil” by his pupils. Decades later Mao could still remember a Japanese song he taught them, celebrating Japan’s stunning military victory over Russia in 1905.

Mao was only in Eastern Hill for a few months, but this was enough for him to find a new opening. In the provincial capital, Changsha, there was a school specially set up for young people from the Wens’ county, and Mao persuaded a teacher to enroll him, even though he was strictly speaking not from the county. In spring 1911 he arrived at Changsha, feeling, in his own words, “exceedingly excited.” At seventeen, he said goodbye forever to the life of a peasant.

MAO CLAIMED LATER THAT when he was a boy in Shaoshan he had been stirred by concern for poor peasants. There is no evidence for this. He said he had been influenced while still in Shaoshan by a certain P’ang the Millstone Maker, who had been arrested and beheaded after leading a local peasant revolt, but an exhaustive search by Party historians for this hero has failed to turn up any trace of him.

There is no sign that Mao derived from his peasant roots any social concerns, much less that he was motivated by a sense of injustice. In a contemporary document, the diary of Mao’s teacher, Professor Yang Chang-chi, on 5 April 1915 the professor wrote: “My student Mao Tse-tung said that … his clan … are mostly peasants, and it is easy for them to get rich” (our italics). Mao evinced no particular sympathy for peasants.

Up to the end of 1925, when he was in his early thirties, and five years after he had become a Communist, Mao made only a few references to peasants in all his known writings and conversations. They did crop up in a letter of August 1917, but far from expressing sympathy, Mao said he was “bowled over” by the way a commander called Tseng Kuo-fan had “finished off” the biggest peasant uprising in Chinese history, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64. Two years later, in July 1919, Mao wrote an essay about people from different walks of life — so peasants were inevitably mentioned — but his list of questions was very general, and his tone unmistakably neutral. There was a remarkable absence of emotion when he mentioned peasants, compared with the passion he voiced about students, whose life he described as “a sea of bitterness.” In a comprehensive list for research he drew up in September that year, containing no fewer than 71 items, only one heading (the tenth) was about labor; the single one out of its 15 sub-heads that mentioned peasants did so only as “the question of laboring farmers intervening in politics.” From late 1920, when he entered the Communist orbit, Mao began to use expressions like “workers and peasants” and “proletariat.” But they remained mere phrases, part of an obligatory vocabulary.

Decades later, Mao talked about how, as a young man in Shaoshan, he cared about people starving. The record shows no such concern. In 1921 Mao was in Changsha during a famine. A friend of his wrote in his diary: “There are many beggars — must be over 100 a day … Most … look like skeletons wrapped in yellow skin, as if they could be blown over by a whiff of wind.” “I heard that so many people who had come here … to escape famine in their own regions had died — that those who had been giving away planks of wood [to make coffins] … can no longer afford to do so.” There is no mention of this event in Mao’s writings of the time, and no sign that he gave any thought to this issue at all.

Mao’s peasant background did not imbue him with idealism about improving the lot of Chinese peasants.

2. BECOMING A COMMUNIST (1911–20 AGE 17–26)

MAO ARRIVED IN CHANGSHA in spring 1911, on the eve of the Republican Revolution that was to end over two thousand years of imperial rule. Though Changsha seemed “just like a mediaeval town” to the British philosopher Bertrand Russell a decade later, with “narrow streets … no traffic possible except sedan chairs and rickshaws,” it was not merely in touch with new ideas and trends, it seethed with Republican activity.

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.

Mao was not a loner, and, like students the world over, he and his friends talked long and hard. The college was situated near the Xiang River, the biggest river in Hunan. Swimming in the Xiang inspired Mao to write a rather flamboyant poem in 1917. In the evenings the friends would go for long walks along its banks, enjoying the sight of junks gliding by the Island of Oranges which was covered with orchards of orange trees. On summer evenings they climbed the hill behind the school and sat arguing deep into the night on the grass where crickets crooned and glow-worms twinkled, ignoring the summons of the bugle to bed.

Mao and his friends also traveled. There was complete freedom of movement, and no need for identity papers. During the summer vacation of 1917, Mao and a friend wandered round the countryside for a month, earning food and shelter from peasants by doing calligraphy to decorate their front doors. On another occasion, Mao and two fellow students walked along a newly built railway, and when dusk descended, knocked on the door of a hilltop monastery overlooking the Xiang River. The monks allowed them to stay the night. After dinner the friends followed the stone steps down to the river for a swim, and then sat on the sandy bank and expounded their views, to the lapping of the waves. The guest room had a veranda, and the friends went on talking in the quiet of the night. One was moved by the loveliness of the still night, and said he wanted to become a monk.

In this and other conversations, Mao poured scorn on his fellow Chinese. “The nature of the people of the country is inertia,” he said. “They worship hypocrisy, are content with being slaves, and narrow-minded.” This was a common enough sentiment among the educated at the time, when people were casting around for explanations for why China had been so easily defeated by foreign powers and was trailing so badly in the modern world. But what Mao said next was uncommon extremism. “Mr. Mao also proposed burning all the collections of prose and poetry after the Tang and Sung dynasties in one go,” a friend wrote in his diary.

This is the first known occasion when Mao mentioned one theme that was to typify his rule — the destruction of Chinese culture. When he first said it in that moonlit monastery, it had not sounded totally outlandish. At that time of unprecedented personal and intellectual freedom, the freest moment in Chinese history, everything that had been taken for granted was questioned, and what had been viewed as wrong proclaimed as right. Should there be countries? Families? Marriage? Private property? Nothing was too outrageous, too shocking, or unsayable.

IT WAS IN THIS ENVIRONMENT that Mao’s views on morals took shape. In the winter of 1917–18, still a student as he turned twenty-four, he wrote extensive commentaries on a book called A System of Ethics, by a minor late-nineteenth-century German philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen. In these notes, Mao expressed the central elements in his own character, which stayed consistent for the remaining six decades of his life and defined his rule.

Mao’s attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, “I,” above everything else: “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others … People like me want to … satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.”

Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. “People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.” “I am responsible only for the reality that I know,” he wrote, “and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don’t know about the past, I don’t know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.” He explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations. “Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself … I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.”

Mao did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally. A good name after death, he said, “cannot bring me any joy, because it belongs to the future and not to my own reality.” “People like me are not building achievements to leave for future generations.” Mao did not care what he left behind.

He argued that conscience could go to hell if it was in conflict with his impulses:

These two should be one and the same. All our actions … are driven by impulse, and the conscience that is wise goes along with this in every instance. Sometimes … conscience restrains impulses such as overeating or over-indulgence in sex. But conscience is only there to restrain, not oppose. And the restraint is for better completion of the impulse.

As conscience always implies some concern for other people, and is not a corollary of hedonism, Mao was rejecting the concept. His view was: “I do not think these [commands like ‘do not kill,’ ‘do not steal,’ and ‘do not slander’] have to do with conscience. I think they are only out of self-interest for self-preservation.” All considerations must “be purely calculation for oneself, and absolutely not for obeying external ethical codes, or for so-called feelings of responsibility …”

Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao’s outlook.

These attributes he held to be reserved for “Great Heroes”—a group to which he appointed himself. For this elite, he said:

Everything outside their nature, such as restrictions and constraints, must be swept away by the great strength in their nature … When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses, they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible. Their power is like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, and like a sex-maniac on heat and prowling for a lover … there is no way to stop them.

The other central element in his character which Mao spelled out now was the joy he took in upheaval and destruction. “Giant wars,” he wrote, “will last as long as heaven and earth and will never become extinct … The ideal of a world of Great Equality and Harmony [da tong, Confucian ideal society] is mistaken.” This was not just the prediction that a pessimist might make; it was Mao’s desideratum, which he asserted was what the population at large wished. “Long-lasting peace,” he claimed:

is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace … When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another … which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored … Human nature loves sudden swift changes.

MAO SIMPLY COLLAPSED the distinction between reading about stirring events and actually living through cataclysm. He ignored the fact that, for the overwhelming majority, war meant misery. He even articulated a cavalier attitude towards death:

Human beings are endowed with the sense of curiosity. Why should we treat death differently? Don’t we want to experience strange things? Death is the strangest thing, which you will never experience if you go on living … Some are afraid of it because the change comes too drastically. But I think this is the most wonderful thing: where else in this world can we find such a fantastic and drastic change?

Using a very royal “we,” Mao went on: “We love sailing on a sea of upheavals. To go from life to death is to experience the greatest upheaval. Isn’t it magnificent!” This might at first seem surreal, but when later tens of millions of Chinese were starved to death under his rule, Mao told his inner ruling circle it did not matter if people died — and even that death was to be celebrated. As so often, he applied his attitude only to other people, not to himself. Throughout his own life he was obsessed with finding ways to thwart death, doing everything he could to perfect his security and enhance his medical care.

When he came to the question “How do we change [China]?” Mao laid the utmost emphasis on destruction: “the country must be … destroyed and then reformed.” He extended this line not just to China but to the whole world — and even the universe: “This applies to the country, to the nation, and to mankind … The destruction of the universe is the same … People like me long for its destruction, because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better!”

These views, worded so clearly at the age of twenty-four, remained at the core of Mao’s thinking throughout his life. In 1918, he had little prospect of putting them into practice and they had no impact, though he seems to have been someone who made an impression. His teacher Yang Chang-chi wrote of him in his diary of 5 April 1915: “My student Mao Tse-tung said that … his … father was a peasant and is now turning into a merchant … And yet, he [Mao] is so fine and outstanding. Really hard to come by … As peasant stock often produces extraordinary talents, I encouraged him …” But Mao did not appear to have leadership qualities. Another teacher of his said later that he showed “no special talent for leadership” at school. When he tried to form a sort of club and put up notices, only a few people turned up and it did not come to anything. When a dozen friends formed a New People’s Study Society in April 1918, Mao was not elected its leader.

HE EVEN FOUND IT HARD to get a job after he graduated from the teacher-training college in June 1918. At the time, it was common for young graduates to aspire to go abroad to study. For those whose families could not afford to support them, as in Mao’s case, there was a scheme to go to France on a work-and-study program. France needed manpower after losing so many young men in the First World War (one of the jobs Chinese laborers had been brought in to do was to remove corpses from the battlefields).

Some of Mao’s friends went to France. Mao did not. The prospect of physical labor put him off. And another factor seems to have played a part — the requirement to learn French. Mao was no good at languages, and all his life spoke only his own local dialect and not even the putonghua—“common speech”—that his own regime made its official language. In 1920, when going to Russia was in vogue, and Mao fancied going (he told a girlfriend “my mind is filled with happiness and hope” at the thought), he was deterred by having to learn Russian. He made a stab at it, taking lessons from a Russian émigré (and agent), Sergei Polevoy. But according to Polevoy the other students teased Mao when he could not even master the alphabet, and he left in a huff. Unlike many of his radical contemporaries, including most of the future Chinese Communist leaders, Mao went to neither France nor Russia.

Instead, after leaving the college, Mao borrowed some money and set out for Peking, the capital, to try his luck. Peking in 1918 was one of the most beautiful cities in the world, where in front of magnificent palaces camels strolled in the streets. The imperial gardens near where Mao took lodgings had just been opened to the public. When winter came, he and his friends — all southerners who had seldom seen snow or ice — would marvel at the frozen lakes, encircled by drooping willows heavy with icicles and wide-open winter plums.

But life in the capital was harsh. The great freedom and opportunities that modernization had introduced to China had brought little material advantage, and much of the country was still extremely poor. Mao stayed with seven other friends in three tiny rooms. Four of them squeezed onto one kang, a heated brick bed, under a single quilt, packed so tight that when one of them needed to turn, he had to warn the men on either side. Between the eight of them, they had only two coats, and had to take turns going out. As there was heating in the library, Mao went there to read in the evenings.

Mao got nowhere in Peking. For a while he found work as a junior librarian, earning 8 yuan a month — a living wage. One of his jobs was to record the names of people who came to read the newspapers, many of whom he recognized as leading intellectuals, but he made no great impression, and they paid him no attention. Mao felt snubbed, and he bore his grudges hard. He claimed later that “most of them did not treat me like a human being.” Less than six months after arriving, he left, so broke that he had to borrow money to travel home in stages. He returned to Changsha in April 1919, via Shanghai, where he saw his friends off to France. He had looked in from the outside at the intellectual and political life of cosmopolitan big cities, and now had to settle for a lowly job as a part-time history teacher in a primary school back in his home province.

Mao did not present himself as a model teacher. He was unkempt, and never seemed to change his clothes. His pupils remembered him disheveled, with holes in his socks, wearing home-made cotton shoes ready to fall apart. But at least he observed basic proprieties. Two years later, when he was teaching in another establishment, people complained about him being naked from the waist up. When asked to dress more decently, Mao retorted: “There wouldn’t be anything scandalous if I was stark naked. Consider yourself lucky I’m not completely naked.”

MAO HAD RETURNED to Changsha at a pivotal historical moment. At the time, there were a number of enclaves in China leased by foreign powers. These operated outside Chinese jurisdiction, with foreign gunboats often nearby to protect expatriates. Newly awakened public opinion in China demanded that these virtual mini-colonies be handed back. And yet, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which drew up the post — First World War settlement, and in which a Chinese delegation took part, allowed Japan to stay on in territory in Shandong which Japan had seized from Germany during the war. This infuriated nationalist sentiment. On 4 May 1919, for the first time in history, a big street demonstration took place in Peking, denouncing the government for “selling out,” and protesting against the Japanese holding on to Chinese territory. The movement ripped across China. Japanese goods were burned in cities and towns, and shops that sold them were attacked. Many Chinese were disappointed that a Republican government had not managed to obtain a better deal from foreign powers than its Manchu predecessor. The sentiment grew that something more radical must be done.

In Changsha, where there were now so many foreign interests that Japan, the US and Britain had opened consulates there, a militant student union was formed, which included teachers. Mao was actively involved as the editor of its magazine, the Xiang River Review. In the first number, he declared his radical views: “We must now doubt what we dared not doubt, employ methods we dared not employ.” It was a shoestring operation: Mao not only had to write most of the articles himself, in stifling heat, while bedbugs raced over the pile of soft-bound Chinese classics that formed his pillow, he had to sell the Review at street corners. Only five issues were published.

Mao continued to write occasional pieces in other journals. Among his output were ten articles dealing with women and the family. Mao was an advocate of women’s independence, free choice in marriage, and equality with men — views not uncommon among the radicals. These outpourings seem to have been inspired by the death on 5 October 1919 of his mother, whom he loved. He had been sending her prescriptions for her ailments, diphtheria and a lymph node condition, and had arranged for her to be brought to Changsha for treatment. There, in spring that year, she had her first and only photograph taken at the age of fifty-two, with her three sons, an image of inner peace. Mao wears an expression of quiet determination and aloofness. Unlike his two brothers, who are clad in farmers’ garments and look like gauche peasants, he has an air of grace in his long gown, the traditional attire for scholars and gentry.

In Mao’s relationship with his mother, while she seems to have shown unconditional love and indulgence for him, his treatment of her combined strong feelings with selfishness. In later life, he told one of his closest staff a revealing story: “When my mother was dying, I told her I could not bear to see her looking in agony. I wanted to keep a beautiful image of her, and told her I wanted to stay away for a while. My mother was a very understanding person, and she agreed. So the image of my mother in my mind has always been and still is today a healthy and beautiful one.” On her deathbed, the person who took priority in Mao’s consideration was himself, not his mother, nor did he hesitate to say so.

Less surprisingly, Mao treated his dying father coldly. Yi-chang died from typhoid on 23 January 1920, and before his death he longed to see his eldest son, but Mao stayed away, and showed no feeling of sadness for him.

In an article written on 21 November 1919, shortly after his mother’s death, and entitled “On Women’s Independence,” Mao claimed that “Women can do as much physical labour as men. It’s just that they can’t do such work during childbirth.” So his answer to “women’s independence” was that “women should prepare enough … before they marry so as to support themselves,” and even that “women should stockpile necessities for the period of childbirth themselves.” Evidently, as a man, Mao did not want to have to look after women. He wanted no responsibility towards them. Moreover, his insistence that women could manage the same kind of manual labor as men, which went against obvious reality, showed he felt little tenderness towards them. When he came to power, the core of his approach to women was to put them to heavy manual labor. In 1951 he penned his first inscription for Women’s Day, which went: “Unite to take part in production …”

AT THE END OF 1919, radical students and teachers in Hunan started a drive to oust the provincial warlord governor, whose name was Chang Ching-yao. Mao went with a delegation to lobby the central government in Peking, writing petitions and pamphlets on an altar in a Tibetan temple where he was staying. Although the delegation failed to achieve its goal, Mao was able as a leading Hunan radical to meet some famous personalities, including Hu Shih, a brilliant liberal figure, and Li Ta-chao, a prominent Marxist.

But it was on his way back via Shanghai that Mao had the crucial encounter that was to change his life. In June 1920 he called on a Professor Chen Tu-hsiu, at the time China’s foremost Marxist intellectual, who was in the midst of forming a Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao had written a long article calling him “a bright star in the world of thought.” Aged forty, Chen was the undisputed leader of Chinese Marxists, a true believer, charismatic, with a volatile temper.

The idea of forming this Communist Party did not stem from the professor, nor from any other Chinese. It originated in Moscow. In 1919 the new Soviet government had set up the Communist International, the Comintern, to foment revolution and influence policy in Moscow’s interest around the world. In August, Moscow launched a huge secret program of action and subversion for China, starting a commitment of money, men and arms three decades long, which culminated in bringing the Communists under Mao to power in 1949—Soviet Russia’s most lasting triumph in foreign policy.

In January 1920 the Bolsheviks took Central Siberia and established an overland link with China. The Comintern sent a representative, Grigori Voitinsky, to China in April. In May it established a center in Shanghai, with a view, as another agent reported to Moscow, to “constructing a Chinese Party.” Voitinsky then proposed to Professor Chen that a Communist Party be set up. By June Voitinsky was reporting home that Chen was to be made Party Secretary (i.e., the head) and was contacting “revolutionaries in various cities.”

This was exactly when Mao showed up on Chen’s doorstep. He had chanced upon the emergence of the CCP. Mao was not invited to be one of the founders. Nor, it seems, was he told it was about to be formed. The eight or so founding members were all eminent Marxists, and Mao had not yet even said that he believed in Marxism. The Party was founded in August, after Mao had left Shanghai.

But although not one of the founders, Mao was in the immediate outer ring. Professor Chen gave him the assignment of opening a bookshop in Changsha to sell Party literature. The professor was in the middle of making his influential monthly, New Youth, the voice of the Party. The July issue carried write-ups about Lenin and the Soviet government. From that autumn the magazine was subsidized by the Comintern.

Mao’s job was to distribute New Youth and other Communist publications (as well as selling other books and journals). Though not a committed Communist, Mao was a radical. He also loved books and welcomed a job. Soon after he returned to Changsha, an advertisement issued about the bookshop contained the bizarre declaration, penned by himself that: “There is no new culture in the entire world. Only a little flower of new culture has been discovered in Russia on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.” The bookshop immediately placed an order for 165 copies of the July issue of New Youth, by far its biggest order. Another large order, 130 copies, was for Labour World, a new Party journal for workers. Most other journals the bookshop ordered were radical and pro-Russia.

Mao was not risking his neck by undertaking pro-Communist activities, which were not a crime. For now, Communist Russia was actually in vogue. In Changsha, a Russia Study Society was being founded, with no less a personage than the county chief as its head. Russia’s popularity was in large part due to a fraud perpetrated by the new Bolshevik government — the claim that it was renouncing the old Tsarist privileges and territory in China, when in fact it retained them. Russian-controlled territory covered over a quarter of a million acres, and constituted the largest foreign concession in the country.

Mao was in charge of the bookshop, but he got a friend to run it. An important trait emerged at this time — he had a gift for delegating chores, and spotting the people to perform them. Mao gave himself the title of “special liaison man,” soliciting donations from the wealthy, and dealing with publishers, libraries, universities and leading intellectuals all over the country. Professor Chen and a number of luminaries were listed as guarantors for the bookshop, which hugely boosted Mao’s status, and helped him to win a creditable post as headmaster of the primary school attached to his old college.

There is no evidence that Mao formally joined the Party now, although by November, thanks to the bookshop, he counted as “one of us.” When Moscow decided to set up an organization in Hunan called the Socialist Youth League, to create a pool of potential Party members, Mao was contacted to do the job. The following month, in a letter to friends in France, he declared that he “deeply agreed” with the idea of “using the Russian model to reform China and the world.” This was his first expression of Communist belief.

APPROACHING TWENTY-SEVEN, Mao had become a Communist — not after an idealistic journey, or driven by passionate belief, but by being at the right place at the right time, and being given a job that was highly congenial to him. He had effectively been incorporated into an expanding organization.

His best friend at the time, Siao-yu, thought the cost of the Russian way was too high and wrote to Mao from France saying what he and some others felt:

We don’t think some human beings should be sacrificed for the welfare of the majority. We are in favor of a moderate revolution, through education, and seeking the welfare of all … We regard Russian-style — Marxist — revolutions as ethically wrong …

Mao summed up their approach as “using peaceful means to seek the happiness of all.” He argued against it not on idealistic grounds but invoking sheer realism: “I have two comments …: All very well in theory; but can’t be done in practice.” “Ideals are important,” said Mao, “but reality is even more important.”

Mao was no fervent believer. This absence of heartfelt commitment would result in a most unconventional and unusual relationship with his Party throughout his life, even when he was the head of that Party.

This has been a delicate point for Mao and his successors, and as a result official history dates the founding of the Party to 1921, as that was the first time Mao could verifiably be located at a Party conclave, the 1st Congress. This is duly commemorated with a museum in Shanghai which enshrines the myth that Mao was a founding member of the Party. That the Party was founded in 1920, not 1921, is confirmed both by the official magazine of the Comintern and by one of the Moscow emissaries who organized the 1st Congress.

3. LUKEWARM BELIEVER (1920–25 AGE 26–31)

AT THE SAME TIME as Mao became involved with the Communist Party, he developed a relationship with the daughter of his former teacher Yang Chang-chi. Yang Kai-hui, eight years Mao’s junior, was to become his second wife.

She was born in 1901 in an idyllic spot outside Changsha. A delicate and sensitive child, she was brought up by her mother, who came from a scholar’s family, while her father spent eleven years abroad, in Japan, Britain and Germany, studying ethics, logic and philosophy. When he returned to Changsha, in spring 1913, he brought back European ways, and encouraged his daughter to join him and his male students at meals, which was unheard-of in those days. Beautiful, elegant, wistful and articulate, she bowled over all the young men.

Her father was impressed with Mao’s brains, and gave him high recommendations to influential people. “I am telling you seriously,” he wrote to one of them, “these two people [Mao and another student, Cai He-sen] are rare talents in China, and will have a great future … you cannot but pay serious attention to them.” When he became a professor of ethics at Peking University in 1918, he welcomed Mao to stay with his family during Mao’s first — and fruitless — venture to Peking. Kai-hui was then seventeen, and Mao was very keen on her, but she did not respond. She wrote years later:

When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I began to have my own views about marriage. I was against any marriage that involved rituals. I also thought that to seek love deliberately would easily and inevitably lose true, sacred, incredible, the highest, the most beautiful and unsurpassable love!.. There is an expression which best expressed my thoughts: “Not to have if not perfect.”

In January 1920, her father died. Mao was in Peking on his second trip, and spent a lot of time with the family. It was then that she fell in love with Mao. She was to write:

Father died! My beloved father died! Of course I was very sad. But I felt death was also a relief for Father, and so I was not too sad.

But I did not expect to be so lucky. I had a man I loved. I really loved him so much. I had been in love with him after I had heard a lot about him, and had read many of his articles and diaries … Although I loved him, I would not show it. I was convinced that love was in the hands of nature, and I must not presumptuously demand or pursue it …

So she still held back. Then they were parted when Kai-hui escorted her father’s coffin back to Changsha, where she entered a missionary school. The distance only heightened her feelings. She later recalled:

He wrote me many letters, expressing his love. Still I did not dare to believe I had such luck. If it had not been for a friend who knew his [Mao’s] feelings and told me about them — saying that he was very miserable because of me — I believe I would have remained single all my life. Ever since I came to know his true feelings towards me completely, from that day on, I had a new sense. I felt that apart from living for my mother, I was also living for him … I was imagining that if there were a day when he died, and when my mother was also no longer with me, I would definitely follow him and die with him!

When Mao returned to Changsha later that year, they became lovers. Mao was living in the school where he was the headmaster, and Kai-hui would visit him there. But she would not stay the night. They were not married, and the year was 1920, when living together outside marriage was unthinkable for a lady. Nor did Mao want to be tied down. In a letter to a friend on 26 November, he inveighed: “I think that all men and women in the marriage system are in nothing but a ‘rape league’ … I refuse to join this rape league.” He broached the idea of forming a “Resisting Marriage Alliance,” saying: “Even if no one else agrees with me, I am my own ‘one-man alliance.’ ”

One night, after she was gone, Mao was unable to sleep, and wrote a poem that opened with these lines:

Sorrow, piled on my pillow, what is your shape?

Like waves in rivers and seas, you endlessly churn.

How long the night, how dark the sky, when will it be light?

Restless, I sat up, gown thrown over my shoulders, in the cold.

When dawn came at last, only ashes remained of my hundred thoughts …

Helped by this poem, Mao managed to persuade Kai-hui to stay overnight. The walls were just thin boards, and some of the residents complained when the pair made passionate love. One neighbor cited a rule saying that teachers’ wives were forbidden to sleep in the school, but Mao was the headmaster: he changed the rule, and started a precedent that teachers’ wives could stay in schools.

For Kai-hui, staying the night meant giving the whole of herself. “My willpower had long given way,” she was to write, “and I had allowed myself to live in romance. I had come to the conclusion: ‘Let Heaven collapse and Earth sink down! Let this be the end!’ What meaning would my life have if I didn’t live for my mother and for him? So I lived in a life of love …”

Mao’s feelings were no match for Kai-hui’s, and he continued to see other girlfriends, in particular a widowed teacher called Si-yung, who was three years his junior. She helped a lot with raising funds for the bookshop, as some of her pupils came from rich families. She and Mao traveled as a couple.

When Kai-hui found out, she was shattered: “Then suddenly one day, a bomb fell on my head. My feeble life was devastatingly hit, and was almost destroyed by this blow!” But she forgave Mao. “However, this was only how I felt when I first heard the news. After all, he is not an ordinary man. She [Si-yung] loved him so passionately she would give everything for him. He also loved her, but he would not betray me, and he did not betray me in the end.” Mao seems to have explained away his affair by claiming he felt unsure of Kai-hui’s love. She chose to believe him:

… now the lid on his heart, and on my heart, were both lifted. I saw his heart, and he saw mine completely. (We both have proud temperaments, me more so at the time. I was doing everything to stop him from seeing my heart — my heart of love for him — so that he came to doubt me, and thought I didn’t love him. And because of his pride, he wouldn’t let any feelings show. Only now did we truly understand each other.) As a result, we were closer than ever.

Kai-hui moved in with Mao, and they got married at the end of 1920. At the time, radicals shunned the old family rituals that cemented marriage, and a new registration system had yet to be adopted, so there was not even a formal certificate.

On account of her marriage, Kai-hui was expelled from her missionary school. Mao’s affairs continued, and he actually started two new relationships soon after his marriage. A close friend of his at the time told us this, writing the characters bu-zhen, “unfaithful,” on the table with his finger. One of these liaisons was with a cousin of Kai-hui’s. When Kai-hui found out, she was so distraught that she hit her cousin, but she rarely made scenes, and stayed faithful to Mao. She was later to write with resignation:

I learnt many more things, and gradually I came to understand him. Not just him, but human nature in all people. Anyone who has no physical handicap must have two attributes. One is sex drive, and the other is the emotional need for love. My attitude was to let him be, and let it be.

Kai-hui was by no means a conventional Chinese wife bound by tradition to endure her husband’s misconduct. In fact she was a feminist, and later wrote an essay on women’s rights: “Women are human beings, just as men are … Sisters! We must fight for the equality of men and women, and must absolutely not allow people to treat us as an accessory.”

AT THE TIME OF Mao’s second marriage, Moscow was stepping up its efforts to foment subversion in China. It began secretly training a Chinese army in Siberia, and explored armed intervention in China, as it had just attempted, unsuccessfully, in Poland. Simultaneously, it was building up one of its largest intelligence networks anywhere in the world, with a KGB station already established in Shanghai, and numerous agents, both civilian and military (GRU), in other key cities, including Canton, and, of course, Peking.

On 3 June 1921, new top-level Moscow representatives arrived, both under pseudonyms — a Russian military intelligence man called Nikolsky and a Dutchman called Maring, who had been an agitator in the Dutch East Indies. These two agents told the CCP members in Shanghai to call a congress to formalize the Party. Letters went out to seven regions where contacts had been established, asking each to send two delegates and enclosing 200 yuan to each place to cover travel to Shanghai. One lot of invitations and money came to Mao in Changsha. Two hundred yuan was the equivalent of nearly two years’ salary from his teaching job, and far more than the trip could require. It was Mao’s first known cash payment from Moscow.

He chose as his co-delegate a 45-year-old friend called Ho Shu-heng. They left quite secretively on the evening of 29 June in a small steamboat, under a stormy sky, declining the offers of friends to see them off. Although there was no law against Communist activities, they had reason to keep their heads down, as what they were engaged in was a conspiracy — collusion to establish an organization set up with foreign funding, with the aim of seizing power by illegal means.

The CCP’s 1st Congress opened in Shanghai on 23 July 1921, attended by 13 people — all journalists, students or teachers — representing a total of 57 Communists, mostly in similar occupations. Not one was a worker. Neither of the Party’s two most prestigious members, Professors Li Ta-chao and Chen Tu-hsiu, was present, even though the latter had been designated the Party chief. The two Moscow emissaries ran the show.

Maring, tall and mustachioed, made the opening speech in English, translated by one of the delegates. Participants seemed to recall its length — several hours — more than its content. Long speeches were rare in China at the time. Nikolsky was remembered as the one who made the short speech.

The presence of the foreigners, and the control they exercised, at once became an issue. The chair was allotted to one Chang Kuo-tao (later Mao’s major challenger), because he had been to Russia and had links with the foreigners. One delegate recalled that Kuo-tao at one point proposed canceling the resolution of the previous evening. “I confronted him: how is it that a resolution passed by the meeting could be canceled just like that? He said it was the view of the Russian representatives. I was extremely angry … ‘So we don’t need to have meetings, we just have orders from the Russians.’ ” The protest was in vain. Another delegate suggested that before they went along with the Russian plans they should investigate whether Bolshevism actually worked, and proposed sending one mission to Russia and one to Germany — a proposal that alarmed Moscow’s men, and was duly rejected.

Mao spoke little and made little impact. Compared with delegates from the larger cities, he was something of a provincial, clad in a traditional cotton gown and black cotton shoes, rather than a European-style suit, the attire of many young progressives. He did not strive to impress, and was content mainly to listen.

The meeting had started in a house in the French Settlement, and the police in these enclaves, known as “Concessions,” were vigilant about Communist activities. On the evening of 30 July a stranger barged in, and Maring, smelling a police spy, ordered the delegates to leave. The Chinese participants adjourned to a small town outside Shanghai called Jiaxing, on a lake strewn with water chestnuts. Moscow’s men stayed away from this final session for fear of attracting attention.

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.

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.”

There were effective labor organizers around, though, especially two non-Communists who founded a Hunan Labor Union and recruited more than 3,000 of the approximately 7,000 workers in Changsha. The two were arrested in January 1922 while leading a big strike. In the small hours, they were executed — hacked to death in the traditional manner, an event that gave rise to a storm of protest nationwide. When the governor who killed them was later asked why he did not target Mao, his answer was that he had not seen Mao as a threat.

IT WAS THANKS TO HIS ineffectiveness at organizing labor and recruiting that Mao was dropped from the Party’s 2nd Congress in July 1922. This was a most important occasion, as it passed a charter and endorsed joining the Comintern, thus formally accepting outright Moscow control. Later, Mao tried to explain away his absence by claiming that he “intended to attend” but “forgot the name of the place where it was to be held, could not find any comrades, and missed it.” In fact, Mao knew plenty of Party people in Shanghai, including some of the delegates, and there was no chance that he could have accidentally missed what was a very formal occasion. His absence from the congress meant that he might lose his position as the Party boss in Hunan. Russian funds would no longer come through him, and he would have to take orders from someone else. This prospect spurred him to act: first he visited a lead and zinc mine in April 1922, and in May he went back to Anyuan, the coal-mining center. He also led a number of demonstrations and strikes. On 24 October, when Kai-hui gave birth to their first child, a son, Mao was not with her, as he was away negotiating on behalf of the builders’ union. He gave their son the name An-ying: An was a generation name; ying meant “an outstanding person.”

Mao also finally set up a Hunan Party committee at the end of May, a year after being made Hunan boss. It had thirty members, most of them not recruited by himself. The future president, Liu Shao-chi, described on his deathbed how the committee worked under Mao. “I had many meetings at Chairman Mao’s house,” he wrote, “and apart from asking questions, I had no chance to speak at all. In the end, it was always what Chairman Mao said that went … the Party in Hunan already had its own leader and its own distinctive style — different from the Party in Shanghai.” Liu was putting on record as explicitly as he could that Mao had already started behaving dictatorially in the earliest days of the Party.

Meanwhile, as Mao worked to mend fences with the center of power, he had a lucky break. In January 1923 most of the CCP cadres working in Shanghai found themselves at odds with an order from Moscow to do something seemingly bizarre, and arbitrary: to join another political party, the Nationalists (also known as the Kuomintang, or KMT). Moscow needed provincial Communists who would support its position — and found Mao.

THE NATIONALIST PARTY had been founded in 1912 by the merger of a number of Republican groups. Its leader was Sun Yat-sen, who had briefly been the first provisional president of the Republic, before losing power to the army chief Yuan Shih-kai. Since then, Sun had been trying to form his own army and overthrow the Peking government.

This objective led Sun to embrace Moscow. The Russians shared his goal of subverting the Peking government, as it was refusing its consent to their occupation of Outer Mongolia, which was then Chinese territory. The CCP was far too small to topple the Peking government, so Moscow’s envoys looked round among various provincial potentates, and found that the only one willing to accept the Soviet presence was Sun.

Sun was based in Canton, the capital of the southern coastal province of Guangdong. He asked the Russians to help him build a force strong enough to conquer China. In September 1922 he told a Russian envoy that he wanted to establish “an army with arms and military matériel supplies from Russia.” In return, as well as endorsing the Soviet occupation of Outer Mongolia, Sun proposed that Russia occupy the huge mineral-rich province of Xinjiang in the northwest. Russia’s chief envoy, Adolf Joffe, reported in November that Sun “asks that one of our divisions should take Xinjiang … where there are only 4,00 °Chinese troops and there cannot be any resistance.” He suggested to the Russians that they invade from Xinjiang deep into the heartland of China, as far as Chengdu in Sichuan, on his behalf.

Not only did Sun have big ambitions and few scruples, he had a sizable party with thousands of registered members, and a territorial base with a major seaport at Canton. So in early January 1923 the Soviet Politburo decided: “Give full backing to the Nationalists,” with “money [from] the reserve funds of the Comintern.” The decision was signed by the up-and-coming Stalin, who had begun to take a close interest in China. Sun had thus become, as Joffe told Lenin, “our man” (italics in original). His price was “2 million Mexican dollars maximum,” roughly 2 million gold rubles. “Isn’t all this worth 2 million roubles?” Joffe asked.

Moscow knew that Sun had his own agenda, and was trying to use Russia, just as Russia was trying to use him. It wanted its local client, the CCP, to be right there on the spot to ensure that Sun toed Moscow’s line and served Moscow’s interest. So it ordered the Chinese Communists to join the Nationalist Party. In a secret session, Stalin spelled out: “we cannot give directives out of here, Moscow, openly. We do this through the Communist Party of China and other comrades in camera, confidentially …”

Moscow wanted to use the CCP as a Trojan horse to manipulate the much bigger Nationalist Party; but all CCP leaders, starting from Professor Chen, opposed joining Sun’s party, on the grounds that it rejected communism and that Sun was just another “lying,” “unscrupulous” politician out for power. Moscow was told that sponsoring Sun was “wasting the blood and sweat of Russia, and perhaps the blood and sweat of the world proletariat.”

Maring, the Comintern envoy, faced a revolt. This is almost certainly why Mao was brought to Party HQ. The pragmatic Mao embraced Moscow’s strategy. He promptly joined the Nationalist Party himself. A more fervent Communist, actually an old friend of Mao’s, Cai He-sen, told the Comintern that when Maring put forward the slogan “All work for the Nationalists,” “its [only] supporter was Mao.”

Mao did not believe in his tiny Party’s prospects, or that communism had any broad appeal. He made this crystal-clear at the CCP’s 3rd Congress in June 1923. The only hope of creating a Communist China, he said, was by means of a Russian invasion. Mao “was so pessimistic,” Maring (who chaired the congress) reported, “that he saw the only salvation of China in the intervention by Russia,” telling the congress “that the revolution had to be brought into China from the north by the Russian army.” This was in essence what happened two decades later.

His enthusiasm for the Moscow line shot Mao into the core of the Party, under Maring. There he exerted himself as never before, now that he could see hope in what he was doing. Moscow’s chief bagman in China, Vilde, who doubled as the Soviet vice-consul in Shanghai, singled out Mao and one other person in a report to Moscow as “most definitely, good cadres.” Mao was appointed the assistant to Party chief Professor Chen, with responsibility for correspondence, documents, and taking the minutes at meetings. All Party letters had to be co-signed by him and Chen. In imitation of Chen, Mao signed with an English signature: T. T. Mao. One of the first things Chen and he did was to write to Moscow for more money—“now that our work front is expanding.”

HAVING SHEPHERDED its local Communist clients into the Nationalists, Moscow now sent a higher-level operator to control both the CCP and the Nationalists and to coordinate their actions. Mikhail Borodin, a charismatic agitator, was appointed Sun Yat-sen’s political adviser at Stalin’s recommendation in August 1923. A veteran of revolutionary activities in America, Mexico and Britain, he was a good orator, with a powerful voice, a dynamic organizer and a shrewd strategist (he was the first person to recommend that the Chinese Communists should move to northwest China to get near the Russian border, which they did a decade later). He inspired descriptions like “majestic,” and radiated energy even when ill.

Borodin reorganized the Nationalists on the Russian model, dubbing their institutions with Communist names, such as Propaganda Department. At the Nationalists’ First Congress in Canton, in January 1924, Mao and many other Chinese Communists took part, and the tiny CCP secured a disproportionate number of posts. Moscow now started to bankroll the Nationalists in a big way. Most importantly, it funded and trained an army, and established a military academy. Set on a picturesque island in the Pearl River some ten kilometers from Canton, the Whampoa Academy was modeled on Soviet institutions, with Russian advisers and many Communist teachers and students. Planes and artillery were shipped in from Soviet Russia, and it was thanks to Russian-trained troops, backed in the field by cohorts of Soviet advisers, that the Nationalists were able to expand their base substantially.

Mao was very active in the Nationalist Party, and became one of sixteen alternate members to its top body, the Central Executive Committee. For the rest of the year, he did most of his work in the Nationalist office in Shanghai. It was Mao who helped form the Hunan Nationalist branch, which became one of the biggest.

Mao even went as far as seldom attending meetings of his own Party. His keenness about working with the Nationalists drew fire from his fellow Communists. His old — and more ideological — friend Cai later complained to the Comintern that in Hunan “our organisation lost almost all political significance. All political questions were decided in the Nationalist provincial committee, not in the Communist Party Provincial Committee.” Another dedicated labor organizer concurred: “Mao at that time was against an independent trade union movement for workers.”

Moreover, Mao suddenly found himself cold-shouldered by some of Moscow’s envoys, as his patron Maring had left China the previous October. Although Mao got on well with Borodin, he struggled to defend himself against the ideological purists. Moscow had ordered the Chinese Communists to keep their separate identity and independence, while infiltrating the Nationalists, but the ideologically woolly Mao could not draw the line between the parties. On 30 March 1924, one of these ideologue envoys, Sergei Dalin, wrote to Voitinsky:

What you would hear from CC [Central Committee] Secretary Mao (undoubtedly a placeman of Maring’s) would make your hair stand on end — for instance, that the [Nationalist Party] was and is a proletarian party and must be recognised by the Communist International as one of its sections … This character represented the Party in the Socialist Youth League … I have written to the Party’s CC and asked it to appoint another representative.

Mao was duly fired from this position. Criticized as “opportunistic” and “right-wing,” he found himself kicked out of the Central Committee, and was not even invited to attend the next CCP congress scheduled for January 1925. His health now took a downturn, and he grew thin and ill. A then house-mate and colleague told us that Mao had “problems in his head … he was preoccupied with his affairs.” His nervous condition was reflected in his bowels, which sometimes moved only once a week. He was to be plagued by constipation — and obsessed by defecation — all his life.

Mao was edged out of Shanghai at the end of 1924. He returned to Hunan, but not to any Party position, and the only place to go was his home village of Shaoshan, where he arrived on 6 February 1925 with over 50 kg of books, claiming he was “convalescing.” He had been with the Communist Party for over four years — years full of ups and downs. At the age of thirty-one, his lack of ideological clarity and fervor had landed him back in his family property. Mao’s setbacks during these initial years of the CCP are still kept tightly covered up. Mao did not want it known that he had been ineffectual at Party work, or extremely keen on the Nationalist Party (which became the main enemy for the Communists in the years to come) — or that he was ideologically rather vague.

Si-yung was to die of illness in 1931.

Siao-yu parted company with Mao around now, and later became a Nationalist government official. He died in Uruguay in 1976.

Total Party membership nationwide was 195 as of the end of June 1922.

The CCP at that point had 994 members.

4. RISE AND DEMISE IN THE NATIONALIST PARTY (1925–27 AGE 31–33)

FOR EIGHT MONTHS MAO LIVED in the family house in Shaoshan. He and his two brothers had inherited the house and a fair amount of land from their parents, and the property had been looked after by relatives. The two brothers had been working in Changsha for the Party, having been recruited by Mao. Now they both came home with him. In Changsha, only 50 km away, the Hunan Communists were organizing strikes, demonstrations and rallies, but Mao was not involved. He stayed at home, playing cards a lot of the time.

But he was watching out for a chance to return to politics — at a high level. In March 1925, Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist leader, died. His successor was a man whom Mao knew, and who was favorably disposed towards him — Wang Ching-wei. Wang had worked with Mao in Shanghai the year before, and the two had got along very well.

Born in 1883, Wang was ten years Mao’s senior. Charismatic, and an eloquent orator, he also had film-star good looks. He had played an active part in Republican activities against the Manchus, and when the Revolution broke out in October 1911 was in prison under a life sentence for his repeated attempts to assassinate high officials of the Manchu court, including the regent. Released as the dynasty collapsed, he became one of the leaders of the Nationalist Party. He was with Sun Yat-sen in Sun’s last days, and was a witness to his will, which was a strong credential to succeed him. Most important, he had the blessing of Borodin, the top Russian adviser. With about 1,000 agents in the Nationalist base, Moscow was now the master of Canton, which had taken on the air of a Soviet city, decked out with red flags and slogans. Cars raced by with Russian faces inside and Chinese bodyguards on the running-boards. Soviet cargo ships dotted the Pearl River. Behind closed doors, commissars sat around red-cloth-covered tables under the gaze of Lenin, interrogating “troublemakers” and conducting trials.

The moment Sun died, Mao dispatched his brother Tse-min to Canton to reconnoiter his chances. Tse-tan, his other brother, followed. By June it was clear that Wang was the new Nationalist chief, and Mao began to spruce up his credentials by establishing grassroots Party branches in his area. Most were for the Nationalists, not the Communists. Having been shunted out of the CCP leadership, Mao was now trying his luck with the Nationalists.

At the top of the Nationalists’ program was “anti-imperialism.” The Party had made its main task the defense of China’s interests against foreign powers, so this became the theme of Mao’s activity, even though it was far removed from peasants’ lives. Not surprisingly, the reaction was indifference. One of his co-workers recorded in his diary of 29 July: “Only one comrade turned up, and the others didn’t come. So the meeting didn’t happen.” A few days later: “The meeting failed to take place because few comrades came.” One night, he and Mao had to walk from place to place to get people together, so the meeting started very late, and did not finish until 1:15 AM. Mao said he was going home, “as he was suffering from neurasthenia, and had talked too much today. He said he wouldn’t be able to sleep here … We walked for about 2 or 3 li [1–1.5 km] and just couldn’t walk further. We were absolutely exhausted, and so spent the night at Tang Brook.”

Mao did not organisze any peasant action in the style of poor versus rich. This was partly because he thought it was pointless. He had told Borodin and some other Communists before, on 18 January 1924:

If we carry out struggles against big landlords, we are bound to fail. [In some areas, some Communists] organised the illiterate peasants first, then led them in struggles against relatively rich and big landlords. What was the result? Our organisations were immediately broken, banned, and these peasants not only did not regard us as fighting for their interests, they hated us, saying that if we hadn’t organised them, there would not have been disasters, or misfortune.

Therefore, until we are confident that our grassroots branches in the countryside are strong … we cannot adopt the policy of taking drastic steps against relatively rich landowners.

Mao was being pragmatic. A Communist called Wang Hsien-tsung in Mao’s area was organizing poor peasants to improve their lot at the time when Mao was in Shaoshan. He was accused of being a bandit, and was arrested, tortured and beheaded by the local police.

Mao prudently decided to steer clear of any such dangerous and futile activities, but the Hunan authorities still viewed him with suspicion, as he had the reputation of being a major radical. That summer there was a drought and, as had often happened in the past, poor peasants used force to stop the rich shipping grain out for sale in the towns and cities. Mao was suspected of stirring things up. In the provincial capital there had also been large “anti-imperialist” demonstrations, following an incident in Shanghai on 30 May when British police killed ten protesters in the British Settlement. Although Mao played no role in the Changsha demonstrations, and was living quietly at home, miles away, he was still assumed to be an instigator, and this notion crops up in an early appearance in US government records. The US consulate in Changsha forwarded to Washington a report by the president of Yale-in-China about “Bolshevistic disturbances” in Changsha on 15 June, saying that the Hunan governor had “received a list of twenty leaders of agitation, including Mao Tse-tung, known to be the leading Communist propagandist here.” Mao was a name, even to an (unusually well-informed) American.

So an arrest warrant was issued in late August. Mao, who was leaving for Canton in any case, decided it was time to decamp. He did so in a sedan chair, heading first to Changsha and telling the bearers that if asked who their passenger was, they should say they were carrying a doctor. Some days later a few militiamen turned up in Shaoshan in search of Mao. Finding him absent, they took some money and left, but did not otherwise disturb Mao’s family.

On the eve of his departure from Changsha, Mao took a stroll along the Xiang River, and wrote a poem in which he looked to the future:

Eagles soar up the long vault,

Fish fly down the shallow riverbed,

Under a sky of frost, ten thousand creatures vie to impose their will.

Touched by this vastness,

I ask the boundless earth:

Who after all will be your master?

Mao’s nose did not fail him. Within two weeks of arriving in Canton, in September 1925, he was given a clutch of key jobs by the Nationalist chief. Mao was to be Wang Ching-wei’s stand-in, running the Propaganda Department, as well as editor of the Nationalists’ new journal, Politics Weekly. And to underline his prominence, he also sat on the five-man committee vetting delegates for the Nationalists’ second congress the following January, at which he delivered one of the major reports. Wang’s role in Mao’s rise is something which has been sedulously obscured by Peking, all the more so because Wang became the head of the Japanese puppet government in the 1940s.

Mao’s ability to work at full pitch in Canton was due in no small part to his discovery of sleeping pills at this time. He had previously suffered from acute insomnia, which left him in a state of permanent nervous exhaustion. Now he was liberated. Later he was to rank the inventor alongside Marx.

In November 1925, while working for the Nationalists, Mao voiced an interest in the question of the Chinese peasantry for the first time. On a form he filled out, he said that he was “currently paying special attention” to these many tens of millions. On 1 December he published a long article on peasants in a Nationalist journal, and he wrote another a month later for the opening issue of the Nationalist magazine Chinese Peasants. Mao’s new interest did not stem from any personal inspiration or inclination; it came on the heels of an urgent order from Moscow in October, instructing both the Nationalists and Communists to give the issue priority. The Nationalists heeded this call at once.

It was the Russians who first ordered the CCP to pay attention to the peasantry. Back in May 1923 Moscow had already referred to “the issue of peasants” as “the centre of all our policies,” and had ordered the Chinese revolutionaries to “carry out peasant land revolution against the remnants of feudalism.” This meant aiming to divide the Chinese peasants into different classes on the basis of wealth, and to stir up the poor against the better-off. At that time, Mao had been cool towards this approach, and when his reservations were reported to Moscow he had been stripped of one of his posts. Mao’s position, as Dalin wrote to Voitinsky in March 1924, was that: “On the peasant question, the class line must be abandoned, there is nothing to be done among the poor peasants and it is necessary to establish ties with landowners and shenshih [gentry] …”

But now Mao shifted with the prevailing wind, though he got into trouble with the Russians over ideological phraseology. In his articles, Mao had attempted to apply Communist “class analysis” to the peasantry by categorizing those who owned their small plot of land as “petty bourgeoisie” and farmhands as “proletariat.” A blistering critique appeared in the Soviet advisers’ magazine, Kanton, which reached a high-grade readership in Russia, where the first personal name on its distribution list of about forty was Stalin’s. The critic, Volin, a Russian expert on the peasantry, accused Mao of arguing as though the peasants were living in a capitalist society, when China was only at the feudal stage: “one very important error leaps sharply to the eye: … that Chinese society, according to Mao, is one with a developed capitalist structure.” Mao’s article was said to be “unscientific,” “indiscriminate” and “exceptionally schematic.” Even his basic figures were way out, according to Volin: he gave the population as 400 million, when the 1922 census showed it was actually 463 million.

Luckily for Mao, the Nationalist Party did not require such high standards of theoretical correctness. In February 1926 his patron Wang Ching-wei appointed him a founding member of the Nationalists’ Peasant Movement Committee, as well as the head of the Peasant Movement Training Institute, set up two years before with Russian funds.

It was only now, when he was thirty-two, that Mao — assumed by many to this day to have been the champion of the poor peasants — took any interest in their affairs. Under Mao, the Peasant Institute churned out agitators who went into the villages, roused the poor against the rich, and organized them into “peasant associations.” In Hunan they were particularly successful after July, when the Nationalist army occupied the province. The Nationalists had just begun a march north from Canton (known as “the Northern Expedition”) to overthrow the Peking government. Hunan was the first place on the 2,000-kilometer route.

The Nationalist army was accompanied by Russian advisers. The Russians had also just opened a consulate in Changsha, and the KGB station there had the second-largest budget of any of the fourteen stations in China after Shanghai. An American missionary wrote home later that year from Changsha: “We have a Russian Consul [now]. No Russian interests here at all to represent … it is plain … what he is up to … China may pay high for his genial presence …” With close Russian supervision, the new Nationalist authorities in Hunan gave peasant associations their blessing — and funding — and by the end of the year the associations had sprung up in much of the countryside in this province of 30 million people. The social order was turned upside down.

At this time, warlords had been fighting sporadic wars for ten years, and there had been more than forty changes of the central government since the country had become a republic in 1912. But the warlords had always made sure that the social structure was preserved, and life went on as usual for civilians, as long as they were not caught in the crossfire. Now, because the Nationalists were following Russian instructions aimed at bringing about a Soviet-style revolution, social order broke down for the first time.

Violence erupted as poor peasants helped themselves to the food and money of the relatively rich, and took revenge. Thugs and sadists also indulged themselves. By December there was mayhem in the Hunan countryside. In his capacity as a leader of the peasant movement, Mao was invited back to his home province to give guidance.

CHANGSHA, WHEN MAO returned, was a changed city, with victims being paraded around in dunce’s hats (a European invention) as a sign of humiliation. Children scampered around singing “Down with the [imperialist] powers and eliminate the warlords,” the anthem of the Nationalist Revolution, sung to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”

On 20 December 1926 about 300 people crowded the Changsha slide-show theater to listen to Mao, who shared the stage with a Russian agitator called Boris Freyer. (Like virtually every Russian agent in China at this time, he later disappeared in Stalin’s purges.) Mao was no orator; his speech was two hours long, and flat. But it was moderate. “It is not the time yet to overthrow landlords,” he said. “We must make some concessions to them.” At the present stage, “we should only reduce rents and interest rates, and increase the wages of hired hands.” Quoting Mao as saying “we are not preparing to take the land immediately,” Freyer told the Russians’ control body, the Far Eastern Bureau, that Mao’s speech was basically “fine,” but inclined towards being too moderate.

Though Mao did not address the issue of violence, his general approach was not militant. Shortly afterwards he went off on an inspection tour of the Hunan countryside. By the end of the tour, which lasted thirty-two days, he had undergone a dramatic change. Mao himself was to say that before this trip he had been taking a moderate line, and “not until I stayed in Hunan for over thirty days did I completely change my attitude.” What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule.

As he wrote in his report about his tour, Mao saw that grassroots peasant association bosses were mostly “ruffians,” activists who were the poorest and roughest, and who had been the most despised. Now they had power in their hands. They “have become lords and masters, and have turned the peasant associations into something quite terrifying in their hands,” he wrote. They chose their victims arbitrarily. “They coined the phrase: ‘Anyone who has land is a tyrant, and all gentry are bad.’ ” They “strike down the landlords to the ground, and stamp on them with their feet … they trample and romp on the ivory beds of the misses and madames. They seize people whenever they feel like it, put a high dunce’s hat on them, and parade them round. All in all, they thoroughly indulge every whim … and really have created terror in the countryside.”

Mao saw that the thugs loved to toy with victims and break down their dignity, as he described with approval:

A tall paper hat is put on [the victim], and on the hat is written landed tyrant so-and-so or bad gentry so-and-so. Then the person is pulled by a rope [like pulling an animal], followed by a big crowd … This punishment makes [victims] tremble most. After one such treatment, these people are forever broken …

The threat of uncertainty, and anguish, particularly appealed to him:

The peasant association is most clever. They seized a bad gentleman and declared that they were going to [do the above to] him … But then they decided not to do it that day … That bad gentleman did not know when he would be given this treatment, so every day he lived in anguish and never knew a moment’s peace.

Mao was very taken with one weapon, the suo-biao, a sharp, twin-edged knife with a long handle like a lance: “it … makes all landed tyrants and bad gentry tremble at the sight of it. The Hunan revolutionary authorities should … make sure every young and middle-aged male has one. There should be no limit put on [the use of] it.”

Mao saw and heard much about brutality, and he liked it. In the report he wrote afterwards, in March 1927, he said he felt “a kind of ecstasy never experienced before.” His descriptions of the brutality oozed excitement, and flowed with an adrenalin rush. “It is wonderful! It is wonderful!” he exulted.

Mao was told that people had been beaten to death. When asked what to do — and for the first time the life and death of people hung on one word of his — he said: “One or two beaten to death, no big deal.” Immediately after his visit, a rally was held in the village, at which another man, who was accused of opposing the peasant association, was savagely killed.

Before Mao arrived, there had been attempts by the leaders of the peasant movement in Hunan to bring down the level of violence, and they had detained some of those who had perpetrated atrocities. Now Mao ordered the detainees to be released. A revolution was not like a dinner party, he admonished the locals; it needed violence. “It is necessary to bring about a … reign of terror in every county.” Hunan’s peasant leaders obeyed.

Mao did not once address the issue that concerned peasants most, which was land redistribution. There was actually an urgent need for leadership, as some peasant associations had already begun doing their own redistribution, by moving boundary markers and burning land leases. People put forward various specific proposals. Not Mao. All he said at a Nationalist land committee meeting discussing this issue on 12 April was: “Confiscation of land boils down to not paying rent. There is no need for anything else.”

What fascinated Mao was violence that smashed the social order. And it was this propensity that caught Moscow’s eye, as it fitted into the Soviet model of a social revolution. Mao was now published for the first time in the Comintern journal, which ran his Hunan report (though without his name on it). He had shown that although he was ideologically shaky, his instincts were those of a Leninist. Some other Communists — especially the Party leader Professor Chen, who flew into a rage when he heard about mob atrocities and insisted that they had to be reined in — were ultimately not Communists of the Soviet type. Now, more than two years after casting him out, the CCP readmitted Mao into the leading circle. In April 1927 he was restored to the Central Committee, though only into the second tier without a vote (called an alternate member).

Mao was based at this time in the city of Wuhan, on the Yangtze, some 300 km northeast of Changsha, where he had moved from Canton with the Nationalist headquarters as the Nationalist army pushed north. Now even more prominent among the Nationalists as an overseer of the peasant movement, he stepped up the training of rural agitators so that they spread his violent line to new areas taken by the army. One text that Mao selected to guide his trainees described peasant association activists discussing ways to deal with their victims. If they were “stubborn,” “we’ll slit their ankle tendons and cut off their ears.” The author greeted the punishments, in particular this gruesome one, with rapture: “I had been listening so absorbedly as if in a drunken stupor or trance. Now I was suddenly woken up by the yelling of ‘Wonderful,’ and I too couldn’t help bursting out ‘Wonderful!’ ” This account was extraordinarily similar to Mao’s own report, both in style and language, and was most likely written by Mao himself.

AS VIOLENCE ACCELERATED under Mao’s tutelage, the Nationalist army turned against the Soviet model their party was following. A large part of the army was from Hunan, and the officers, who came from relatively prosperous families, found that their parents and relatives were being arrested and abused. But it was not just the better-off who suffered; the rank-and-file were also being hit. Professor Chen reported to the Comintern in June: “even the little money sent home by ordinary soldiers was confiscated,” and the troops were “repelled by the excesses,” seeing that the outcome of their fighting was to bring disaster to their own families.

Many in the Nationalist Party had been unhappy about their leaders adopting Moscow’s line right from the start, when Sun Yat-sen embraced the Russians in the early 1920s. Their anger had reached the boiling point after the Nationalists’ second congress in January 1926, when the much smaller CCP (with far fewer than 10,000 members) seemed to have hijacked the Nationalists, who had several hundred thousand members. Under Wang Ching-wei, one-third of the 256 delegates were Communists. Another third were “on the left,” among whom was a large contingent of secret Communists. Not only had Moscow planted its Trojan horse, the CCP itself, inside the Nationalists, it had also infiltrated a large number of moles. Now, over a year later, the mob violence condoned by their party led many prominent Nationalists to call for a break with Moscow’s control, and with the Chinese Communists.

The crisis quickly came to a head. One thousand kilometers to the north, on 6 April 1927 the Peking authorities raided Russian premises and seized a large cache of documents which revealed that Moscow was engaged in extensive subversion aimed at overthrowing the Peking government and replacing it with a client. The documents also showed secret Soviet links with the Chinese Communists. In fact, one important CCP leader, Li Ta-chao, and some sixty other Chinese Communists were arrested in the Russian compound, where they had been living. Li was soon executed by strangulation.

The raids received wide publicity, as did the documents. The proof of Soviet subversion on a massive scale outraged Chinese public opinion and alarmed Western powers. Unless the Nationalists took decisive action to dissociate themselves from the Russians and the CCP, they risked being seen as part of the conspiracy to turn China into a Soviet satellite. Many Nationalists might leave the party, the general public would be repelled, and the Western powers stiffened in their resolve to give full backing to the Peking regime. It was at this point that the commander-in-chief of the Nationalist army, Chiang Kai-shek, took action. On 12 April he gave orders to “cleanse” the Nationalist Party of Communist influence. He issued a wanted list of 197 Communists, headed by Borodin and including Mao Tse-tung.

CHIANG KAI-SHEK HAD been born into a salt merchant family in the east coast province of Zhejiang in 1887, six years before Mao. Later familiar abroad as “the Generalissimo,” he was a professional military man, and in public presented a stolid, rather remote and humorless appearance. He had trained in Japan, and in 1923, as Nationalist chief of staff, had headed a mission to Soviet Russia. At the time he was regarded by the Russians as on the “left wing of the Nationalists” and “very close to us,” but his three-month visit turned him profoundly anti-Soviet, particularly on the issue of class struggle: he was deeply averse to Moscow’s insistence on dividing Chinese society into classes and making them fight each other.

But Chiang did not breathe a word in public about his real views when he returned to China. On the contrary, he gave Borodin the impression that he was “extremely friendly to us, and full of enthusiasm.” He concealed his true colors for one simple reason — the Nationalists were dependent on Soviet military assistance for their goal of conquering China. Chiang, who meanwhile had risen to No. 2 in the Nationalist Party, had, however, been quietly preparing the ground for a split, and had already removed some Communists from key positions in March 1926. This caused the Russians to start plotting ways to get rid of him. According to one of their agents in Canton, their idea was “to play for time and prepare the liquidation of this general [Chiang].” A year later, in early 1927, Borodin had issued a secret order to have Chiang arrested, though the plan did not materialize.

The moment the Peking government published documents about Russian subversion, Chiang acted. On 12 April, he issued a notice which said, in essence: arrest Communists. He moved first in Shanghai, which had been the HQ of the CCP, and where he himself was. The Communists had armed pickets there. Chiang took steps to disarm them. Towards this end he enlisted gangsters to pick a fight with the pickets, to create an excuse for his army to descend and confiscate the arms. Communist strongholds were assaulted, many trade union leaders arrested, and some shot. Chiang’s troops opened fire with machine-guns on a subsequent protest march. In the space of a few days, there were probably more than 300 deaths on the Communist side. Chiang had broken the Communists as an organized force able to operate in public in Shanghai, though the CCP leadership remained largely intact — and, amazingly, Shanghai continued to be where the Party Center resided and operated, clandestinely, even in the middle of the purge. For the following five or six years, “Shanghai” was synonymous with the CCP leadership (and we use it in this sense).

After Chiang Kai-shek started killing Communists in Shanghai, Nationalist chief Wang Ching-wei, who was in Wuhan, some 600 km inland, broke with the CCP and submitted to Chiang. From now on, Chiang Kai-shek became the head of the Nationalist Party. He went on to build a regime that lasted twenty-two years on the mainland, until he was driven to Taiwan by Mao in 1949.

IN THE LEAD-UP TO Wang’s split, Mao faced a choice. He had been much more appreciated by Wang than by his fellow Communists and most Russians, and he had risen much higher among the Nationalists than in the CCP. Should he now go with Wang? He was later to say of this time: “I felt desolate, and for a while, didn’t know what to do.” It was in this rather torn state of mind that one day he ascended a beautiful pavilion on the bank of the Yangtze in Wuhan. Originally built in AD 223 the Yellow Crane Pavilion was a landmark. Legend had it that here a man had once beckoned to a yellow crane flying along the Yangtze, rode on its back to the Celestial Palace — and never returned. The Yellow Crane thus came to mean something gone forever. Now it seemed an apt metaphor for everything Mao had built up for himself in the Nationalist Party. It was a day darkened with heavy rain. As he stood by the carved balustrade of the pavilion, looking across the vastness of the Yangtze, “locked in,” as he wrote in a poem, between Mount Snake and Mount Tortoise on either side, but extended to the infinite by the deluge from the sky, Mao pondered his alternatives. In a traditional libation, he poured his drink into the torrent below, and finished his poem with the line: “The tide of my heart soars with the mighty waves!”

Mao made a bid to keep Wang on the Communists’ side by disowning the peasant association thugs whom he had previously hailed as wonderful, and casting them as scapegoats. On 13 June, Wang Ching-wei told other Wuhan leaders: “Only after Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s report did we realise that peasant associations are controlled by gangsters. They don’t know anything about the Nationalists or the Communists, they only know the business of killing and arson.” Mao’s attempt to pass the buck was futile. His Nationalist mentor was already planning to break with the Communists, and blame them for all the rural atrocities. As the most vocal promoter of this violence, Mao had to say goodbye to Wang and the Nationalists. He was already on the wanted list. But quite apart from this, to stay with Wang would mean having to become a moderate, and respect social order. Mao was not prepared to do this, not after he had discovered his fondness for brutality in rural Hunan. Nearly a decade before, as a 24-year-old, he had expressed his craving for violent and drastic social change: “the country must be … destroyed and then re-formed … People like me long for its destruction …” The Soviet model suited his impulse.

For the first time, Mao had to risk his neck. During the arrest scare two years before, he had had time to summon a sedan chair and make off in leisurely fashion to Changsha. But now escape was not so simple. There was no obvious safe haven and the killing of Communists had started. Professor Chen’s eldest son was arrested and beheaded on 4 July. By the end of the year, after the Communists had launched violent uprisings of their own and taken many lives, tens of thousands of Communists and suspects were slaughtered. Anyone could be arrested, and killed, simply on the charge of being a Communist. Many died proclaiming their faith, some shouting slogans, others singing the “Internationale.” Newspapers hailed executions with pitiless headlines.

Mao first had to ensure his personal safety. Then he decided to use the CCP and the Russians for his own ends. This decision, taken in summer 1927, when he was thirty-three, marked Mao’s political coming of age.