Mao Zedong Read Online Free Page A

years old. They respected his “learning,” and Mao reciprocated by writing letters home for them. Perhaps this respect brought out a basic arrogance in Mao, even though it was not long since he had left the family farm, where he had been a laborer as well as his father’s accountant. Mao now declined to go and fetch his own water from the springs or wells outside the city, as the soldiers were expected to do. As somebody who had been a student, Mao wrote later, he “could not condescend to carrying, and bought it from the water-pedlars.” It was an odd kind of irony that the money he could have used to buy more socialist tracts was spent instead on buying water that he could easily have gotten for himself, but China was full of such twists of status. Army life, in any case, was not very fulfilling for Mao. Despite the antagonisms between different military and political leaders on the Republican side, the Qing dynasty itself had fallen with little more than a whimper, and China seemed set on a fair course toward the future. “Thinking the revolution was over,” Mao recalled later, “I resigned from the army and decided to return to my books.”

2
    Self-Strengthening
    IT WAS ONE THING for Mao to say he had to get back to his books. It was quite another to decide how to do it. For a few months in 1912, Mao simply browsed through the educational advertisements in the local newspapers, and (according to his later reminiscences) because of his gullibility and lack of experience, he was briefly convinced of the inestimable value of a whole range of special training schools, at least to the extent of sending in his dollar registration fee and in one case taking courses of a few weeks. The schools that caught his eye were for police training, legal work, commercial skills, and soap making. These new schools, with their promises of guaranteed careers for ambitious youth, were themselves reflections of the rapid changes that were sweeping China. Their claims were flamboyant because they were untried and unprovable, and, as Mao learned to his chagrin, some of them held their classes mainly in English, which he could not understand except for a few phrases remembered from his earlier primary school.
    Perhaps on the rebound from all this new knowledge, Mao retreated in mid-1912 to the shelter of a more traditional middle school in Changsha, one with a predictable curriculum of Chinese learning. His teachers there encouraged him to explore China’s own imperial past more deeply, believing that he had the “literary tendencies” to undertake serious study. One teacher led him through a collection of selected imperial edicts from the Qianlong emperor’s reign in the eighteenth century, a period when China had been rich and prosperous, and had greatly expanded its borders. Others took him more deeply into earlier texts in classical Chinese than he had ever gone before, including the celebrated Historical Records (Shiji) by the second century B.C. historian Sima Qian, still regarded as China’s greatest master of expository and narrative history.
    Mao had almost certainly read some of these stories before, perhaps in simplified versions; it was at primary school that he began to delve deeply into the histories of early rulers, including the builders of the Qin dynasty, which after centuries of steady military expansion and administrative experimentation was finally in 221 B.C. able to draw all of known China together into a single centralized imperial state. One of Mao’s middle school essays, dated June 1912, has been preserved and gives us an entry into his intellectual mindset at this time. It is an analysis of one of the Qin’s first famous ministers, Lord Shang. Lord Shang was condemned by later Chinese scholars for his ruthlessness and deviousness, and for imposing savage and inflexible laws that terrified the people and reduced them to silence or to sycophancy. The historian Sima Qian said that Lord Shang was “endowed