Mao Zedong Read Online Free PDF Page A

strangers without proper credentials was to be prosecuted.
    In the months after Mao wrote this essay, with its bleak view of China’s ordinary people, China did in fact embark on the only broad-based political elections in its history. The elections were called under the rules of the new draft constitution promulgated in 1912, and a large number of political parties were formed and competed for seats in the new Chinese parliament—among them Sun Yat-sen’s previously illegal and underground Revolutionary Alliance, now renamed the “Nationalist Party” (Guomindang). Candidates and voters in these elections had to be male, with certain educational or economic qualifications, and the elections were hard-fought, with the Nationalist Party winning the largest plurality but not an absolute majority. In a tragedy for China, Song Jiaoren, a close friend of Sun Yat-sen’s and the architect of the Nationalist election victory, and who many had believed would be China’s new premier, was assassinated in March 1913 as he waited in Shanghai to board the train to Beijing. The assassination may well have been ordered by China’s acting president, the former Qing dynasty governor-general Yuan Shikai, but that was never proved. What was clear was that Yuan was bitterly hostile to the Nationalist Party, and that within a few months he had declared the party illegal and had driven most of its leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, once more into exile. For the next fourteen years, during the most important phase of Mao’s schooling and young manhood, the Chinese republic became a sham, with the real power focused largely in the provinces and concentrated in the hands of local military leaders.
    Mao commented on none of these crucial events of 1913, at least not in any sources that have survived. Instead he tells us that he spent this dramatic year of China’s history wrapped up in an intensive period of private study in the Changsha public library. The establishment of such public libraries had been one of the priorities recommended by China’s late Qing reformists, and now Mao was to reap the benefits. Though very short of money, and living in a noisy Changsha hostel for Xiangxiang natives, Mao established his own rigorous reading schedule during the library’s open hours, pausing only at noon each day to buy and eat a lunch of two cakes of rice. According to his later memories, he concentrated his reading on “world geography and world history.” As well as carefully scrutinizing world maps—the first he had seen—he plunged into his first serious study of Western political theory. Among the works that Mao recalls reading in translation during this time were Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and Herbert Spencer’s Logic. Mao also mentions reading John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, and there is no reason to doubt him: by this time all the titles Mao mentions had been translated into Chinese and were available in China’s better provincial libraries.
    It must have been a solitary life, and one without clear purpose; certainly Mao’s father thought so, and refused to send any more money unless Mao formally enrolled again in a school from which he might really graduate, and which might lead to gainful employment. Also, life in the Xiangxiang hostel grew intolerable, as fights flared regularly there between the students and the restless demobilized Xiangxiang soldiers and militia who used the same premises. When a group of soldiers tried to kill some of the students—Mao writes that he hid out in the toilet during this confrontation—he decided to leave. Once again, an advertisement caught his eye: it was for a school in Changsha called the “Hunan Provincial Fourth Normal School,” and it offered free tuition along with cheap room and board. Urged on by two friends who asked him to write their application essays for them, and with a written promise of renewed support from his family