Mao Zedong Read Online Free PDF

if he was admitted, Mao applied in the fall of 1913. He and his friends were all accepted. “In reality, therefore, I was accepted three times,” as Mao put it.
    This was the school that drew things together for Mao; it gave him support and focus through teachers he both admired and respected, and a group of friends with whom to share life’s travails and adventures. Mao was to stay there for five years. Even though he fretted under the restrictive regulations, especially the required courses in natural sciences and life-drawing (both of which he hated), he had outstanding teachers in classical Chinese and in the social sciences. The classical-language teacher made him restudy all he thought he knew about the early Chinese language, pointing out that Mao wrote like a “journalist,” due to the pernicious stylistic influence of some of the reformers he had been reading so avidly. This teacher, whom the students nicknamed “Yuan the Big Beard,” put Mao through an intensive course on the great Tang dynasty prose writers and poets of the eighth and ninth centuries, whom many considered the finest stylists in China’s long history. Some fragmentary pages from Mao’s surviving school notebooks, dated around December 1913, show the wide range of literary works that teacher Yuan discussed, and the detailed way that he led Mao (and the other students) through the variant classical pronunciations, the accurate translation of archaic economic and social terms, the exact identity of historical personages mentioned in the texts, and an analysis of the passages from various earlier Confucian classics chosen by Tang writers for inclusion in their own essays and poems.
    Some of Mao’s other notes show how carefully Yuan (or perhaps other teachers in the middle school) introduced and analyzed the work of poets from the mid-seventeenth century, who wrote in anguish at the victory of the Manchu conquerors over the once proud Ming dynasty. Such poems had complex racial and nationalist overtones in their contempt for foreign barbarians and their veneration of the long literary traditions of China’s past. From such instructors Mao emerged with a decent familiarity with China’s traditional culture, though not with the kind of encyclopedic sweep and depth of knowledge that would allow him to write or argue on an equal footing with those young men who had spent years working with scholars in their own private academies. And for the rest of his life Mao was interested in poetry and continued to write poems in the classical style even during the most strident periods of later revolutionary upheaval.
    Strong though his literature teachers’ impact may have been, it was Mao’s social science teacher, Yang Changji, who was to have the deepest influence on Mao’s intellectual life. As Mao recalled later, Yang “was an idealist, and a man of high moral character. He believed in his ethics very strongly and tried to imbue his students with the desire to become just, moral, virtuous men, useful in society.” Yang was, by all accounts, a remarkable figure, and the fact that men of his background were now available to be the teachers of restless middle school students is one of the indices of how the intellectual world of China was shifting in the early twentieth century. A Changsha native born in 1870, Yang spent the years between 1902 and 1913 in a series of schools in Japan, Great Britain, and Germany. From these experiences Yang had developed his own broad-based system of ethics that combined the idealism of Kant and the theories of individual “self-realization” developed by British philosophers. The Changsha middle school position was Yang’s first teaching job, and he led Mao and the other students through a rich series of ethical arguments, some of which he illustrated through selected passages drawn from the Analects of Confucius, and others by a careful reading of the German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen’s System of Ethics,