On April 12, 1927 GMD [Guomindang] forces allied with the Shanghai underworld unleashed a major attack on the CPC [Communist Party of China] and affiliated organizations in Shanghai. About 400 people were killed and more hundreds wounded and imprisoned. The next day, after a general strike failed and protesters were shot down in the street (including many women and children from the textile factories), Chiang Kai-shek was in complete control of the city.

The CPC was taken by surprise by this attack, although evidence that Chiang was planning it was not that hidden had anyone been looking for it. Why hadn't the CPC leadership seen it coming? Short's answer is, "that, in 1927, the CPC was so wedded to the alliance with the bourgeoisie that it could not conceive of a revolution without it." This doesn’t seem to be confined to 1927, nor to China.

On April 12 Mao and Wang Jingwei (1883-1944) were in Hankou on GMD business. Wang, an old ally of Sun Yat-sen, was the top civilian leader of the GMD and a rival of Chiang, he was also a friend of Mao. Mao was working with the GMD Land Committee and getting ready for the Fifth Congress of the CPC (Short barely mentions the Fourth Congress which took place in early 1926). Short also says a new Comintern rep was also on the scene [M.N.Roy 1887-1954], one "more sympathetic to the agrarian revolution" than previous reps, especially Borodin [M. Borodin 1884-1951, rehabilitated 1964]. The CPC leader, Chen Duxiu was soon to arrive in Hankou as well.

On the afternoon of the 12th the news from Shanghai arrived causing an existential crisis. The party's Central Bureau was in session for the next six days trying to figure out what to do. Borodin and Roy "gave radically differing advice."

According to Short, Borodin and Chen Duxiu wanted to put the struggle against Chiang on hold, make a "strategic retreat" and start up the Northern Expedition again (the military attacks on the non-GMD warlords) by joining with GMD forces that were getting a lot of Soviet aid. After getting rid of the warlords and with a beefed up allied GMD military command Chiang could then be reckoned with. 

Roy rejected his fellow Comintern rep's plan. Short quotes him as saying it was "a betrayal of the peasantry, of the proletariat... and the masses." The Revolution "will either win as an agrarian revolution or it will not win at all." Borodin's plan was equivalent to "collaborating with the very forces of reaction that are betraying the revolution at every step." The idea of collaborating with reaction (capitalists) now in order to get progress later is widespread on the left.

How could two reps of the Communist International take such contrary positions? Short says it was because Stalin's program for China had been contradictory. Borodin represented the view that the communists had to be allied with the "progressive" bourgeoisie [always an elusive beast] and Roy, newly arrived, supported the new emphasis on the agrarian revolution.

Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) and others had different plans. Some felt they should attack Chiang with help from sympathetic "left" GMD forces. The meetings were going nowhere. The Bureau finally sided with Roy, but Borodin then went to the GMD leader Wang Jingwei and Wang proclaimed that the Northern Expedition would start up again.

Meanwhile Mao, who supported Roy, wasn't even at these meetings. Chen Duxiu had broken relations over the Hunan peasants reports and Mao was no longer on the CC. He tried to pass a resolution when the Fifth Congress met, in favor of his agrarian revolution theories, but it was defeated. He was also replaced as Secretary of the CC Peasant Committee but allowed to stay as a member.

Meanwhile the right-wing GMD forces were gaining in strength and consolidating their power. This provoked countermeasures and fighting and riots were breaking out all over the place between the right and left.

Short says that on May 21, 1927 ("The Day of the Horse" on the traditional calendar) the military commander in Changsha took action. Reaction had come to Hunan. By the end of May and the beginning of June over 10,000 people had been killed. The violence spread to neighboring provinces. The White terror was rampant throughout China. Over 300,000 died by the time the violence ended. Peasants were beheaded, disemboweled, had their eyes and tongues ripped out, women were wired together through pierced breasts and hacked to bits. This was all done by the landlords and gentry to the peasants in the villages. This may explain the excesses later on when the peasants finally got the landlords in their power.

The "Horse Day Incident" and its aftermath was, Short remarks, "a turning point" for the CPC. A lesson was learned and never forgotten. It boiled down to violence must be met with violence. 

Now two major new events happened. Stalin sent orders to the CPC telling it to step up the agrarian revolution, to raise an independent army, and to restructure the GMD Central Executive Committee. In the new situation in China none of these proposals could be carried out. As Short says, Stalin's orders "might as well have come from another planet."

Both Borodin and Roy, as well as a third Comintern agent (G. Voitinsky 1893-1953, ostensibly a news reporter) all concluded that Stalin's ideas would be impossible to carry out.

Roy then made a big mistake. He showed Stalin's missive to the left wing GMD leader Wang Jungwei, perhaps hoping it would make him more radical in order to secure Soviet aid and more CPC support. It had the opposite effect. It drove him back into the arms of Chiang Kai-shek.

Yet, Stalin's telegram to the CPC had one lasting effect. The leadership realized that an independent military force was necessary. GMD generals couldn't be trusted. Stalin had "sowed the seed from which, in the months that followed, the Chinese Red Army would grow." That army is arguably still today the largest military force in the world that is independent of the control of international monopoly capitalism. 

By July 1927 the CPC leadership was at its wit's end. It felt the GMD-CPC "united front" was about to end, yet it could not think of what to do about it. It passed resolutions affirming the leading role of the GMD and offering to serve under GMD supervision. Short calls this a "craven resolution." Two lines emerged: one, the communists would join the GMD army to show they were not a threat to the unity policy [this was just asking for it] and two, go hide up in the mountains and build an independent military force. 

Meanwhile, Stalin was upset that Chen Duxiu had rejected his orders as "impractical" and Chen was forced out of the leadership. By the end of the summer, however, the CPC-GMD united front was at an end, the Russian advisors to the GMD had been sent packing, Mao and the other leaders were underground, the Comintern agents were gone. By the end of 1927 the left-GMD was also kaput and Wang Jingwei was an exile in Europe. Things were looking pretty good for Chiang Kai-shek and the rightists. By year's end Mao turned 34 years old.

Next Up: Chapter Seven "Out of the Barrel of a Gun"

​In July 1921 Mao attended the founding congress of the CPC. There were three big problems to solve: what type of party, how to relate to the bourgeoisie and the two governments ruling from Beijing and Canton, and how to relate to the Communist International (Comintern).

Despite the objections of Li Hanjun (1890-1927) that the Chinese masses were too backward to understand Marxism and a long period of educational work would be necessary before they could be properly organized, the CPC, under the prodding of a representative of the Comintern [Hendricus Sneevliet (1883-1942), adopted a Bolshevik program calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the establishment of soviets.

Two other points upset the Comintern representative. They were one, the Congress decided to oppose both existing governments: Beijing as well as Canton. But Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) ( was running the Guomindang government in Canton which the Comintern considered "revolutionary". Lenin (1870-1924) had said that CPs in "backward countries" should, as Short writes, "work closely with national-revolutionary bourgeois democratic movements." Worse was two, "the delegates refused to acknowledge Moscow's supremacy." The new party wanted to be treated as an equal.

The Comintern rep did not make a good impression. Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) was elected leader and found that he was told to give weekly reports to the rep who was also giving directions to party members on his own. Chen put up with some of this because Moscow was providing seed money to the new party to help it grow.

Mao did not play a major part at this Congress. The CPC had at this time 53 members, only 10 of whom came from Hunan. In September 1921 the Hunan branch, with Mao in charge, was officially set up.

Mao was 29 years old in December of 1922 and his role as a party leader in Hunan (and labor union organizer) had been outstanding over the last year and three months. But what was true in Hunan was not true elsewhere. In other parts of China the warlords were becoming fed up with communist and union activity. On February 7, 1923 the warlords struck, perpetrating a massacre on communist led workers who were about to establish the General Rail Union.

"The February Seventh Massacre" took place in Beijing, Zhengzhou and Hankou. Short reports about forty people were killed and Mao's counterpart, the communist leader in Hankou, was publicly beheaded before the workers. Hunan fell to martial law a few months later, but Mao had already been called to Shanghai to serve on the Central Committee [CC] of the party.

Meanwhile the problem of the party's view of the Guomindang [GMD] was still brewing. The Comintern wanted the CPC to work with the GMD as allies. Far from seeing that organization as "progressive", the CPC viewed it as a reactionary throw back to patriarchal feudalism. Anyway, Sun Yat-sen was not all that impressed with the Marxists. He is quoted by Short has having said there is "nothing new in Marxism. It had all been said 2000 years ago in the Chinese Classics."

However, he changed his mind in the summer of 1922 when his allies turned on him and he was kicked out of Canton "in a palace coup." The CPC was also feeling more pressure to modify its views as well. So in July 1922 at the Second Congress of the CPC the party agreed to, Short quotes the document, "a temporary alliance with the democratic elements to overthrow... our common enemies." Le plus ca change, le plus ca le meme chose.

So now, with Soviet help, the GMD inched to the left and reorganized on what ended up being a Leninist model. However, many CPC members did not like this new arrangement with the GMD. Anyway, demoralization had set in after the February Seventh Massacre and the subsequent destruction of the union movements the CPC had built. To top it off, it looked like Li Hanjan had been right all along as the Comintern agents in China themselves said that the CPC had been "fabricated" and "the Soviet system cannot actually be introduced into China, because there do not exist here the conditions for the successful establishment of communism." Well, that turned out to be the case for the Soviet Union as well and we should bear it in mind as we progress through this book and the next 50 years of Chinese history.

At the Third Party Congress the Comintern demanded that all CPC members should also join the GMD. Mao and the Hunan delegates all voted against this but it passed by a slim margin. Mao said that while the GMD was the leading bourgeois "revolutionary democratic faction" the bourgeoisie could not lead the revolution. Nevertheless, the CPC could join it because as time went by the CPC forces would gain in strength. In the end the Congress stated that the GMD was the leading force in the revolution but the CPC should recruit its Left wing members into itself and push the GMD toward the USSR. At this Congress Mao was elected to the nine member CC.

The Third Congress was an educational experience. "Being forced," as Short says, "to accept Comintern instructions and to submit to the will of the majority had confronted [the members] for the first time with the principles of democratic centralism on which all Bolshevik parties had to operate." Following the "united front" line, Mao now joined the GMD.

By the middle of 1924 the CPC saw the GMD as existing in two wings, a right and a left. They would work with the left wing but struggle whole heartily against the right wing. This is not unlike the tactics practiced by many Marxist parties today.

By 1925 the CPC had 994 members. Short tells us up until this time the CPC did not pay much attention to the peasants. Lenin, in 1920, had said it was impossible for poor third world areas to have a workers revolution without an alliance of the peasants. The Second CPC Congress had even declared that they made up "the most important factor in the revolutionary movement" yet the CPC had no interest in leading the peasants. The job of the CPC was to lead the workers.

This was not good thinking! The workers were a speck compared to the mass of peasants, and leaving the peasants thrashing about without CPC leadership meant they were liable to be led by other forces-- not necessarily progressive.

By the Third Congress, under Russian pressure, the CPC had seen the light and now referred to the workers and peasants as the two classes the CPC represented.

Then, Short writes, on May 30, 1925 another country wide outbreak, similar to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, erupted. Japanese guards had shot and killed some strikers at a private plant and people all over the country protested. A British officer in the British Concession panicked and ordered his troops to shoot into a crowd, later in Canton 50 protesters were machine gunned: the fat was in the fire. The country was seething for months.

Mao went underground and did party building, including establishing night schools for peasants. Sun Yat-sen had died in March and out of the leadership struggle Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)  emerged eventually as top dog in Canton-- with a left outlook (at this time), a powerful army, and Russian financing.

At this period, the CPC did not amount too much compared to the power of the GMD, so Mao did not push Marxism in his night schools. Instead, Short points out, "they taught Sun Yat-sen's 'Three Principles of the People'-- nationalism, democracy and socialism."

At this time Mao had no office in the CPC but was an alternate on the CC of the GMD. He went to Canton and became chief of the GMD Propaganda Department. "As a senior official," Short says, " Mao was a man of substance." For the next year and a half, according to the book, Mao worked on two big issues: solidifying the GMD left wing and "mobilization of the peasantry."

At this time he wrote an article advocating a real social revolution led by the GMD left as opposed to, in his words, a "Western-style, middle class revolution" favored by the GMD right wing. He thought all the objective conditions were in place for a revolution of the left except one: "a way to mobilise the masses." He also studied the composition of the population and decided 1% of the people were total enemies, 4% were enemies that could be converted, and 95% of the population were either neutral or pro revolution. The 95% represented the peasants. Where were the workers? This is just great: a proletarian party for a country without a proletariat! Short says that Mao "never wavered" from this analysis.

The middle class "revolution" seems to be the one that Chiang Kai-shek had in mind. The GMD got a lot of support, Short points out, from the landowning families and "violent overthrow of the existing rural order was not part of their agenda."

In March 1926 Chiang staged a "coup", arresting all CPC officers in the army in Canton and getting rid of the major left GMD leadership. Mao thought the CPC was strong enough to 

thwart Chiang's gambit, but the Comintern rep Nikolay Kuibyshev  (1893-1938)  rejected any such move. He thought Chiang too strong: Kuibyshev was later shot in Stalin’s Purge and rehabilitated in 1956. 

Back in October 1925 Mao seemed to be out of the loop. He still held his GMD post and had been out of touch with the CPC leadership (located in Shanghai) for almost a year and he was developing his own ideas about how the CPC should move forward, ideas out of sync with the leaders and the Comintern line. His idea, for example, of Marxism based "on Chinese conditions,” which  would rally the rural masses, clashed with the official dogma that the "urban proletariat" should be the basis of the revolution. Sometimes the out of step comrades are the correct comrades.

By the first half of 1926 the CPC was trying to disengage from the GMD and function independently. Stalin (1878-1953) now running the China show from Moscow, had other ideas. He insisted, and the CPC complied, that the Russian-GMD cooperation be strengthened and the the GMD still be seen as the leading "revolutionary" force. The Comintern rep assigned to the GMD as an advisor (Mikhail Borodin 1884-1951) is quoted by Short as having said it was the fate of the CPC "to play the role of coolie in the Chinese revolution." Short says that until March 1926 the Russian advice to the CPC was "well-intentioned, well informed, and frequently more realistic than the views of the inexperienced [CPC] leaders in Shanghai. "But then the CPC became a pawn in the game being played in the CPSU between Stalin, Trotsky (1879-1940) and the moderate Bukharin (1888-1938, shot in Stalin’s Purge, rehabilitated 1988).

Meanwhile, Mao toiled away at his GMD job. In the summer of 1926 the GMD sent off a big expedition from Canton to go north and overthrow the warlords and unite all of China under the GMD. Mao published an article in a GMD journal in which he maintained that "the peasants had to be liberated and the power of the landlords smashed." He said the peasant struggle was the real revolutionary struggle while the class struggle of the urban proletariat was only centered on building trade unions. This opinion was so unorthodox, Short points out, that the article was left out of the Collected Works when they started coming out in the 40s and 50s.

As 1926 moved along the party was more and more conflicted about the 'United Front" with the GMD. The Russians insisted on it while the CPC thought it should be looking out for its own interests. But as the GMD armies started to achieve more and victories in their drive to unify China, victories fueled by the peasantry, the CPC leadership began to see the importance of the peasants for the future revolutionary transformation of China. Mao was called to Shanghai in November and made Secretary of the CC's Peasant Movement Committee.

In early 1927 Mao toured many rural areas studying the conditions of the peasantry, he then wrote one of his most famous articles: "Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan." It was, Short says, "a brilliant intellectual tour de force.... based on meticulous field research."

Mao defended the peasants, who were revolting against the feudal system, from criticism by the left GMD and some elements within the CPC who thought they were getting too violent. For those of us who go to bed every night with full tummies, Mao's report reminds us what is at stake in a revolution. "A revolution is not like inviting people to dinner... [it is] an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another... If the peasants do not use extremely great force, they cannot possibly overthrow the deeply rooted power of the landlords, which has lasted for thousands of years... To put it bluntly, it is necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror in every rural area... the wrong [of feudalism] cannot be righted without doing so." Mao was about to begin riding the tiger.

Short writes that the lessons learned by Mao put forth in this report stayed with him all his life. "Revolution, he now understood, could not be micromanaged. In any revolutionary venture, there would always be excesses, just as there would always be those who lagged behind."

Short's bourgeois background begins to intrude in this section of his book and prevents him from grasping what is at issue. He says this analysis reflects "class hatred" that is "aimed at men who were enemies not because of what they did, but because of who they were." This is of course completely wrong. It is precisely because of their actions, brutalizing the peasants, overtaxing them, taking their crops and food to support themselves in luxury, in a word exploiting them beyond all tolerable limits, that provokes class hatred and drives men and women to the extreme that leads to revolutionary violence that, unfortunately, once unleashed, is hard to control.

Meanwhile, Stalin had changed his mind about the peasant struggle. In December the Seventh Plenum of the Comintern declared, "The fear that the aggravation of the class struggle in the countryside will weaken the antI-imperialist front is baseless...." It also described the past policy as "a profound mistake." [Too bad Chiang Kai-shek wouldn't agree.] The stage was set for a change of policy by the CPC. Mao's article appeared soon after. It was now early 1927 and Mao was 33 years old.

Up Next:  Chapter Six "Events Leading to the Horse Day Incident and its Bloody Aftermath"

Around the time of Mao's first article (1917) he and a group of his friends in the New People's Study Society left Hunan and went to Beijing. There Mao met Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) one of the two men to later found the CPC (the other was Li Dazhao 1889-1927) but at this time he was the editor of New Youth a magazine that contributed to the future May Fourth Movement. He was the CPC General Secretary 1921-1927 and later became a Trotskyist. Short quotes Mao as having said that Chen (whose view was that before China could become a modern country the old culture had to be completely superseded ) influenced him "perhaps more than anyone else."

In Beijing, Mao came under many influences both from the traditional culture and the new Western ideas penetrating China. He picked up what he later called "old fashioned liberalism" from reading Adam Smith (1723-1790), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). Another major influence was the Ming Dynasty Neoconfucian Wang Yangming [1472-1529] who, according to Short, "inspired him to link man to society, theory to practice, knowledge to will, and thought to action." This is a little redundant since "theory to practice" is the same as "thought to action." Wang Yangming is sort of a prolegomena to Marxism where the unity of theory and practice is a basic premise.

Another Ming philosopher that Mao liked was Wang Fuzhi [1619-1693], another Neoconfucianist, for whom the world "was in constant flux" and "the mutability of things, driven by the dialectical contradictions inherent in the material world, was the basic principle moving history forward." Engels (or Hegel) couldn't have put it any better.

In 1919 Mao was writing about anarchism and later said that at that time he "favored many of its proposals." It is Prince Kropotkin (1842-1921) that he has in mind. He thought the followers of Marx were too violent. This is a big improvement in humanism for Mao, as Short notes-- in three years he has moved from Butcher Tang to Kropotkin! Mao is now 25 years old.

On May 4, 1919 a great demonstration of students and workers took place in Beijing to protest the fact that the former German concession of Shandong Province was ceded to Japan by the Versailles Treaty. This was the beginning of the May Fourth Movement which spread throughout many areas of China protesting the weakness of the government and the warlord system. Above all it demanded the modernization of China. Short says this movement "has been regarded ever since as one of the defining periods of modern Chinese history."

Mao was in Hunan at the time, in the capital Changsha. He participated in actions against the local warlord. He started a local paper and in the first issue published an article on the crisis followed up by a long article that became very influential ("The Great Union of the Popular Masses.") He said China had a great future, the youth would be the major agents of change and a practical program was proposed.

Mao became nationally known and Hu Shih (1891-1962]) the philosopher of Chinese liberalism, he ended up in Taiwan after 1948, called the article, according to Short, "one of the [truly] important articles" and that Mao had "exceedingly far-reaching vision and effective and well chosen arguments." Mao was on his way!

But he was not yet a Marxist. Mao told Edgar Snow (1905-1972) that he was a Marxist by the summer of 1920, but Short says this was untrue. Actually, Short says, "Mao at that time considered Dewey (1859-1952), 'who taught that 'education is life, school is society', to be one of the "three great contemporary philosophers", along with Bertrand Russell  1872-1970) and the French thinker, Henri Bergson (1859-1941).”

[Short has 142 pages of endnotes to back up his claims, but no bibliography. Practically, this means you can't really check his references unless you want to spend hours searching through the notes for the first time he cites a source since all subsequent citations are abbreviated. This is a sloppy and inexcusable procedure.]

Later Mao described himself at this time [1920]: "I am too emotional and have the weakness of being vehement." He said he wished he had had time to study Buddhism. His mother, who had died the previous year (his father died soon after) would have been happy had he done so. I cannot help but think the rest of the world might have also benefited if Mao had had a dose of Buddhist compassion along the way. Who knows.

Short says Mao, even after he became a Marxist, never abandoned the influences of his youth. His "thinking developed by accretion... Nothing was ever lost." This meant that when he was older he could think outside the box. He resorted to "metaphor and lateral thinking."
[Lateral thinking is a manner of solving problems using an indirect and creative approach via reasoning that is not immediately obvious-Wikipedia]

Who can object to a Marxist who tempers his views with knowledge of a wide range of other opinions and outlooks? His "approach to Marxism," Short writes, "when finally he embraced it, was coloured by other, very different intellectual traditions." Including many traditional Chinese motifs. This should bode well. Who wants Johnny one note as a leader?

In June 1920 Hunan's war lord was forced out and a new leader, with more democratic aspirations took over. Because of the general situation in the country Mao as well as most others favored a form of "home rule" for Hunan and its 30 million people.

Mao was a leader in Hunan and wrote articles and gave speeches advocating a government based on the participation of the citizens, and a democratic government in favor of socialism. But Mao didn't really think this type of government was actually possible. Because of a 90 percent illiteracy rate in Hunan he didn't think either a Soviet type revolution was possible, nor a really democratic form of government. His solution was to "create a movement of the educated elite, 'to push things forward' from the outside." The talented 10th!

In November of 1920 Mao found himself at a conference in Changsha discussing constitutional government. Both John Dewey and Bertrand Russell attended and gave speeches. So Mao had the opportunity to participate in a conference with two of the three men he considered the most important philosophers of the day. A few weeks later another military leader overthrew the new Hunan government.

Meanwhile, since October Mao had been participating in a Marxist study group. By the end of the year the study group had three "factions" debating each other. Those who wanted to follow Bolshevism, those who favored Kropotkin style anarchism, and those who thought they should just work in education to enlighten the masses. The Voltaire style!

Mao was leaning towards Kropotkin. He didn't like what he called the "terrorist methods" of the Leninists and thought the education program unrealistic. But "realism" carried the day. With the warlords increasing in power Mao was finally won over to the Russian model. It was, he said, "a last resort."

By the beginning of 1921 Mao and his fellow radicals in Hunan were getting ready to found a new political party based on Marxism. "His conversion," Short says, "was complete." Yet there would remain to the end "an anarchist tincture" to his Marxism.

Next Up: CHAPTER FIVE "The Comintern Takes Charge" (4/16)

​This chapter recounts the events leading up to the overthrow of the Manchus and the swearing in of Sun Yat-sen as the first president of China on 1 January 1912, and the aftermath. It is a background chapter, Mao’s life continues with,

​CHAPTER THREE "Lords of Misrule"

After China became a Republic, Mao spent about five years in school in Changsha, the capital of Hunan. He studied to become a teacher. Many of the views he would hold for the rest of his life were formed at this time. He read many books, including Rousseau's Social Contract, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, Smith's Wealth of Nations and works by Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Huxley and John Stuart Mill. 

It was a Chinese book, however, that was most influential: Si-Ma Guang's Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Those Who Govern. Si-Ma Guang (1019-1086) was a minister to an emperor in the middle of the Song Dynasty (969-1279) who lived over seven hundred years ago. Mao kept this book and referred to it all his life. Its message was simple. Good and honest men were more important than the laws in ruling the Empire.

He also read the German thinker Paulsen's System of Ethics. Short says Mao retained three main principles from this book, First, the need for a powerful state; second, the centrality of the individual will; third, the ambiguous relationship between Chinese and Western culture.

He published his first article (in New Youth) in 1917 at age 24. He extolled the individual will. The quote from Short shows that Mao was far from Marxism at this time. "Ultimately, the individual comes first... Society is created by individuals, not individuals by society." At this time he also developed a "cardinal principle" that stayed with him the rest of his life. This was to ground "foreign ideas in Chinese reality to establish their relevance." This of course makes sense and is the origin of the later notion of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Mao also reflected on Paulsen’s view that cultures go through old age and then decline. "Revolution does not mean," he said, "using troops and arms, but replacing the old with the new." Yet, the basis of classical Chinese thought must be preserved. The future Cultural Revolution will test this idea, but it is 50 years in the future.

Short says "a chilling hint of future ruthlessness" can also be detected at this time. This is Mao's attitude of "focusing on what he considered the principle aspects of [a] problem... and disregarding what was secondary." An example was his support of a local warlord "Butcher Tang" who killed people all over the place in order to enforce "law and order" in his area (i.e., stability). Mao supported Butcher Tang since order was the main need at the time and the mass killings were therefore secondary. Later, however, he changed his mind about Butcher Tang-- but not the principle.

He also developed his life long views on education at this time. Short says he was against rote learning, anti-elitist and pro "open learning" and he supported Kant's dictum that "our understanding must come from the facts of experience." I should note that the future inspiration for The Little Red Book also had "an abhorrence of book-worship."

At this time, when most of the youth and radicals were against China's traditional culture and only thinking in terms of the advantages of Western culture and science, Mao had a vision that Short calls "astonishingly modern." This was "a synthesis that would reconcile the traditional dialectic of the country's ancient ways of thought with Western radicalism."

Next Up: CHAPTER FOUR "A Ferment of 'Isms'"

​Short aptly begins with December 26, 1893 in Hunan with Mao’s birth. His mother was a practicing Buddhist and, Short says, was disappointed when the teenage Mao gave up the faith. Her name gives some idea of the status of women at the time, Her name was Wen Qimei “Sister Seven” as girls were not given names, just numbers.

Mao came from a well off peasant family and his father was able to send him to the village school to get a traditional Confucian education. Short tells us that Mao learned three main principles from Confucianism. First, every person and every society “must have a moral compass.” Second, “the primacy of right thinking” which means that one’s thoughts had to be morally right: this was what Confucius called “virtue.” Third, “self-cultivation” was very important. These are not, I think, bad precepts to inculcate in children.

Short says that all his life Mao was influenced by Confucius, Zhuangzi (a Daoist) and Mozi as well as Lenin and Marx. He thinks the Confucian element was “as least as important” as the Marxist.

One of the major influences on his life, according to Mao himself, happened when he was 16 years old. These were the food riots of 1910 in Changsha. There was plenty of food for the people of Changsha but it was all shipped out to other places where it could be sold for more money so the locals all died from famine. People died in droves, sold their children, and even practiced cannibalism to survive. A nice introduction to the capitalist market for the young Mao.

This chapter ends with a discussion of modernism in the 1890s. Chinese were studying abroad and returning to introduce Western ideas into China. Short mentions Kang Youwei who updated Confucianism for the modern world and Liang Qichao who “took Charles Darwin’s thesis ‘the survival of the fittest’ and applied it to China’s national struggle....” Mao’s world was one of ferment. 

I should note that “survival of the fittest” was actually the slogan of Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin. Spencer adapted Darwin’s ideas to society to get a form of “social Darwinism.” Darwin was only interested in biology and his term was “natural selection.”

Up Next, Chapter Two “Revolution” and 3 “Lords of Misrule”