Mao: The Unknown Story

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: