An Austere Style
Although Mao commanded enormous authority--in 1955, in a casual talk with local officials, he overturned the provisions of the five-year plan fixed only a day before by the National People's Congress--he shunned the trappings of might. He seldom appeared in public, perhaps to preserve a sense of awe and mystery, and he eschewed fancy dress or medals, in conformity with the simple standard he himself had set during his guerrilla days. Whatever the occasion, he wore only a plain gray tunic buttoned to the neck and trousers to match that came to be called a Mao suit in the West and for a period in the 1970's became a fashion craze.
Edgar Snow, the American journalist who in 1936 became the first Westerner to meet Mao, felt that his style owed much to the simplicity, if not roughness and crudeness, of his peasant upbringing. He had the "personal habits of a peasant, plain speaking and plain living," Mr. Snow reported after a visit to the Communists' guerrilla headquarters in Shensi, near Yenan. Mao was completely indifferent to personal appearance; he lived in a two-room cave like other peasants "with bare, poor, map-covered walls." His chief luxury was a mosquito net, Mr. Snow found, and he owned only his blankets and two cotton uniforms.
"Mao's food was the same as everybody's, but being a Hunanese he had the southerner's ai-la, or love of pepper," Mr. Snow wrote. "He even had pepper cooked into his bread. Except for this passion, he scarcely seemed to notice what he ate."
In the classic "Red Star Over China," the first public account of Mao, Mr. Snow wrote that he found Mao "a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure, above average height for a Chinese, somewhat stooped, with a head of thick black hair grown very long, and with large searching eyes, a high- bridged nose and prominent cheekbones." The account continued: "My fleeting impression was of an intellectual face of great shrewdness."
"He appears to be quite free from symptoms of megalomania," Mr. Snow said--the cult of Mao would not begin until the first "rectification" campaign in 1942. But, Mr. Snow added, "he has a deep sense of personal dignity, and something about him suggests a power of ruthless decision."
Seeming Reserve and Aloofness
Agnes Smedley, another journalist who encountered Mao in Yenan at that time, felt that though he could communicate intensely with a few intimate friends, he remained on the whole reserved and aloof. "The sinister quality I had at first felt so strongly in him proved to be a spiritual isolation," she related. "As Chu Teh [the military commander] of the Red Army was loved, Mao Tse-tung was respected. The few who came to know him best had affection for him, but his spirit dwelt within himself, isolating him."
Other American visitors--diplomats, army officers and journalists--who trooped to Yenan in the 1940's during an optimistic interlude when Washington hoped to bring Mao and Chiang together to fight the Japanese, inevitably were impressed by Mao's obvious earnestness and by his willingness to sacrifice personal comfort for the pursuit of an idea. In these he contrasted all too clearly with the corruption and indifference of most Nationalist leaders.
Some of Mao's dedication, toughness and reserve may also have been the product of his bitter personal experiences along the road to power. His sister and his second wife, Yang Kai-hui, were executed in 1930 by General Chiang; a younger brother was killed fighting a rear-guard action during the Long March; another younger brother was executed in 1943 in Sinkiang, and Mao's eldest son was killed in the Korean War. Another son, according to Red Guard sources during the Cultural Revolution, was said to have gone mad because of the way he was brought up by a "bourgeois" family after his mother was executed.
Mao also had several close brushes with death. In 1927, when he was organizing peasants and workers in Hunan, he was captured by local pro-Kuomintang--that is, pro-Nationalist--militiamen, who marched him back to their headquarters to be shot. Just in sight of their office, Mao broke loose and fled into a nearby field, where he hid in tall grass until sunset.
"The soldiers pursued me, and forced some peasants to help them search for me," he related to Mr. Snow. "Many times they came very near, once or twice so close that I could almost have touched them, but somehow I escaped discovery. At last when it was dusk they abandoned the search."
The Moment of Victory
The supreme moment came on Oct. 1, 1949, when Mao, at age 54, stood on the high balcony of Tien An Men, the Gage of Heavenly Peace in Peking through which tribute-bearers had once come to prostrate themselves before the emperors, and proclaimed the People's Republic of China.
Processions had filled the square in front of the scarlet brass-studded gate. The air was chilly with the wind from the Gobi. Mao, wearing a drab cloth cap and a worn tunic and trousers, had Mr. Chou and Marshal Chu with him. Below them the immense throng shouted: "May Mao Tse-tung live 10,000 years!"
Suddenly there came a hush. Sliding up the immense white staff in the square was a small bundle that cracked open as it neared the top to reveal a flag 30 feet broad, blood red, with five yellow stars in the upper left quadrant. Guns reared in salute. On cue the crowd broke out in the new national anthem, and Mao stepped to the microphone amid more cheers.
"The Central Governing Council of the People's Republic of China today assumes power in Peking," he announced. A week before, speaking to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, he said: "Our nation will never again be an insulted nation. We have stood up. Let the domestic and foreign reactionaries tremble before us."
His words came 28 years after he and 11 others founded the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. Its membership then was 52. "A small spark can start a prairie fire," Mao once said. It had.
Peasant Origins
Mao Tse-tung was born in a tile-roofed house surrounded by rice fields and low hills in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan Province, in central China, on December 26, 1893. His father, Mao Jen-sheng, was a tall, sturdily built peasant, industrious and thrifty, despotic and high-handed. Through hard work, saving and some small trading he raised himself from being a landless former soldier to what his son later described as the status of a "rich peasant," though in the China of those days that hardly meant being wealthy.
Mao's mother, Wen Chi-mei, was a hardy woman who worked in the house and fields. A Buddhist, she exhibited a warm-hearted kindness toward her children much in contrast to her husband's patriarchal sterness. During famines, when her husband--he disapproved of charity--was not watching, she would give food to the poor who came begging.
The China into which Mao was born was a restive empire on the point of its final breakup, which came in 1911. Since the middle of the 19th century the ruling Ching Dynasty had been beset by rural uprisings, most notably the Taiping revolt in the 1860's, and by the encroachments of foreign powers that challenged China's traditional belief in its superiority.
The mandarins who governed on behalf of the emperor in Peking seemed helpless to stop either the internal decay or the foreign incursions. Corrupt, smug, the product of a rarified examination system based on the Confucian classics, they procrastinated. China had no industry, and its peasants, 85 percent of the population, were mired in poverty and ignorance, subject to the constant threat of starvation and extortionate demands by landlords.
In the Fields at Age 6
At age 6 Mao was set to work in the rice fields by his father, but because he wanted the youngster to learn enough characters to keep the family's accounts, he also sent him to the village primary school. The curriculum was the Confucian Analects, learned by rote in the old style. Mao preferred Chinese novels, "especially stories of rebellions," he later recalled, which he used to read in school, "covering them up with a classic when the teacher walked past."
At 13 Mao left the school, working long hours on the farm during the day and keeping the accounts at night. His father frequently beat Mao and his two younger brothers and gave them only the most meager food, never meat or eggs.
At this point there occurred an incident that Western writers have seized on as a seminal clue to Mao's later life. During a reception Mao's father began to berate him for being lazy and useless. Infuriated, he fled to a nearby pond, threatening to jump in. Eventually the quarrel was resolved by compromise when Mao agreed to kowtow--on one knee only--in exchange for his father's promise to stop the beatings. "Thus the war ended," Mao recalled, "and from it I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained meek and submissive he only cursed and beat me the more."
Some scholars have also noted the possible influence on Mao of growing up in Hunan. A subtropical region, its many rivers and mountains made it a favorite haunt for bandits and secret societies. Hunanese are also famed for their vigorous personalities and their political talents as well as their love of red pepper, and they have produced a disproportionate number of leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Going to Another School
Although out of school, Mao retained his passion for reading in his spare time, and at 16, over his father's opposition, enrolled in a modern higher primary school nearby. It was at this school, in a busy market town, that Mao's real intellectual and political development began. In newspapers a cousin sent him he learned of the nationalistic late 19th-century reformers, and in a book, "Great Heroes of the World," he read about Washington and Napoleon (from his earliest days Mao was fascinated by martial exploits).
Most of his fellow students were sons of landlords, expensively dressed and genteel in manner. Mao had only one decent suit and generally went about in an old, frayed coat and trousers. Moreover, because he had been forced to interrupt his education for several years, he was much older than the others and towered above them. As a result this tall, ragged, uncouth "new boy" met with a mixture of ridicule and hostility. The experience may also have left its mark in his attitude toward the landlord class.
After a year wanderlust took Mao off to the provincial capital, Changsha, where he entered a junior high school. The year was 1911, the time of the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty, and he was caught up in the political turmoil that swept the country. He cut off his pigtail, a rebellious act, and it was then that he joined a local army unit. After several more months of drifting and scanning classified ads in the press for opportunities, he spent half a year in the provincial library, where he read translations of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species" and Rousseau's "Social Contract." He also saw a map of the world for the first time.
In 1913 Mao enrolled in the provincial normal school in Changsha, where he received his last five years of formal education. Although it was really only a high school, its standards were high, and Mao was particularly influenced by his ethics teacher, Prof. Yang Chang-chi, whose daughter he was later to marry. Professor Yang, who had studied in Japan and Europe, advocated combining Western and Chinese ideas to prod China back to life. Through him Mao soon found himself in touch with the mainstream of intellectual life, which was then caught up in what was called the May 4th Movement, an explosive nationalistic effort to modernize Chinese culture
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Vast Outpouring of Criticism
When, contrary to Mao's expectation, the hundred flowers policy led to a vast outpouring of criticism that called the Communist Party itself into question, he quickly switched to the other side of his formula--discipline--and instituted a tough rectification campaign.
It was at this time that he made his second trip to Moscow in November 1957, and created a sensation by declaring that there was no need to fear nuclear war. "I said that if the worse came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while imperialism would be razed to the ground, and the whole world would become socialist: in a number of years there would be 2.7 billion people again and definitely more."
This accorded with his deeply held belief that men, not machines or weapons, were the decisive factor. In 1947, in an interview, he had declared: "The atom bomb is a paper tiger used by the U.S. reactionaries to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by people, not by one or two new types of weapon." It was a guerrilla's view.
In Mao's recollection, this period, the winter of 1957-58, marked a great watershed in China. His misgivings about the Soviet Union had reached the breaking point, and he resolved to put an end to copying the Russians. He reached back to the wellsprings of his experience in Kiangsi and Yenan, re-emphasizing the countryside and the potential energy of the peasantry to overcome material obstacles. China was to make "a great leap forward." By reorganizing the peasants into communes, Mao would release their energy, vastly increase agricultural production and catch up with the West overnight. It was a vision, not a plan.
As Mao described it: "China's 600 million people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it."
All China went to work at a fever pitch. Peasants set up backyard blast furnaces to make their own steel, the symbol of industrialization. Cadres became dizzy with success and reported a 100 percent jump in agricultural production in a single year. A jingle by peasants in Hunan caught the mood:
"Setting up a people's commune is like going to heaven. The achievements of a single night surpass those of several millennia."
t was not so easy. Terrible dislocations ensued, food grew scarce and there was even some starvation. It took three years to restore the economy.
Leader Attacked
These steps led to the first serious challenge to Mao's leadership since the early 1930's. At a Central Committee meeting in the summer of 1959 at the mountain resort of Lushan, he was boldly criticized by Peng Teh-huai, then Minister of Defense. Under the impact of Mr. Peng's attacks, Mao became tense and irritable. "Now that you have said so much, let me say something, will you," he finally told the group. "I have taken sleeping pills three times, but I cannot to seep."
Candidly accepting some of the onus for the disaster, he declared: "The chaos was in a grand scale, and I take responsibility. I am a complete outsider when it comes to economic construction, and I understand nothing about industrial planning."
But with devasting tactical skill Mao also counterattacked and ousted Mr. Peng from his post. This done, Mao was satisfied to leave the running of China to others, and over the next few years concentrated on foreign affairs, particularly the growing quarrel with Moscow.
Foreign policy often seemed to swing almost as wildly as domestic political campaigns; from intervention in Korea to the Bandung (Indonesia) Conference and the five principles of peaceful coexistence, from calls for world revolution to President Nixon's trip and the Shanghai communique. Behind these shifts, scholars agree, it was Mao himself who made all the fundamental decisions, even if Mr. Chou was often China's ambassador to the world.
Moreover, underneath these swings Mao adhered to several deeply held ideas.
First, China would pursue a strictly defensive policy, it would not, for example, intervene in Vietnam. "Others may come and attack us, but we shall not fight outside our borders," Mao told the Central Committee, "I say we will not be provoked."
