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Young Mao remembered the lesson, and modified it. In his long march to power, he knew how to appear meek when the occasion demanded. But he himself was never moved by meekness. China's new master is no man to settle—permanently—for a one-knee kowtow from an opponent.
To Grasp the Future. Mao began to develop a social conscience. Once there was a famine in the Shao Shan district and the poor, asking help from the rich farmers, started a movement called "Eat Rice Without Charge." This seemed reasonable to Mao, but not to his father who, like other farmers, kept selling rice to cities despite the local famine. Young Mao read pamphlets about the Western powers that were dismembering China. He read books that proclaimed China's need to modernize herself. He began to cut classes and teach himself from books. The principal reprimanded him and Mao said: "Though it will interfere with my own study program, I will attend classes on one condition: If I ask a question a teacher cannot answer, will you fire him?" The principal pressed Mao no further.
Mao's father wanted to apprentice him to a rice merchant, but Mao again rebelled. He went to study in Changsha, where he hoped to find answers to many questions.
The old order in the China of Mao's youth was crumbling under the influence of Western civilization, like a broken mummy suddenly exposed to the harsh air. China tried to reproduce 500 years of Western evolution in a few decades. Twentieth Century China was to have bombers before it had a good rail system, radios before it had more than a few telephones. Chinese shouted Communist slogans before they could read. Galileo and Einstein, Jefferson and Karl Marx came to China all at once. The nation's youth desperately wanted to grasp the future. What the future was, they did not know.
The Idealist. Mao wanted knowledge. He read advertisements of newly opened schools. In turn he enrolled in a police school, a soapmaking school, a law school, a commercial school, an economics school. He finally wound up in the Hunan Normal School where he hoped to be trained as a teacher. He read translations of Adam Smith, Darwin, Rousseau, Spencer. Says Mao: "I was then an idealist."
Feeling the need to share his new knowledge with others, he inserted advertisements in newspapers inviting correspondence with fellow idealists. Four answered. Three of them later turned out to be "reactionaries." The fourth, a skinny youth called Li Lisan ("who listened to everything I had to say and then went away") was soon to become Mao's rival for the leadership of Chinese Communism.
At that time (1910), China's revolution against the tottering Manchu dynasty was in progress. Swept along by the torrent, Mao clipped off his queue as an antimonarchist demonstration. Other students promised to follow his example, but later reneged. This prepared Mao for party discipline—or what Lenin called "democratic centralism." Recalls Mao: "A friend of mine and I therefore assaulted them in secret and forcibly removed their queues, a total of more than ten falling victim to our shears."