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The Marxist. The Russian Revolution (1917) shook China with fear and hope. It gave Mao the simple answers he was looking for. Excitedly, he traveled between Changsha, Peking and Shanghai, doing odd jobs and organizing workers and students. In Peking he worked as a librarian and for the first time he sensed himself a proletarian. "I stayed in . . . a little room which held seven other peopie," he said. "I used to have to warn people on each side of me when I wanted to turn over . . ." He read the Communist Manifesto.
In Shanghai, in 1921, he attended the foundation meeting of China's Communist Party. Although he was impatient with friends who talked about girls or other nonrevolutionary matters, he fell in love. According to old custom, his parents had married him to a village girl when he was 14. He discarded the girl back home, with whom he had never lived, and married Yang K'ai-hui, a professor's daughter and an active Communist. Friends celebrated their marriage as an "ideal romance." She bore him two sons, both of whom were educated in Moscow. Yang was executed by Hunan's anti-Communist Governor Ho Chien in 1930.
When the Chinese Communist Party allied itself with Dr. Sun Yat-sen's nationalist revolutionary movement, Mao worked in the combined executive committees of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang. In this capacity he met a young Kuomintang leader who, like himself, was a country boy with the urge to take a hand in China's destiny. He was Chiang Kaishek.
The Half-Trotskylte. The Communist-Kuomintang alliance did not last long. Chiang was one of the first to realize that cooperation with the Communists is possible only by surrendering to them. Chiang preferred not to surrender. By 1927, the Chinese Communists were once more on their own. In his native Hunan, Mao tirelessly tried to organize the peasants. But Li Lisan, Mao's noncommittal correspondent, was chosen by Moscow to head the Chinese party. In orthodox Marxist fashion, Li Lisan based his hopes on the urban proletariat; he considered China's peasant millions too backward to grasp the new revolutionary science.
Li's city rebellions failed bloodily. Moscow deposed Li as a "half-Trotskyite" and ordered him to Russia for corrective education. "Lilisanism" was declared incorrect by Moscow. Mao Tse-tung meanwhile formulated a simple but fateful strategy: in an industrially backward country whose whole life depended on the peasantry, the Communists must win the peasants first, and give them arms.
When Mao succeeded Li as head of the Chinese Communist Party, he retreated with Communism's badly beaten bands to Kiangsi, in South China, where he managed to establish a Chinese Soviet. For three years, his headquarters were on Chingkan Shan, a nearly impregnable mountain stronghold which had been shared, uneasily, by bandits and Buddhist monks. Mao chased away the monks, welcomed most of the bandits into the party, and settled down to organizing the nucleus of the army which was to conquer China.