Read Online Mao Zedong by Jonathan Spence - Free Book Online

of these assertions. Effective political organizations had to grow out of an integrated social system. Such a social system could initially take root only in “small localities,” and in such local settings “it is the individual citizens who comprise the foundation of the citizenry as a whole.” To Mao this had to be a voluntaristic process: “A forced attempt at construction simply will not work.” Mao then drew on the discussions of Marxism he had attended in Beijing but suggested that some of those arguments were lacking in cogency. People had used the example of Lenin, wrote Mao, to argue that “political organizations can reform social organizations,” and that “group forces can transform the individual.” Mao felt Lenin’s example in Russia was a special case, not one that could be simply applied to China. For a start, Lenin had relied on “millions of party members” to undertake his “unprecedented course of popular revolution that made a clean sweep of the reactionary parties and washed away the upper and middle classes.” Lenin had a carefully thought-out ideology—Bolshevism—and a “reliable mass party” that carried out his orders “as smoothly as flowing water.” The peasants of Russia also responded to his revolutionary call. Were there to be a “thorough and general revolution in China,” Mao wrote, he would support it. But he knew that was not possible at the moment. Accordingly, he would work for a Republic of Hunan “that shines like the rising sun.”
    Events, however, were pushing China away from the federation of provinces that Mao envisioned. Part of the problem was that Hunan was in no way united, and within a few months of Mao’s return to Changsha from Shanghai, rival warlords were once again vying for control; although the province did declare its formal independence in November 1920 and formulated its own Hunanese constitution, including the granting of full civil rights to women, the Hunan assembly never established a fully independent jurisdiction. Equally fateful were developments in the Soviet Union. In March 1919 Lenin convened the first meetings of a “Third Communist International” to replace the Second International, which had disintegrated during World War I. This new international—known as the Comintem—was to be the global arm of the Soviet Communist Party, fostering revolution overseas not only to spread the cause of the world’s proletarians, but also to strengthen the Soviet Union’s own defenses. In the spring of 1920 the first of the Comintern agents (one of them was a Chinese raised in Siberia, who acted as interpreter) arrived in China to speed the formation of a Chinese Communist Party. The Soviet group rapidly identified the New Youth editors Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu as the two most prominent Chinese intellectuals interested in Marxism. Having conferred with Li in Beijing, they traveled to Shanghai to visit Chen. Though the Soviet agents did not meet Mao in either Beijing or Shanghai, and Mao had already returned to Changsha by August 1920 when a Communist “small group”—the first in China—was established in Shanghai, he and his fellow Hunanese had nevertheless made enough of an impression on the inner circle of leading radicals for Changsha to be included among the six cities in which further Communist “small groups” were to be formed. (The other four cities were Beijing, Wuhan, Jinan in Shandong province, and Canton.)
    The first brief “Manifesto” of the Chinese Communist Party appeared in Shanghai in November 1920, but there is no evidence that Mao saw it right away. From a flurry of letters that Mao wrote at this time to friends in many parts of China and in France, we know that he was frantically busy with his teaching, running the New People’s Study Society and the Cultural Book Society, building up a “rent-a-book readers’ club,” and coordinating the struggle for Hunanese independence. Mao does not mention the