Read Online Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan - Free Book Online
Authors: Margaret MacMillan
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politics. And, apparently for the first time, he encountered the ideas of Karl Marx.
Marxism, with its claims to be scientific and its promise of a glorious socialist world to come, was immensely appealing to radical Chinese intellectuals. At a time when they were engaged in attacking the old values and institutions that had held China back and made it so weak, Marxism was modern and revolutionary. On a drunken evening in Tokyo, Chou told his friends that students, workers, and peasants must work together; “You have to have them all with you before you can push a revolution to successful conclusion. And without a revolution China cannot be saved!” 9
A future in which there would be no more private property and no more conflicts between classes and nations had a particular appeal, perhaps without their realizing it, to Chinese brought up in a world where the Confucian values of order and harmony and of disdain for business were still powerful. Moreover, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia provided an encouraging example. What also impressed the Chinese was that the new regime in Russia, alone among the powers, proposed to hand back land taken from China in the previous century. That the gesture would prove to be an empty one was something the Chinese could not then know.
Chou went back to a China full of anger directed against the Western powers for, as the Chinese saw it, betraying them. The end of the First World War, in which China had participated on the victorious Allied side, had brought hopes that the great powers would be true to their own publicly stated principles and help China rule itself and safeguard its territory. Instead, the Allies had decided, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, to award former German possessions in China to their ally Japan, despite the fact that China had also been an ally of the victorious powers, and that the West had repeatedly professed to be fighting for principles of democracy and justice. The decision was based on cold calculation: China was weak and Japan was strong. It produced huge anti-Western and anti-Japanese demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, which then spread across China.
The collapse of the 1911 republic into warlordism and the burgeoning threat as Japan tried to bring China under its control stimulated an intense artistic and political ferment, which came to be known as the May Fourth Movement. Writers and scholars moved beyond criticizing their leaders and attacked the whole of the old order, which, they argued, had got China into its present miserable straits. Reverence for the past and obedience to authority had trapped the Chinese in outmoded and useless ways of thinking and acting. The time had come, the radicals argued, for China to become modern, to follow, in the language of the time, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. The Allied betrayal of China at the peace conference helped persuade many that Communism and its promise of a classless democracy, not capitalism and liberal democracy, was the best hope for China. Moreover, radical change at home, they hoped, would make China stronger abroad.
Chou enrolled at the university in Tianjin but spent most of his time on political work. His revolutionary activities brought him his first term in jail and his first encounter with a fifteen-year-old who was one of the leading lights of the local Girl Students’ Patriotic Association. Deng Yingchao would become his wife seven years later. Chou may also have met at this time another, slightly older revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung, the man whose faithful subordinate he would one day become. 10
In 1920, Chou sailed for France on a work-study program to learn more about the world outside China. For the next three years, he eked out a living writing articles for Chinese papers and working at menial jobs. He also wrote faithfully to Deng. “I haven’t made a single female friend,” he assured her, “and I have no intention of having one in the future.” From
Marxism, with its claims to be scientific and its promise of a glorious socialist world to come, was immensely appealing to radical Chinese intellectuals. At a time when they were engaged in attacking the old values and institutions that had held China back and made it so weak, Marxism was modern and revolutionary. On a drunken evening in Tokyo, Chou told his friends that students, workers, and peasants must work together; “You have to have them all with you before you can push a revolution to successful conclusion. And without a revolution China cannot be saved!” 9
A future in which there would be no more private property and no more conflicts between classes and nations had a particular appeal, perhaps without their realizing it, to Chinese brought up in a world where the Confucian values of order and harmony and of disdain for business were still powerful. Moreover, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia provided an encouraging example. What also impressed the Chinese was that the new regime in Russia, alone among the powers, proposed to hand back land taken from China in the previous century. That the gesture would prove to be an empty one was something the Chinese could not then know.
Chou went back to a China full of anger directed against the Western powers for, as the Chinese saw it, betraying them. The end of the First World War, in which China had participated on the victorious Allied side, had brought hopes that the great powers would be true to their own publicly stated principles and help China rule itself and safeguard its territory. Instead, the Allies had decided, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, to award former German possessions in China to their ally Japan, despite the fact that China had also been an ally of the victorious powers, and that the West had repeatedly professed to be fighting for principles of democracy and justice. The decision was based on cold calculation: China was weak and Japan was strong. It produced huge anti-Western and anti-Japanese demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, which then spread across China.
The collapse of the 1911 republic into warlordism and the burgeoning threat as Japan tried to bring China under its control stimulated an intense artistic and political ferment, which came to be known as the May Fourth Movement. Writers and scholars moved beyond criticizing their leaders and attacked the whole of the old order, which, they argued, had got China into its present miserable straits. Reverence for the past and obedience to authority had trapped the Chinese in outmoded and useless ways of thinking and acting. The time had come, the radicals argued, for China to become modern, to follow, in the language of the time, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. The Allied betrayal of China at the peace conference helped persuade many that Communism and its promise of a classless democracy, not capitalism and liberal democracy, was the best hope for China. Moreover, radical change at home, they hoped, would make China stronger abroad.
Chou enrolled at the university in Tianjin but spent most of his time on political work. His revolutionary activities brought him his first term in jail and his first encounter with a fifteen-year-old who was one of the leading lights of the local Girl Students’ Patriotic Association. Deng Yingchao would become his wife seven years later. Chou may also have met at this time another, slightly older revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung, the man whose faithful subordinate he would one day become. 10
In 1920, Chou sailed for France on a work-study program to learn more about the world outside China. For the next three years, he eked out a living writing articles for Chinese papers and working at menial jobs. He also wrote faithfully to Deng. “I haven’t made a single female friend,” he assured her, “and I have no intention of having one in the future.” From
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