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If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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C
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D
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C
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C
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.
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A
And me, William Duranpool. And today we are launching a brand new six part series exploring the life of one of the most influential, but also one of the most controversial figures in human history. Mao Zedong. He's a figure of titanic proportion. Some hail him as a revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage and lifted millions out of poverty. But he's also condemned as someone who killed more civilians than Hitler or Stalin. A brutal despot who built a revolutionary
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C
one party state to take us through this extraordinary story of an extraordinary man. We are very lucky to have Rana Mitha with us. ST Lee, professor of US Asia Relations at Harvard University. He is the leading expert on China and has written numerous books on this including Forgotten China's World War II and modern a very short introduction, which let me tell you, is now in its Count Them third edition. Thank you so much for being with.
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D
Lovely to be here with you, Anita, and you, Willi.
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C
So Mao is one of those faces that was so iconic and so everywhere, you know, Warhol got his hands on it. He was on T shirts, he was on magnets, he was on badges, he was all over the place. And I just wondered, sort of in China, the iconography was very much of this sort of red sun that he was almost divine. The people of China were the sunflowers all looking up to this great broad face of Chairman Mao. Tell us a little bit about actually the true story and how much did Chinese people know of the real story of Mao?
- [03:37]
D
Anita, you're absolutely right that Mao is perhaps one of the very few figures in certainly modern Chinese history, maybe the only one who gets that adjective, which is overused, but in this case it's probably correct, which is iconic. I think, you know, the Warhol portrait that you mentioned is probably one good example of that. And the fact that his name was used often in a, you know, pretty loose and ropey kind of way, from everyone from Paris students rioting in the streets in 1968 to the actually murderous insurgent group the Shining Path in Peru back in the 1990s, they all tip the hat to Mao. So he's a capacious figure in terms of that iconography. And the irony is that in some ways, in China itself, both during his lifetime and in the present day, there's much more restriction in terms of how he's perceived and what you can say about him. We're going to talk about him in much more detail over the course of the next few episodes. But to put it its most simple, I'd say that during his period in power, it became essentially taboo, almost impossible to argue that there could have been any pathway to ultimate power other than through Mao. Now, it doesn't quite make him a religious figure, but it's not far off. In other words, when the Communist Party started off, and we'll talk about that too, there were plenty of other people who probably could have risen to the top. And if Mao had dropped dead one day, then they probably would have done. What Mao did during his lifetime was to create a cult of personality. As you say, the broad face, the image of the shining sun, that suggested quite a Marxist style, that this was a historical inevitability. Now, fast forward to the present day. We're, you know, more than half a century after Mao's death. And it's certainly fair to say that Mao is not regarded today with the kind of cult like status that he had in, say, the Cultural Revolution. But it is fair to say that you still have to tread very carefully in terms of what you say about Mao. Mao, on the one hand, he's one of the very few figures who there's been some official begrudging condemnation of the Cultural Revolution under his rule. But broadly speaking, he still has a pretty sacred status and therefore what people know about him today is more historically informed than it would have been 50 years ago, but still leaves out a lot of the more dubious parts.
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C
Do you still, if you go to China today, do you still see those epic portraits, you know, the side of
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A
billboards or the Tiananmen Square sitting out over the central.
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C
Yeah, with Mao's face on it. Is he still ubiquitous, at least his face ubiquitous in China?
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D
Well, his face is certainly, as Wooly says, very much there on that big portrait in Tiananmen Square, right in the literal and political heart of Beijing. And as far as I know, it's not going anywhere, so that's there. He's also on all the banknotes. That's less relevant now because as you may have gathered, China is one of the most cashless societies in the world. So the number of occasions you'd actually have to get out a red 100 renminbi bill with Mao's face on it is more limited. But he's still there. So in other words, he certainly hasn't been cast into outer darkness by any one element, though, of ubiquity. It's probably not ubiquitous in the sense that everyone would have had their Little Red Books back in the 1960s, but certainly pervasiveness is something that you don't necessarily get quite. Well, you certainly don't get it at all in that period of his lifetime, which is Mao's universality. But ironically, because of course, he's now seen as someone who of course was, you say, you know, central to the founding of the People's Republic of China. But at the same time, because so many people went through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and because of course, he, you know, in his sarcophagus in the mausoleum in the center of Tiananmen Square now for more than half a century, you do get daring artists who now and then will do the Warhol thing and try and at least sort of playfully put out the image of Mao as something that you can question and play with, but you have to be careful. Even now, that could still be politically dangerous.
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A
It's still difficult to criticize Mao. And an example of that is I think, Po Yung Chang, who we've got on a bonus episode coming up, who has had her life difficult, including getting into India recently because of her criticism of Mao.
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D
Oh, I didn't know about India. Gosh, that's very worrying to hear. I mean, certainly having read actually her most recent book, which is called Fly Wild Swans, it's a sort of sequel to the famous Wild Swans book. She does talk there about how she sort of could still get in and out of China relatively okay after publishing Wild Swans, which became a sort of international bestseller. But after she'd published her Mao book, that made things much more difficult. So, yeah, you know, there are people who are known as. The Chinese expression is a bit snappier. It's the Hongadai Hongsandai, the second and third generation reds, in other words, children of those who were kind of leadership types. I mean, Xi Jinping is a Huangdai, you might say he's a second generation red because his father, Xi Jungxun, subject actually of a fantastic new biography by Joseph Turigian from the Hoover Institute. And this is just one example of someone who basically was born into the party and, you know, carried on the legacy. But there are plenty more of them and they regard the memory of Mao as very, very important to keep quite sacred.
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C
Can we talk about the man, you know, rather than the myth? Because, you know, he must have had a birth and a childhood and what was it actually? And what do we know for sure about it?
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D
Oh, we do know quite a lot. I mean, he was. He was born in 1893. I mean, I think that's not contested. It's also not contested that he was born in Xiaochan A. Well, people often say village. I mean, sort of perhaps large village, small town. Certainly it's a small town these days out in the countryside of Hunan. And for those who don't know so much about the interior of China, Hunan is a very distinctive place then and now. It has a sort of reputation that say somewhere like Bengal. Hunan is associated with spicy food. People say often spicy food, spicy personalities. A lot of revolutionaries come from Hunan. Also very thick, distinctive accent. It was often said that Mao, particularly in his later days, partly when we now know he was being to suffer from AMS and there were other problems, would speak. At least some of his Politburo colleagues allegedly couldn't understand what he said because his accent was so thick and so Strong.
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A
What would be the equivalent in an English accent? Would it be Liverpudlian or what would it be?
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C
Well, I mean, yeah. Would it be sort of smart or yokel? I mean, what would people regard it as?
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D
Well, I would say that I have friends from Glasgow who would argue that listening to a very posh, upmarket, southern English voice is not only very difficult to understand, but very offensive. So, you know, there are people who might take it, take it in different sorts of directions. I mean, I think it's not an uncommon place thing in a lot of countries that people from one place think that they have the natural accent. I think Kulanese would point out that they have, you know, the best accent going and then everyone else is fitting into them. But I think it's fair to say that people who study Northern Chinese, Mandarin, standard Mandarin Chinese, do find southerners like Hunanese perhaps not as easy to understand. But you could argue that's the fault of the northerners rather than the southerners. I should add as a very quick addition that when I was doing doctoral research many, many years ago in the northeast of China used to be known as Manchuria in the frozen north, they would always show me there that they spoke the purest Chinese of anyone in the country.
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C
Okay, but was he born in this, you know, the legend of the mud hut, in poverty and he rises up from, you know, paddy fields?
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D
Not poverty. No, no.
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C
So tell us, what was it?
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D
Okay, no, no, no, actually, quite, quite prosperous. One of the things that you actually find with revolutionaries in general. I mean, I'm now sort of giving sort of caricaturing wildly, but all the same is that they do quite often come from, you know, quite middle class backgrounds. Lenin certainly did. So in the case of Mao, he didn't come from a bourgeois background, he was a peasant. But his father, well, put it this way, he. I think in later years when he got very obsessed with the classification of different classes and Strug would have classified his own father, who he hated, as a rich peasant. And so this is someone who owns a certain amount of land, who has access to it and is able to kind of cash crop a bit. I mean, there are different definitions, but basically Mao did not grow up in poverty. He grew up in highly acrimonious circumstances because said he adored his mother, hated his father. You know, read your own Freudian messages into all of that. He didn't lack education. I mean, he was an autodidact. But there were opportunities clearly for him to learn. And that wouldn't be the case if he were genuinely illiterate, literate, impoverished peasants. So yes, peasant background, but no, not a mud hut with him. Sort of hard scrabbling for, for survival. This was someone who had reasonably, you know, tolerable material conditions when he was growing up in the countryside.
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A
And Rana, paint us a picture of China in 1893. The. The Qing Dynasty is facing a terminal crisis. It looks like the mandate of heaven has been taken from the painter's portrait.
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D
1893 is a moment in the midst of what probably counts as the greatest crisis of modern Chinese history. And goodness knows, China has had an awful lot of those. But the reason I say that is that essentially it marks a low point from China's point of view in what had become an increasingly urgent series of incursions, invasions, occupations of parts of China. They start essentially in the late 1830s, early 1840s with the famous Opium wars.
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A
And we had those on our pod last year. We had a 10 part series. Yeah, yes.
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D
So you basically have a dynasty that has the doors of China smashed open through the force of industrialized capitalist empire. You know, the British Empire is able to bring semi ironclad warships to the coast off the south of China, near Guangzhou Canton, as it was known then. And against the wooden shipping of the Qing Dynasty, this was really no contest. And very quickly China had to sign a series of what became known as unequal treaties, which last for nearly a century till, you know, World War II, in which essentially foreigners, the British, the French, the Americans, Japanese, Russians would all be given preferential treatment on trade, on partial immunity from prosecution, all sorts of privileges that were forced from the Chinese, not given willingly. And so very quickly, China's young intellectuals, their thinkers, their ruling class, began to feel a sense of existential panic. Could the China that they had known be, in a rather evocative phrase of the era, be sliced up like a melon and become a lost country, a Wang war? Although Mao himself was Only born in 1893, the debates over how China could reform and become strong and push back were very, very active at the time. Some people looked at Japan, the Meiji Restoration, when Japanese in the same position push back hard against the west, but also modernize very, very fast. And many people looked at Japan at that point in China and said, well, Japan has always been the sort of little brother to our big brother, but maybe we should learn from them how
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A
much of the Chinese coast was occupied by foreign colonial powers at this point, 1893, very little of it was occupied
- [14:52]
D
in the sense that India was fully colonized, partly because it was difficult and expensive to do that. And it turned out that it was much better from the point of view of Western empires to have the Chinese EMP empire stay in power and run things, but add concessions where needed. So the main colonial possession was Hong Kong. That was ceded in 1842, the island of Hong Kong, famously, in 1898, when Mao was five years old, an extra slice, known as the New Territories, a big slice actually was added. And since that was on a 99 year lease, that ended up, of course, leading up to what we now think of as the Hong Kong handover back in 1997. But in those days, 99 years, I think, was thought of as like forever. You know, there was no thought that the empire in which the sun never would eventually sunset.
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C
Getting back to the man himself, I mean, you said he hated his dad and he loved his mum, which sort of seems to a familiar story of despots. Stalin much the same hated his father, could have killed him very happily. What was the problem here? What was his father like? What was his father doing to make him so unhappy?
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D
We only really know Mal's father through the accounts of the son, which obviously by definition are biased. The story seemed to be that he was overbearing, not only overbearing to Mao, but also to his wife. And that this, I mean, in Mao's own telling, this essentially inspired the kind of thinking about a need for an overturning of society that would eventually, of course, become revolutionary communist thought. We'll get in time to how the sort of feelings of rage and anxiety and anger turn into an actual ideological worldview. But at this point, thinking of Mao as a child as what we'd now call a teenager, I think needs to be understood in the context of his father being this very, very overbeari, very domineering kind of character. And actually, I think you're right that in the case of other, you know, authoritarian dictator figures, that pattern seems to be one that you find over and over again.
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C
Was he brutal? Because, you know, the problem Stalin had with his dad is that his dad used to beat up his mum and used to beat him up.
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D
I think we do have a sense that it was a violent household. I mean, it wouldn't have been unusual for fathers to beat their children anyway at that time in many societies. But certainly I think the idea that in the peasant countryside of China at that stage, that doesn't seem entirely surprising. Although of course one of the many traumas that no doubt shaped the Mao that we would know later, I think it is relevant to think about that, because one of the things that characterizes Mao's thought throughout his life is reactions to violence. And there's a strange contradiction, really, in that he both seeks to talk about violence and coercion as something that must be resisted, but also glorifies it. You know, he talks frequently when he writes this down, about how actually the transformative value of violence is something that can remake society. And the ultimate, of course, expression of that was the Cultural Revolution.
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A
Absolutely. He's thrilled to see landlords toppled and humiliated and this sort of thing. There's a genuine excitement in the writing.
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D
This is part, of course, of the wider way in which revolutionary movements developed during that time. And you can also find it in Russia. You know, Lenin is also a great advocate of terror as a tactic. But I think it's worth that. Although the violence that Mao feels and sees in his childhood, both at home and around him, clearly shapes his sense of what his political project is going to be, he doesn't reject violence. If you want to kind of contrast him and Mahatma Gandhi and two more contrasting characters, in some ways, you could hardly think of that might be one of the major differences between them.
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A
Tell me about his mother, a Buddhist, gentle, devout, bound feet, all those things.
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D
These are amongst the things that are reported. But again, we don't have. That's, unsurprisingly, much of a sense of her from herself. And so much of the report that we have is about Mao, particularly years later, he would tell these stories, amongst others, to Edgar Snow, the American Communist journalist who would sort of create the mythical Mao that we know. And in some ways, just as much, writing about China for a Western audience sort of adapts things into ways that will seem comprehensible. I think that this may be in that category. There's no reason to think that she wasn't gentle and kind. But the idea that I had a violent father and a wonderful mother is something that actually, again, sits in a sort of set of tropes as well. It's worth noting, by the way, there are other figures in Chinese history, Confucius, to name one, who had, in his case, a missing father and was largely brought up by his mother. And that's part of the mythology of Confucius as well.
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C
What do we know of his education? I mean, you mentioned Confucius. I guess he would have been steeped in Confucian literature.
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D
From what we can gather, he would have had what was probably typical for a reasonably educated son from, you know, a rich rural background, being in the countryside didn't necessarily mean you're illiterate if you had money and access to education. And we certainly know from his later life, where he actually became quite a skilled writer of classical Chinese poetry, that he certainly had training in the Chinese classics. He also told stories about when he was at that sort of age. But he loved reading the kind of classic romantic novels of the Chinese tradition. The Water Margin, Outlaws of the Marsh, Tale of the Three Kingdoms. And I think, you know, that's also part of what makes his mindset, you know, the idea of himself as a kind of rebellious leader on horseback, leading a fight back on behalf of the poor. Those novels which are written in a, you know, kind of form of readable classical Chinese, I think in the form that he would have read them very much sit in that tradition. So we know he was able to absorb and understand those.
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C
You mentioned those Edgar Snow interviews, and he sort of describes himself, I think, in those interviews as, you know, being hungry for knowledge. I think this is a phrase that he himself uses about himself. A buffalo charging into a ven. But he was hungry, you know, wanted to lap everything up and came from that background. At what point do we see him sort of breaking out of that model of boys his age from his background and showing himself to be something a bit special?
- [20:57]
D
I think it comes in his quest to move to the next phase when it comes to education. And again, that may be a product of what we understand to be this kind of huge anger with his father when he leaves home. But moving from Shao Shan and then heading up, not to Beijing immediately, but to the biggest provincial city in Hunan,
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A
Changsha, abandoning already a first wife in
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D
the process, so it seems. I mean, again, this is one of the things where we have, you know, kind of limited background, but we know that actually, again, there's something about Chinese leaders and first wives. Chiang Kai Shek, who became his sort of deadly rival through much of the 20th century, also had a first wife who was then abandoned and made way for, I think, at least two more before finally marrying. So being betrothed to a girl, a child really out in the countryside at that stage was still not particularly unusual. We are at that point beginning to move out of the phase, thankfully, when such girls would have had bound feet, which, of course was one of the things that marked most Han Chinese girls, both from high and low level families during that time. But in terms of marriage, it was still very traditional. Of course, one of the ways that we know that in your Fraser Anita, that he was sort of Moving away from convention to something a bit more than that was when he gets up to Changsha and you know, starts studying and writing and reading, railing in anger against traditional arranged marriages. Not his own, but other ones that, you know, came up at that, that time became part of his core brand.
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C
The first wife, you know, she's, she's not even given a name really, is she? Woman Luo is what she's referred to. Yeah, thank you for the pronunciation. But it was, I think, you know, from what he said later on, or didn't say it, trying to control him, you know, as a 14 year old boy saying, you know, settle down you rebellious little git and you know, we'll have control over you because you'll be married and you'll be.
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A
Says the mother of a 14 year old, 15.
- [23:01]
D
Let it all out, Anita.
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C
I would not inflict that boy, he's lovely, I love my life, but to marry him off, bloody hell. God, no, Good God.
- [23:11]
D
Give him a few decades, he'll be fine. Yeah, I mean, I think all of that is true. I think it's worth noting though how prevalent traditional marriage would have been in the countryside at that point. In other words, I'm not necessarily convinced that what was happening to Mao at that point was unusual. What was unusual was his very strong reaction to it and decision for a variety of reasons that again, we'll talk more about that he was going to take a different sort of path. So the wonder in a sense at that point is that there was someone who was willing to actually do something different rather than necessarily what we would now rightly, I think regard as being, you know, deeply patriarchal, deeply controlling set of acts from society at that time.
- [23:53]
C
Yeah, I mean some of the things he said, Rano, I mean, are so powerful when he talks about arranged marriage and coming out against arranged marriage, you know, saying things like Chinese parents are all the time indirectly raping their children. It's strong stuff.
- [24:08]
D
This comes from one of his most famous actually sets of writings. It's called on the suicide of Ms. Jao. But actually there's a series of other essays that are sort of follow on from that, that iconic classic essay that people who read Mao's early works certainly get to. This essay. It's about a young woman who had taken her own life rather than be placed in this arranged marriage which really was a forced marriage rather than just an arranged marriage. And Mao wrote, as you say, in this absolutely devastating manner about how this symbolized the wider oppressiveness of Chinese society at that time. And you're right. He uses this phrase, says we all know what rape is. But essentially by forcing these marriages, Chinese parents indirectly are causing the rape of their daughters. Compared to what would have been the very hierarchical Confucian way of thinking about marriage, which of course, is not just a relationship, a romantic relationship between one man and one woman, but part of a huge network and hierarchy of family relationships. This was sacrilegious indeed.
- [25:12]
A
We're going to take a break now. After the break, we're going to ask Rana to pan out to the crumbling of the Qing dynasty.
- [25:25]
D
I have created the most advanced AI Soldier. The wait is over. Tron Ares now streaming on Disney. We are looking for something, something you've discovered. Give me something to believe in. And some of us will stop at nothing to get it ready. The countdown is complete. There's no going back. Our directive is clear. Hang on. Tron Ares now streaming on Disney. Rated PG 13.
- [25:59]
A
Welcome back. We've been following Mao from his rural background through his first marriage, his fight with his father and his escape from his village. R Run it. Pan out a little bit and show us what's happening around what, 1900, 1911, that sort of time. What's happening in the wider China.
- [26:21]
D
China is in the early 20th century on the brink of an earthquake. But at that stage, you are still feeling the tremors. The actual collapse hasn't yet happened. So it is a decade where one has to sort of summarize briefly because there's so much you'd want all the detail that you couldn't fit it all in. A bit like our own decade, I would say, actually Willi and Anita. But first of all, you know, as the new century opens, 1900, there's a devastating war, the Boxer Uprising. The Boxer War, which basically is a peasant uprising which tries to kill Chinese Christians and missionaries. The dynasty under the basically ruled from behind the scenes by the Dowager Empress cixi, quite a character in her own right, failed to kick out the foreigners and with long fingernails, amongst other things, too. Basically, it goes horribly wrong. And not only are the rebels defeated, but the Chinese court is forced to pay huge indemnities, you know, taxes, basically, in punishment for having encouraged these peasant rebels. So the China that limps into the first decade of the 20th century is, amongst other things, deeply indebted. And that's one of the factors that tips things over the edge. Nonetheless, for a brief period, a little bit like there's Russian history where there's a sort of brief period of constitutional reform at about the same period before things kind of tip over the edge.
- [27:40]
A
1905.
- [27:41]
D
Yeah. First of all, 1902 is when a series of reforms called the New Government Reforms are put in. Now, spoiler alert, they don't succeed. But the reason I mention them is that they point towards what could have been a very different China, A China that if there had been a slow but steady introduction, as the reform has proposed, of constitutional government voting, regional assemblies, then China could have turned into a constitutional monarchy like Japan, or indeed like Germany or even Britain, which were some of the sources to draw on for that. So that's the direction it was going in those years. And it's one of the reasons why people thought even if there were tremors beneath the surface, they could be dealt with. But you mentioned 1905, which of course was the year of the liberal revolution in Russia. It's also the year that there is an education and bureaucratic earthquake in China. It's the very last year that students are able to take the traditional bureaucratic examination, which for a thousand years since
- [28:39]
A
the Song dynasty that ends in 1905.
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D
1905 sees the abolition of more than a thousand years of the system of bureaucratic entry through classical examination into the bureaucracy of China, making way for a new system of modern languages, science and so forth. And. And that moment of the ending of this millennium plus of Chinese traditional bureaucracy is organizationally an earthquake, but also one of the things that creates seismic tremors. There's a whole bunch of people who spent their lives studying for these exams who suddenly find themselves cast out. There's no longer a bureaucracy of that sort into which to insert themselves. And it creates yet another constituency of people who have no vested interest in the imperial system continuing.
- [29:24]
C
They've done everything right from their point of view. I mean, it's sort of almost in India when you suddenly had reservation of jobs where you had people sort of saying, hang on a minute, I've done everything right. This is meant to be my super highway into my future. And you've just taken it away from me. And so you have a lot of cheesed off intellectuals.
- [29:42]
D
Yeah, and that's not a good thing for any regime to have running around. Cause intellectuals who are underemployed get ideas about changing, changing things, and eventually things come to a head in the year 1911. Now nobody expects them to. It's not sort of foretold or foreseen in that sense, but basically a small local rebel, a garrison, the city of Wuhan, which has since become much more famous because of COVID but was actually a kind of very long standing and important port city in China for centuries. A local garrison rebellion there between sort of soldiers just sort of suddenly explodes, not just in Wuhan, but actually city by city, province by province, and within the space of a few months, what seems to be the, you know, restabilized, reforming dynasty of a type that's existed for, you know, 2,000 years, suddenly finds itself on the verge of collapse. And it is by the end of that year the moment when the five year old boy emperor, famously, you know, immortalized in Bertolucci's film the last emperor, is confronted by a warlord man named Yuan Shikai and told that basically he's going to have to step off the throne and it's curtains for the Chinese Empire and instead, hello to a new formation, the Chinese Republic.
- [30:53]
C
So you've got all of this change happening. You have talk of, you know, changing the system and revolution. Is Mao immediately swept up in all of that?
- [31:03]
D
Yes, I mean, he's still very involved in education and study and, you know, revolutionary work in Changsha and in Hunan. This is still, you know, home province from his point of view, but he's beginning to see not only the way in which the overturning of the old regime creates all sorts of new possibilities, but also begins to develop the sense of disillusionment that many young men and women, both of them, began to feel at this particular point. So bearing in mind that when the revolution happens, when the imperial system falls, you know, never to be resurrected, he's 16 years old, so it's, you know, an exciting time, a perilous time, he's still very young, he develops a thought at this point and we don't know exactly when, but it's clear that it must have been around this sort of time that actually, even, even Changsha, even Hunan province isn't big enough for him and he really needs to get to the heart of the action. And that of course, from the point of view of any ambitious young would be revolutionary thinker, is to go to the capital city to get to Beijing.
- [32:07]
C
So is it at this point that he decides that he's going to make a physical change in himself? Because from what I understand that he and his friends, they have that traditional pigtail, the Q. Am I saying it right? And they both sort of do this thing of symbolic, just hacking it off, that the past is the past. Our attachment to the Qing dynasty, we're cutting that off too, because this is a brave new different tomorrow.
- [32:33]
D
That's right, the Q. I mean, that's the way the Sort of the braided hair at the back was a symbol that the Manchu dynasty, so the Qing dynasty was run by ethnic Manchus, insisted that men of the majority Han ethnicity should wear such a braid, you know, essentially as a sort of marker. And for a while, while cutting off your cue was regarded rightly as a very dangerous act. I mean, you think about, say, women who don't wear head coverings in Iran today, a sort of similar sort of thing. By your behavioral choice, cutting off your cue became important as a symbolic moment of leaving the imperial past behind. But also this wider sense was still there that the revolution was unfinished, that by changing your dress and your behavior, you could symbolize your connection to the new world. So for instance, people started making, you know, wearing new types of clothes, you know, something that's sometimes called the Mao suit, that actually starts as a Sun Yat Sen suit, because Sun Yat Sen, as the man who briefly becomes president of China for a few months after the revolution, wears such a suit. And, you know, following him, following that kind of clean cut, revolutionary look, becomes part of defining yourself through dress and appearance as someone who has indeed cut off your cue and instead is going modern and revolution.
- [33:50]
A
So Mao has cut off his cue. What's he up to? Drifting around, starting and finishing stuff. Right. He goes to soap making school at one point as well as police school and law school.
- [34:02]
D
Why? I think probably the soap period is a relatively limited part of the. After all, and you know, not what
- [34:09]
A
he glorifies in his later writings.
- [34:11]
D
Well, no, you shouldn't downgrade these things. After all, the founder of one of the most influential religions in the world, I believe, used to make furniture at various points with his father. So, you know, the carpenter background is good for some. Anyway. I think it's fair to say that, yes, Mao is still sort of bouncing around a bit full of ideas, full of, you know, to use what's called a cliche word in our era, but I'll use in this case passion of one sort or another. Probably actually in the 18th century. He has these sort of strong feelings, but not necessarily a sense of direction to where to go. You know, if it's a sort of enlightenment battle between rationality and romantic, you know, kind of revolt, then he's very much on the romantic revolt side. He wants to be a big person, be a big deal, but he's not sure what about yet. Just remember though, he's still very young. You know, he doesn't turn 20 until the year 1913. So, you know, he's still in the aftermath of this revolution, making his way through Hunan.
- [35:08]
A
And he's reading, huh? He's reading a lot.
- [35:10]
D
And he's reading. He used this metaphor of the buffalo who makes his way into the grass patch and devours everything. Yes, he's an utter autodidact. I mean, we know that some of his earliest writings that we have are very much around, you know, European writers who've been in translation, they're there from the late Qing dynasty, who he absorbs. But there's one particular strand that he begins to develop at this time, and because it precedes his communist convictions, his Marxist convictions, it comes before that, it's worth noting, and that is writing that has a social, Social Darwinist trend to it. You know, this idea that, again, you know, emerged from 19th century Britain that races or peoples were in competition with each other for survival of the fittest, as biological species were. I mean, you know, for the avoidance of doubt, it's regarded as pseudobiological claptrap in the present day. But in those days, actually in East Asia, in particular in Japan and China, a social Darwinist view of how races and nations would compete with each other was very popular, and it was very literalistic in some ways. The idea that the body personal and the body politic were links, which is one of the reasons that when you look at Mao's earliest writings from this time, they're not about Marxism or anything at all. They're about personal hygiene and personal exercise. In other words, that you have to keep your own body fit and strong as a means of building up the body politic.
- [36:35]
C
But is he also reading sort of the Western thinkers like Adam Smith or John Stuart Milne or those. Does he get his hands on that kind of thing as well?
- [36:45]
D
It's difficult to know exactly because he's reading Eclectic and we don't necessarily have notes from the earliest, but there are now actually English translations of the very earliest writings of Mao, and they become more detailed as time goes on. We do know about the Social Darwinist partly because not his very first, but one of the first things that he writes is literally a personal exercise plan. So if you want to kind of get fit the Mao way, you can look up his guide and basically see it. A lot of it involves sort of thrusting up and down and sort of touching the buttocks at various points. We won't go into huge detail, but people can look it up for themselves. They want to. And that fits into this idea very much of there being a kind of physical element to national renewal. He wasn't the only one. Again, bearing in mind that other young men in particular who were beginning to sort of follow this path, like Tsai Ghassen, who would also become sort of founder member of the party, he took a different path with this sort of social Darwinist idea. He felt he should harden his body by exposing it to the elements. So he would walk around Beijing in the middle of winter, which was very, very cold, just wearing a thin shirt, and therefore had sort of asthma for most of his revolutionary care. You can see similar things, actually, I would say, in parts of Sheffield late at night in November and December, but not necessarily for revolutionary purposes. In that particular case, though, who knows? So there was a very literalistic take on many of these sort of social Darwinist ideas, and Mao certainly seems to absorb them in a very enthusiastic manner.
- [38:08]
C
So he's a voracious student of many different schools of thought at this point. But then at some point in 1913, he goes from being student to wanting to be a teacher, and he ends up in teacher training college. Tell us a little bit about that aspect.
- [38:24]
D
Yes, I mean, he goes to what in China is. It's an English term, but it's actually used, I think, more commonly in translation in China these days, to a normal college, which actually normal in the sense of teacher training. I mean, he's clearly got in his mind at this stage the idea that there's going to be a revolutionary transformation and that education will be a large part of this. And he wants to sort of make sure that there is this sort of shift in terms of wider mindsets and society as a whole. So we have to assume at that time that he's reading widely, I'm guessing, in modern studies. She was never a linguist, unlike some of his contemporaries at that time, but certainly I was thinking about science and scientific change, these things that were very, very much part of the teacher training establishment. Bearing in mind that, as I mentioned before, the old Confucian education system had been formally abolished in 1905. So the turn towards modern education and scientific education became much more central in reforming efforts at that time. And certainly we that the governments of the early Republican period are keen to do various things, including standardize the form of Mandarin that people use around the country and also try and create a sort of new generation of younger people, men in particular, who would have the kind of scientific and technical training that a newly emergent Chinese republic was going to need. There's often actually quite a lot of martial training as well. The idea that sort of drill and learning, militarist values was important. This became important A and Mao directly, who was heavily influenced by it, but also because it's another rejection of that Confucian past. It was said that, you know, the ideal for a Confucian gentleman was to be this, you know, sort of person who's slightly languid, would, you know, concentrate on studying by sort of reading through a, leafing through a book while sitting back on a couch. I'm sure Willy's day to day life must be exactly like this.
- [40:14]
A
Very similar, very similar.
- [40:16]
D
And the most modern ethos that was being put forward in that sort of teacher training college and more broadly in education in China, very much taken from the kind of, you know, Victorian, muscular Victorian ideas, was that, no, you should be exercising, you should be training, you should be drilling, healthy mind and a healthy body. That I think would have been very much the dynamic that he would have encountered in that sort of teacher training college.
- [40:37]
C
And the same thing's going on in India. At the same time you've got this sort of, you know, the idea of the Shaka, the Brits taking over and sort of, you know, if you want to be worthy of running your own country or getting hold of your own identity or your own destiny, you have to be strong. And so, you know, you can only be strong if you drill, drill, drill, yes.
- [40:55]
A
So tell us about his time with the May 4th movement, Rana.
- [40:59]
D
So let me explain a little bit what this phrase means because it's one that actually would be understood even today, I think, by, you know, any educated Chinese who's read a bit of Chinese history in high school or elsewhere. The end of the 19 teens is yet another turbulent time time in Chinese political history. And while Mao is making his way from Hunan province up to the big city up to Beijing to the capital of the country where the real action is going on. There's huge ructions going on. But the most important thing is the rise of a new youth oriented patriotic nationalist movement, which is often called for shorthand, the May Fourth Movement, attached to a student demonstration of about 3,000 students in the center of Beijing on the fourth September of, of May 1919. Why that date? Because a few days before the end of April, the Paris Peace conference that ended World War I, in other words, the Great War being held in Paris. Now again, many people who know more, the European side of things may not realize that China and Japan were both very much present there. And essentially to cut a much longer story really quite short, China, which had sent 100,000 plus workers to the Western front in Europe to dig trenches and do all this kind of behind the scenes work as part of the Allied effort, was expecting to get back the territories which Germany had had on Chinese soil to Chinese sovereignty instead as a reward for being on the right side, the winning side in the Great War, and through a combination of sort of the Japanese intervening to take them as well, and also because of some skuldugerous action by Chinese politicians who were playing both sides and turned out to actually be doing secret deals with the Japanese in a way that quite shocked Woodrow Wilson when he found found out essentially China did not get those former German colonies back, they went to Japan instead. And this caused outrage amongst the young patriotic nationalist students in Beijing, in particular at Peking University, Tsinghua University, these sorts of places, and a whole group of them, thousands, demonstrated in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Tiananmen. And although the demonstration itself breaks up after a bit of kind of scuffling and even violence, it sets a sort of symbolic moment going that on May 4, China's youth, the elite youth of the university, say no more. China is weak. It is being eaten away by imperialism from outside, it's being eaten away by warlords from inside. And this has to stop. And this is a very inspiring movement that, you know, spreads through the media of the press, through student groups who sort of talk to each other and inspires a whole variety of shifts, some of which are also given the new culture movement. In other words, the idea that China's old culture, the Confucian culture, was the problem and putting something new in its place was the solution to this particular issue. What does this have to do with. Well, by this stage, Mao has got himself up in the late teens, early 20s to Beijing and heads to, you know, the beating heart of all of this, a place actually which some Chinese students at the time called Beijing's Latin Quarter. In other words, the sort of lively university zone where people are drinking tea, eating snacks and discussing big ideas. At this time, one of the biggest ideas comes from what's happened just a few years before in 1917, which is the overthrow of the Russian Empire and the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Lots of young Chinese are very interested in this. And then they're discussing anarchism, communism, liberalism, whole range of very, very free thinking ideas in and around the surrounds of Peking University, then as now the most prestigious educational institution in China. It's headed at that time by a chancellor, a president who is a real liberal, a man called Tsai Yuenpei. And he said that what we do at Peking University is we give you education for a worldview. In other words, we don't tell you what to think, we tell you how to think. A very kind of liberal minded idea. Also those days you, there's no sort of security tags that you need to get into the campus. Everyone's just like crowded and listened to lectures by famous figures. So this is exhilarating for Mao, but he needs a way to keep body and soul together while he's in Beijing. He's still not very well trained for anything, but he's done a bit of teacher training, as you say. He's done a lot of autodidactic reading. And he gets a job, not a very glamorous job, library assistant, if I remember correctly. His pay slip actually is in the museum up there at the old Peking University site just north of Forbidden City.
- [45:17]
A
And it's pretty low.
- [45:19]
D
It's eight Chinese dollars a month. It's my memory, which even then was not that much. But it didn't matter because it was enough to keep body and soul together. And it enabled him to meet people who would be crucial to his later life. Two people. Li Da Zhao Chengduxiu. Li Da Zhao was the head librarian of Peking University. So technically Mao's boss. And then Chengduxiu was the dean of humanities at Peking University. And they're remembered in Chinese history because Li Da Zhao and Chengduxiao were two of the founders, maybe the two founding members of what was in a tiny little outfit started in 1921 called the Chinese Communist Party. And not to spoil the end for listeners, but that would be quite significant for Mao's life for the next few decades.
- [46:05]
C
This is a very good place to leave this. A young man who's suddenly been introduced to, you know, communist ideology, which is then going to define what we think of him, what we associate with him. In the next episode, we're gonna see how Mao makes manages to turn these ideas that he's surrounded with as a young boy into effective action, rising up through the ranks of this nascent Chinese Communist Party. And if you want to hear that next episode right now with Rana, join the empire club@empirepoduk.com cheaper than a price of a pint a month. You get early access, you get ad free shows, you get a weekly newsletter, you get book discounts. Just do it. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand, and goodbye
- [46:49]
A
from me, William D. Rimple.