Mao Zedong Read Online Free

strengthening the state and recasting the form of the government.
    The immediate lesson that Mao absorbed in these tumultuous events was the transient nature of fame and success. The two men who had done the most to bring the revolution to Changsha were Jiao Defeng and Chen Zuoxin. Jiao, from a wealthy Hunan landlord family, had studied briefly at a railway school in Japan before returning to China and founding his own revolutionary group with local secret-society support, which he named the “Forward Together Society.” With some backup financial support from the Revolutionary Alliance, Jiao, still only twenty-five in 1911, managed to create a remarkable underground following among shopkeepers, farmers, crafts-men, coolies, and army personnel, whom he organized in a formidable array of front organizations. Chen had served in the Qing government’s new army forces, where he rose to the rank of platoon commander, and became a close friend of Jiao’s. The two men may have agreed with the basic republican goals of Sun Yat-sen, but they also had their own ideas about how the revolution in China should help the poor and the disadvantaged while at the same time increasing the power base of the affiliated secret societies.
    Though they showed considerable courage and shrewdness in winning the city of Changsha to the revolutionary camp in October, neither Jiao nor Chen had a firm footing among the wealthy merchants and scholars who dominated the Changsha assembly. Accordingly, as soon as their radical goals became known, the two men were outmaneuvered and isolated by a number of local political leaders and military men, and they were killed in a sudden mutiny by the very troops they thought they were leading. As Mao succinctly described the events later in his life, Jiao and Chen “did not last long. They were not bad men, and had some revolutionary intentions, but they were poor and represented the interests of the oppressed. The landlords and merchants were dissatisfied with them. Not many days later, when I went to call on a friend, I saw their corpses lying in the street.” It was Mao’s first introduction to the realities of power politics.
    The fates of Jiao and Chen seem to have given Mao pause. He had missed his chance to join the first revolutionary army in Wuhan due to the speed of events—and to the elusive rain shoes. But when other students from Changsha schools hurried to enlist in a “student army” from the city to hasten the revolutionary cause, Mao was cautious. He did not exactly understand their motives, nor did he think the volunteer force was well managed. So instead he made the pragmatic decision to join the regular army—that is to say, the army once loyal to the Qing emperors, which had been won over to the republican cause by the rhetoric and skillful planning of Jiao and Chen. By a strange twist, therefore, Mao’s commanding officers were now the people who had instigated the murders of both Jiao and Chen.
    Mao did not see combat during his six months in the Republican army, but seems to have remained on garrison duty in Changsha. He did make some friends in his squad, two of whom were workers, one a miner and the other an ironsmith; they may have given him some new insights into the world of labor. If so, the conversations he had with them were doubtless sharpened by new reading that Mao was doing in his leisure time, in the pages of the Xiang River Daily News. This Hunan paper devoted considerable space to socialist theories—Mao said later this was the first time he encountered the word “socialism”—and also led him to read essays by one of the first socialist theorists and organizers in China. But when Mao tried to share this latest enthusiasm, in correspondence, with some of his former school friends, he found that only one of them showed any interest at all.
    The members of his squad, however, looked up to him as an educated man, a new experience for Mao, who was now almost eighteen