had become something of a marked figure in Changsha, as well as a definite thorn in the side of the dangerous General Zhang. So in December, Mao traveled once again to Beijing to see the Yangs, to attempt to deepen his contacts with Li Dazhao and other writers he admired, and to seek support for a national campaign to oust the corrupt general Zhang from Hunan Province.
Mao arrived in Beijing to find Professor Yang Changji desperately ill. A gastric illness the previous summer had somehow led to massive swelling of his body and to collapse of his digestive system. Convalescence in the scenic western hills, and specialized care in the Beijing German hospital, had alike been unavailing. Yang’s colleagues ascribed the illness to overwork at Beijing University, where he was teaching a full load besides translating two books on Western ethics and writing educational surveys. Yang died at dawn on January 17, 1920, and on January 22, just a few months after giving the eulogy at his own mother’s funeral, Mao became the cosignatory of the funeral eulogy for his most influential teacher. One day later, on January 23, Mao’s father died at his home in Shaoshan.
Mao, however, stayed on in Beijing. There must have been family matters to attend to back in Hunan, but there was a lot to do in Beijing. There were the Yangs, mother and daughter, to see to. Most important to Mao’s political future was Li Dazhao, whom he now got to know better, for both were mourning the loss of a mutual friend. Li now had organized a more formal Marxist Study Society in Beijing, and a translation of the Communist Manifesto was under way (some of it already completed, for Mao to see) along with more technical works like Karl Kaut sky’s Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. Yet if Mao was now getting a more specific knowledge of Marxist-socialist theories, he remained very eclectic in his own mind—his surviving letters to friends from this time show him dreaming of a wide range of options, including a work-study school in the verdant Yuelu hills outside Changsha, a dream he had harbored since 1918. The students and teachers would learn and work at farming in all its aspects—from tending vegetables and flowers to raising rice and cotton, growing mulberry trees, and breeding fish and poultry. (Mao noted that such work would be regarded as “sacred,” but if the “rough work” was too hard for the students, then “hired hands should be employed to assist them.”) If farming proved impractical, an alternate approach would be to found a “Self-Study University” in which the teachers and students “would practice a Communist life.” Income for this project would be derived from teaching, publishing essays and articles, and editing books, and expenses would be cut by having the community do its own cooking and laundry. All income would be held in common, for this would also be a “work-study mutual aid society.” Intellectual focus would come from an “Academic Symposium,” meeting two or three times a week. After two or three years of such training the students and teachers might be able to set off for Russia, which Mao was now defining as “the number one civilized country in the world.”
Mao, in other words, was restless. As he wrote in March 1920 to a friend whose own mother had also just died, there was now a whole category of “people like us, who are always away from home and are thereby unable to take care of our parents.” In a letter to his girlfriend, Tao Yi, who was teaching in Changsha but hoping to come to Beijing, Mao repeated that he would like to go to Russia. To make that dream a reality, once things were peaceful again in Hunan he would form a “Free Study Society” in Changsha, hoping “to master the outline of all fields of study, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign.” Mao added, “Then I will form a work-study team to go to Russia.” He was confident, he told Tao Yi, that women going to Russia would “be
Mao arrived in Beijing to find Professor Yang Changji desperately ill. A gastric illness the previous summer had somehow led to massive swelling of his body and to collapse of his digestive system. Convalescence in the scenic western hills, and specialized care in the Beijing German hospital, had alike been unavailing. Yang’s colleagues ascribed the illness to overwork at Beijing University, where he was teaching a full load besides translating two books on Western ethics and writing educational surveys. Yang died at dawn on January 17, 1920, and on January 22, just a few months after giving the eulogy at his own mother’s funeral, Mao became the cosignatory of the funeral eulogy for his most influential teacher. One day later, on January 23, Mao’s father died at his home in Shaoshan.
Mao, however, stayed on in Beijing. There must have been family matters to attend to back in Hunan, but there was a lot to do in Beijing. There were the Yangs, mother and daughter, to see to. Most important to Mao’s political future was Li Dazhao, whom he now got to know better, for both were mourning the loss of a mutual friend. Li now had organized a more formal Marxist Study Society in Beijing, and a translation of the Communist Manifesto was under way (some of it already completed, for Mao to see) along with more technical works like Karl Kaut sky’s Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. Yet if Mao was now getting a more specific knowledge of Marxist-socialist theories, he remained very eclectic in his own mind—his surviving letters to friends from this time show him dreaming of a wide range of options, including a work-study school in the verdant Yuelu hills outside Changsha, a dream he had harbored since 1918. The students and teachers would learn and work at farming in all its aspects—from tending vegetables and flowers to raising rice and cotton, growing mulberry trees, and breeding fish and poultry. (Mao noted that such work would be regarded as “sacred,” but if the “rough work” was too hard for the students, then “hired hands should be employed to assist them.”) If farming proved impractical, an alternate approach would be to found a “Self-Study University” in which the teachers and students “would practice a Communist life.” Income for this project would be derived from teaching, publishing essays and articles, and editing books, and expenses would be cut by having the community do its own cooking and laundry. All income would be held in common, for this would also be a “work-study mutual aid society.” Intellectual focus would come from an “Academic Symposium,” meeting two or three times a week. After two or three years of such training the students and teachers might be able to set off for Russia, which Mao was now defining as “the number one civilized country in the world.”
Mao, in other words, was restless. As he wrote in March 1920 to a friend whose own mother had also just died, there was now a whole category of “people like us, who are always away from home and are thereby unable to take care of our parents.” In a letter to his girlfriend, Tao Yi, who was teaching in Changsha but hoping to come to Beijing, Mao repeated that he would like to go to Russia. To make that dream a reality, once things were peaceful again in Hunan he would form a “Free Study Society” in Changsha, hoping “to master the outline of all fields of study, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign.” Mao added, “Then I will form a work-study team to go to Russia.” He was confident, he told Tao Yi, that women going to Russia would “be
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