progressive literature. They seethed with resentment, or even hatred, at what had happened to old China: important seaports just seized by this or that foreign power, the Japanese in bullying mode, finances in a mess, native collaborators coining it in. In 1912 the old empire had been abolished, but no solid state had then followed: on the contrary, local warlords divided the country up. There were also some 6,000 Protestant missionaries, setting up hospitals and even universities some way into central China: Yale developed a connection. But this activity just called attention to Chinese backwardness: the awful poverty of the peasants, the degradation of women (in China little girls had their feet crushed so that, in later life, they would walk daintily), the illiteracy that was bound to follow from a script in which each word had its own character, sometimes of forty different brush strokes. Even the Americans’ record was not spotless: they imposed such restrictions against Chinese immigration that a team of Chinese representatives trying to set up their pavilion for an international exhibition at St Louis were roughed up as they came through. Shanghai was an international city, with tens of thousands of foreigners in their own settlements, from which Chinese were kept out; and when there were riots in the twenties, foreign policemen fired into the crowds. Russia had also been dominated by more advanced countries; Lenin had just refused to pay the debts, and in 1919 was defeating the foreign invaders trying to collect them and to return Russia to her previous status. In Peking, Chinese took an interest, and a Communist Party soon followed.
Of course, this was in some degree fanciful. Old Marx did not really have very much to say about such countries, regarding their economic and social arrangements as fossils. There was not much of an industrial working class in China, either. However, Lenin had made his revolution in a Russia that also had only a limited number of industrial workers: the ‘people’ were Volga boatmen, dockers, hawkers, servants-of-servants and especially peasants, and especially again peasants who had been pushed into military uniform in pursuit of a very badly managed war with Germany. There were at least the beginnings of that pattern in China, and some of the intelligentsia understood as much. The cause was even inspiring, and Chinese students, getting married in France, solemnly had photographs taken to record them in their wedding finery, jointly holding up a copy of
On the worldwide scale, there was of course a potential Bolshevik alliance with victims of imperialism, and, quite soon after the Revolution, representatives of these, from India or China, began to appear in Moscow. The Communist International — Comintern — set up a school for them, and sent its own people to offer sage advice. Mao Tse-tung (the name means ‘shined-on east’) did not go to that school, and did not in fact go to Moscow at all until after his own victory, much later. But his cause was revolutionary, and he belonged to a type that, worldwide, produced revolutionaries: for he was a student teacher from a peasant background less dismal than others, and had ambitions to count as a scholar, which had been frustrated by an irascible, bullying father who made him work in the fields. The province in which he was born (in 1893), Hunan, was on a military road, and it was relatively open to foreign influences: in 1903 it had the first girls’ school in China and its capital was also chosen by Yale University as the place for an educational programme, on which American missionaries were very keen. In fact Mao was first noticed by an American, the president of Yale-in-China, as an agitator in 1924. It was easy enough for the young Mao to regard China with contempt. Why had such a civilization, the most ancient of all, come under Western domination? Mao cut off his pigtail, broke with his domineering father, and took up links with Peking intelligentsia who became interested in the Russian Revolution.
It was not just Communists who wanted to get rid of these things. There was a progressive-nationalist movement, the Kuomintang, initially dominated by Chinese Christians, with support from the merchants and students. They, too, were prepared to collaborate in the anti-imperialist cause with the Bolsheviks, and developed close relations with a Moscow which, to start off with, regarded the Kuomintang as the desirable ally. The overall notion was that China was too backward and rural to produce a proper Communist movement, and that the likely revolution would be anti-Western but also fuelled by peasants wanting their own land and merchants wanting to corner trade: these would be useful to Moscow, though they might also, on the ground, be hostile towards Communists. The Russians sent advisers and even set up the Whampoa Military Academy, near Canton. Its graduates, led by Chiang Kai-shek, set about unifying the country, which had fallen under various warlords, each with his protection racket (often involving opium, of which there was an epidemic). Moscow instructed the Chinese Communists to co-operate with Chiang, and the labour unions in Shanghai did so. He, however, had other ideas, and mercilessly butchered them, sometimes, to save ammunition, just binding them in batches of ten, taking them out to sea, and throwing them overboard. The origins of the Sino-Soviet split, a vastly important element in the end of the Cold War much later on, go back to this period. The Communists were decapitated, and Mao kept much of the nucleus together in remote, difficult, mountainous country; he did get help from Moscow, but not very much — in effect only enough to keep him going (in one decisive battle, his troops could fire their machine-guns only for ten minutes). Meanwhile, Moscow co-operated with Chiang Kai-shek, since the Kuomintang had taken over most of the country and especially the cities. Even when the Kuomintang eventually lost the civil war, in 1949, and evacuated Shanghai in conditions of much disarray, the Soviet ambassador accompanied it to the very last stage of exile.
Mao Tse-tung turned out to be a guerrilla leader of genius, and kept his forces together for years of harsh living and very hard fighting against an enemy far stronger. As Leszek Kolakowski says, he ‘was one of the greatest… manipulator[s] of large masses of human beings in the twentieth century’. The ideology was ‘a naive repetition of a few commonplaces of Leninist-Stalinist Marxism’ and in places hardly said more than ‘what goes up must come down’. But it did lay stress on the peasant side, and it possessed the necessary degree of hating-ness, as required by Lenin. In later life, he became grotesquely vain and self-indulgent, producing a ‘Little Red Book’ that the masses were supposed to chant (‘The world is progressing, the future is bright and no-one can change this general trend of history’ and the like) and he was always neurotic (suffering from chronic constipation). But he had a Stalinist mixture of guile and ruthlessness, and even when he was travelling through remote territory, carried on a bamboo litter with two senior colleagues and followed by a bedraggled horde carting weaponry along muddy tracks, he had an idea as to which of the two colleagues needed to be knifed by some show trial held in some hut of wicker, roofed and walled with yak dung. He also seems to have had the measure of the Soviets, knowing how to extract help from them and what to expect. It was at a Party meeting at which Stalin’s henchman Lominadze presided that Mao made his most famous remark, that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun’.
In China, the generation that surfaced with Mao Tse-tung around 1920 took up the revolt of the peasants, the downtrodden rural masses, oppressed by landlords and by village usurers. When these matters were properly examined, the downtreading was limited, or, rather, was a matter of overall poverty. There were no doubt usurers who made money out of the poor, but the landlords themselves were badly off, in most cases not far above the rest of the peasantry: in fact, when Mao set about land distribution, expropriating the landlords, each peasant came away with one sixth of an acre, or hardly more than a suburban garden. True, there were absentee landlords in the towns, and their rent collectors were hated, especially when they arrived at a bad time, but in every village there were problems between peasants or other inhabitants, and it was here that Mao excelled. Collecting army mutineers, village bad-hats, bandits and dirt-poor peasants in an isolated mountain area in Hunan, he applied himself to studying what a peasant revolution would really be about: prices, profits, networks, diets, the incomes of watch repairers, the numbers of prostitutes (thirty in a population of 2,684 in one locality). ‘On hearing that a borrower has sold a son, lenders will hurry to the borrower’s house and force the borrower to repay his loan… “You have sold your son. Why don’t you repay me?” ’ Mao thus represented the Party with at least some cohesion and force, whereas the Shanghai and southern components had been hopelessly weakened; later, he escaped to an even more remote area, where he set up the ‘Jiangxi soviet’, one of those Communist islands that appeared with all wartime resistance movements, complete with its own secret police, its own re-education arrangements and its own machinery for exploiting gullible foreigners. In any village there would be a confiscation committee, a recruitment committee, a ‘red curfew committee’ etc., and even a children’s corps. An economy developed, too. Curiously enough the area was a big source of tungsten, and exported it through a state bank run by Mao’s brother to Canton; peasant women were made to cut their hair short such that their hair-pins — their savings — could be taken in for war finance. There was, however, primary school education for the first time, and Mao gained a favourable press, with romantic American journalists such as Edgar Snow to be flattered or lied to (when the Sino-
