Chapter 7 "The rise and fall, everyone is responsible"

"China also needs such a great man!" Mao Zedong said to Xiao emotionally, and China must also become prosperous and strong, "so as not to follow the mistakes of Annan, North Korea, and India."He quoted a saying by the scholar Gu Yanwu (1613-1682), "Everyone is responsible for the rise and fall of the world." Mao Zedong opened "The Legend of Heroes of the World" and read aloud to his classmates—who were not used to sitting and listening to him preaching honestly—a sentence about George Washington: "Only under the leadership of Washington, After eight years of hard war, the United States won victory and independence." [4]

Seeing a ray of light above the horizon, the young Chairman began to pay attention to the West.At that time and later, he was always thinking about what China should learn from the West and was not interested in the West itself.The United States has completed a revolution, so what about China? Mao Zedong liked to read books about ancient Chinese emperors, and his love of heroes made him want to know more about great people.Among them, the images of two emperors were deeply imprinted in his heart.One is Qin Shihuang, a Chinese strongman who unified the world; the other is Han Wudi, the founder of a dynasty with military acumen, and the word "Wu" in his title comes from this.

The students admired Mao Zedong's mastery of peer-to-peer legendary novels, and they liked to hear him retell the highlights.But Mao felt that the novels depicted real events that happened in history, which shocked everyone.He once argued the matter with his history teacher, cursed at any fellow student who agreed with the teacher, and even hit a classmate with a chair.Mao Zedong was unwilling to accept criticism, as he later admitted when looking back on this period of study life. [5] For this matter, he even went to the headmaster, and when the learned headmaster disagreed with his point of view, that is, he did not think it was a real incident that happened during the Warring States period[6], he wrote a petition to the county magistrate of Xiangxiang. , Demanding the replacement of the principal, and forcing those confused students to sign.

Mao Zedong is a straight boy, he will not protect himself by flexibility.His views on the novels that fascinated him in Shaoshan were so naive and stubborn. The incident made his life in Dongshan worse. At the same time, through this incident, we can also see the shadow of his later thinking characteristics: paranoid thinking, insisting on his own opinions, willful denial of simple facts, and contempt for different opinions. Mao's grades were very good, and after five months of probation, the headmaster allowed him to stay in school.Although good academic performance is a kind of comfort to him who is lonely, there are always two sides to things, and some students laugh at his narrow enthusiasm because of this.So, he began to consider leaving the school.

In Dongshan, Mao Zedong greatly broadened his horizons.Now, he wants to travel around Hunan and see Changsha. Returning to Shaoshan twice—once at the Spring Festival and once at the end of the early summer semester—had strengthened his determination to realize his ideal.Mao Shunsheng is much gentler, but still lacks foresight. "When will you finish your studies and become a teacher, and come back to honor your ancestors?" asked the father. [7] In September 1911, Mao Zedong left Xiangxiang with his luggage.Amy Xiao herself was also somewhat dissatisfied with Dongshan, and left with Zedong.They walked to Xiangtan, where Mao Zedong wanted to apply for admission to a high school, but was rejected because he was too old and too tall. [8]

Mao Zedong still had a way out, and he had asked a teacher from Dongshan to help him in a middle school in Changsha.Xiao and Mao crowded into the third-class cabin of a small steamer bound for Changsha, the provincial capital, from Xiangtan.To Mao Zedong's delight and surprise, he entered a beautiful school without any difficulty: Xiangxiang Zhusheng Middle School. Xiao recalled that the bustling crowds in Changsha made Mao Zedong "too excited to speak" [9].At that time, Changsha had a population of 800,000, and the climate was hot, lacking in character, dirty and messy.After being opened as a treaty port and foreign trade in 1904, Changsha became somewhat prosperous and increasingly became a bastion against the revolution of the Qing court.

Mao Zedong saw the newspaper for the first time here.Before that, he only knew that printed matter was a window to understand history, but the newspapers were all about events happening today! "Minli Daily" was Sun Yat-sen's mouthpiece for advocating nationalism.Mao Zedong saw the news of the failure of the Guangzhou Uprising from the messy columns of this vertical newspaper.The uprising was led by a Hunanese revolutionary, Huang Xing.He recalled: "I was deeply moved by this story, and also found that Minli Daily was full of exciting content." [10] Mao Zedong was encouraged and wrote an article himself. "This is the first time I have expressed a political opinion, but this political opinion is a bit muddled." Mao Zedong said when recalling his passionate article pasted on the wall of the school gate.He advocated that the new government should be composed of reformers and revolutionaries, with Sun Yat-sen as president, Kang Youwei as prime minister, and Liang Qichao as foreign minister. (This is as naive as a late-twentieth-century American youth pleading out of unifying zeal for a U.S. government with Jack Keim as president, Oprah Winfrey as vice president, and Al Gore as secretary of state.)

Heroes are still the idol of 17-year-old Mao Zedong.But the monarch is no longer among his heroes.In a radical move, he became one of the first students in the school to cut their braids[11].In order to oppose the cause of the Qing Dynasty, he and another classmate who cut off their braids urged 10 classmates who had previously "coached to cut their braids" but later regretted it, to forcibly cut off their braids with scissors. Mao Zedong only stayed at the Xiangxiang Provincial Middle School for four weeks. In October 1911, the revolutionary army in the city of Wuhan launched an attack on the Qing Dynasty, and the last dynasty that ruled China for 267 years collapsed.Within a month, the revolutionary army occupied 17 provinces, and the era of the Qing court ruling China passed.

The wide boulevards in Changsha were bustling with excitement.Politics has broken out of old patterns, but new contours have not yet formed.The textbooks were temporarily thrown aside, and the students no longer wrote ancient prose, but wrote some slogans calling for a better future. A revolutionary propagandist arrives at the school to address the students, promising to usher in a new era.Mao Zedong was very excited after hearing this, and he decided to "join the revolution." [12] He spent five days planning his career before joining the Hunan Revolutionary Army (i.e., the New Army).

Mao Zedong's monthly salary in Changsha was seven oceans, two yuan was used for food, and most of the rest was used to buy newspapers.Mao Zedong was engrossed in reading the newspaper and regarded it as a treasure.All he bought were left-wing newspapers; the media was a source of information, because newspapers were a new tool in Chinese political life. In "Xianghan News", Mao Zedong saw that a Hunanese who had studied in Japan founded a "socialist" party, and other articles also talked about "socialism" as a new idea to reorganize society.This was the first time Mao Zedong came into contact with the word "socialism".

The so-called socialism at that time refers to social reform with a collectivist color, and Marxism has not yet appeared on the eastern horizon.The soldier Mao Zedong was deeply moved. He wrote enthusiastically to his former classmates, introducing them to the attractive concept of socialism, but only one of his classmates replied.