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Mao Tse-tung and the Hunan Self-government Movement, 1920: An Introduction and Five Translations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Angus W. McDonald Jr
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Extract

Several years ago, while going through the Mochizuki Collection in the sub-basement of Keiō University Library, I came across a small book bearing the title Hunan tzu-chih yün-tung shih (shang) [History of the Hunan Self-government Movement, Part I (Shanghai, December 1920)] by a Fukienese journalist with the curiously Taoist name of Wang Wu-wei. The book turned out to contain four hitherto unexamined and uncollected articles by Mao Tse-tung, written during September 1920, and a lengthy proposal written by Mao and others in early October. Asa whole the book throws considerable light on an important phase of the search by enlightened members of the Chinese polity for a way out of the twin dilemmas of warlordism and foreign penetration. Mao's articles show the 26-year-old teacher, far from being the obscure figure many have thought, as already something of a primus inter pares, a notable thinker and respected leader in the context of a rather chaotic and creative situation. Although I wrote a short introduction (in Japanese) and republished these pieces (in Chinese) in Hogaku Kenkyu, the journal of the Keio University Faculty of Law, neither is readily available to western audiences. What follows is a completely new introduction, together with translations of the five documents in question.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 68 , December 1976 , pp. 751 - 777
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1976

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References

1. See Legal Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2. This paper and the translations of the first four documents were prepared for presentation to the Midwest China Seminar (Chicago, February 1976). A much briefer version appears as part of ch. I (“Power”) in The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution in China: Elites and the Masses in Hunan Province, 1911–1927 (University of California Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

2. Chin-pai-nien ta-shih chi-shu (Record of Major Events of the Last Hundred Years), Changsha, 1959, pp. 411–12. Li Jui, in his biography of Mao Tse-tung, has the manifesto issued in late June after Mao and P'eng Huang had returned to Changsha, but Chin-pai-nien says that it was organized by Hunanese living in Shanghai.

3. His father had died the previous year: Mao may have had to attend to the properties he had inherited.

4. Wu-wei, Wang, Hunan tz.u-chih yün-tung shih (shang) (History of the Hunan Self-government Movement, Part I) (Shanghai, December 1920), pp. 11–18.Google Scholar

5. Ibid p. 34.

6. Ibid pp. 49–50.

7. At the same time the energetic Mao was engaged in founding the Cultural Bookstore (in a building owned by Yale-in-China), corresponding with Ts'ai Ho-shen in France, and founding a Marxist Study Society. He may already have begun teaching at night-school again.

8. Wang, op. cit pp. 144–46.

9. Mao does not mention the little-remarked San Remo Conference of April 1920, which had made Syria, Palestine and Iraq class”A”mandates of France and England, undermining the principle of Wilsonian self-determination; but the mandate system was still two years away from being well-established as he wrote and the Arabs were still confident that it would be only temporary.

10. Wang, op. cit p. 148.

11. It should perhaps be noted that P'eng did not properly understand the Monroe Doctrine. Originally, it was not a warning to Europeans to keep out of the United States: it was a warning not to intervene in Latin America. And its effectiveness, from the time of its promulgation in 1823 to the First World War, was paradoxically guaranteed by the British Navy. The Monroe Doctrine was revived by Theodore Roosevelt and had received wide publicity when it was specifically”safeguarded”by the Versailles Treaty establishing the League of Nations.

12. Wang, op. tit pp. 149–66.

13. Red Star Over China (Grove Press ed.), p. 154.Google Scholar

14. Wang, op. cit p. 3; pp. 141–44. Of course Wang was himself a “ foreigner” from Fukien.

15. Wang, Ibid pp. 169–73.

16. e.g. Liu Ch'un-jen in Wang, Ibid pp. 173–78.

17. Wang, ibid pp. 69–71.

18. Wang, ibid p. 71.

19. Including a teacher, a journalist, a labour leader, a merchant, and a student - i.e. “all circles”of the polity.

20. Wang, op. cit pp. 79–80.

21. Wang, ibid pp. 72–79.

22. The fact that the date of the convening of the National Assembly of the Chinese Republic is erroneously given as 1910 may indicate a lingering unfamiliar-ity with western forms of dating, or, alternatively, it may be a confusion with the convening of the National Assembly by the Ch'ing government in October of that year.

23. Wang, op. cit p. 10.

24. Wang, ibid p. 3.

25. Wang, ibid p. 3.

26. Of the 15, eight are identifiable. Two were among the highest ranked civilians, in the province (Yuän Chia-p'u was a personal follower of T'an Yen-k'ai); two were students, two were journalists and two were teachers.

27. Wang, op. cit p. 100.

28. Wang, ibid p. 101.

* A leading advocate of vernacular teaching, and a graduate of Peking Teacher's College.

† Member of the Provincial Assembly.