One evening, when Mao was 13, his father, in front of a group of guests, denounced him as lay and useless. This meant a terrible loss of face for young Mao; He ran-out of the house, his father in hot pursuit. Young Mao reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if his father came any nearer. "Demands and counter-demands were presented for cessation of the civil war," Mao recalled. "My father insisted that I apologize and kowtow . . . I agreed to give a one-knee kowtow if he would promise not to beat me. Thus the war ended, and from it I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion, my father relented, but when I remained meek and submissive, he only cursed and beat me the more."
Young Mao remembered the lesson, and modified it. In his long march to power, he knew how to appear meek when the occasion demanded. But he himself was never moved by meekness. China's new master is no man to settle-permanently- for a one-knee kowtow from an opponent.
To Grasp the Future. Mao began to develop a social conscience. Once there was a famine in the Shao Shan district and the poor, asking help from the rich farmers, started a movement called "Eat Rice Without Charge." This seemed reasonable to Mao; but not to his father who, like other farmers, kept selling rice to cities despite the local famine. Young Mao read pamphlets about the Western powers -that were dismembering China. He read books that proclaimed China's need to modernize herself. He began to cut classes and teach himself from books. The principal reprimanded him and Mao said: "Though it will interfere with my own "study program, I will attend classes on one condition: If I ask a question a teacher cannot answer, will you fire him?" The principal pressed Mao no further.
Mao's father wanted to apprentice him to a rice merchant, but Mao again rebelled. He went to study in Changsha, where he hoped to find answers to many questions.
The old order in the China of Mao's youth was crumbling under the influence of Western civilization, like a broken mummy suddenly exposed to the harsh air. China tried to reproduce 500 years of Western evolution in a few decades. Twentieth Century China was to have bombers before it had a good red system, radios before it had more than a few telephones. Chinese shouted Communist slogans before they could read. Galileo and Einstein, Jefferson and Karl Mars came to China an at once. The nation's youth desperately wanted to grasp the future. What the future was, they did not know.
The Idealist. Mao wanted knowledge. He read advertisements of newly opened schools. In turn he enrolled in a police school, a soapmaking school a law school, a commercial school, an economics school. He finally wound up in the Hunan Normal School where he hoped to be trained as a teacher. He read translations of Adam Smith, Darwin, Rousseau, Spencer. Says Mao: "I was then an idealist."
