Feeling the need to share his new knowledge with others, he inserted advertisements in newspapers inviting correspondence with fellow idealists. Four answered. Three of them later turned out to be "reactionaries" The fourth a skinny youth called Li Li-san ("who listened to everything I had to say and then went away") was soon to become Mao's rival for the leadership of Chinese Communism.
At that time (1910), China's revolution against the tottering Manchu dynasty
was in progress. Swept along by the torrent, Mao clipped off his queue as an anti-
monarchist demonstration. Other students promised to follow his example, but
later reneged. This prepared Mao for party discipline-or what Lenin called "democratic
centralism." Recalls Mao: "A friend of mine and I therefore assaulted them in secret and forcibly removed their queues a total of more than ten falling victim to our shears."
The Marxist. The Russian Revolution (1917) shook China with fear and hope. It gave Mao the simple answers he was looking for. Excitedly, he traveled between Changsha, Peking and Shanghai, doing odd jobs and organizing workers and students. In Peking he worked as a librarian and for the first time he sensed himself a proletarian. "I stayed in . . . a little room which held seven other people," he said. "I used to have to warn people on each side of me when I wanted to turn over. . ." He read the Communist Manifesto.
In Shanghai, in 1921, he attended the foundation meeting of China's Communist Party. Although he was impatient with friends who talked about girls or other non-revolutionary matters, he fell in love. According to old custom, his parents had married him to a village aid when he was 14. He discarded the aid back home, with whom he had never lived, and married Yang K'ai-hui, a professor's daughter and an active Communist. Friends celebrated their marriage as an ''ideal romance." She bore him two sons, both of whom were educated in Moscow. Yang was executed by Hunan's anti-Communist Governor Ho Chien in 1930.
When the Chinese Communist Party allied itself with Dr. Sun Yat-sen's nationalist revolutionary movement, Mao worked in the combined executive committees of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang. In this capacity he met a young Kuomintang leader who, like himself, was a country boy with the urge to take a hand in China's destiny. He was Chiang Kai-shek.
The Half-Trotskyite. The Communist Kuomintang alliance did not last long. Chiang was one of the first to realize that cooperation with the Communists is possible only by surrendering to them. Chiang preferred not to surrender. By 1927, the Chinese Communists were once more on their own In his native Hunan, Mao tirelessly tried to organize the peasants. But Li Li-san, Mao's noncommittal correspondent, was chosen by Moscow to head the Chinese party. In orthodox Marxist fashion, Li Li-san based his hopes on the urban proletariat; he considered China's peasant millions too backward to grasp the new revolutionary science.
