Free Mao Zedong by Jonathan Spence Page B

Hunan. Marxism was not mentioned in the roster of courses, but the university formed a convenient front for recruiting and vetting possible members of the Communist Party, and students enrolling found they were given the choice of taking courses in Marxist-Leninist theory. A similar use was made of a YMCA-sponsored “mass literacy” campaign that happened to be going on in Changsha at the same time, based in public halls, schools, churches, and private homes, which allowed Communist organizers to reach over a thousand potential recruits.
    In November, the Party Central Committee specifically mentioned that Changsha must recruit at least twenty new “comrades” to form “district executive committees,” and combine with other areas to get at least two thousand young socialist league members. (It was probably around this time that Yang Kaihui joined the Communist Party formally.) The Changsha district was also told to get “more than one labor union under its direct control” and to establish “solid relations” with other labor unions. The short-term goal was for all the districts to unite in forming a national union of railway workers. In line with such specific directives, Mao had already (in September) traveled to the massive Anyuan coal mines just across the border in Jiangxi, pretending to be a tourist, and even went down the colliery shafts. That November, Mao issued a particularly lavish eulogy on the Labor Association of Changsha, which had launched a major strike the previous April, although he had not been involved in its work and it was in fact controlled by Hunanese anarchists.
    The Labor Association was bound to become the focus of Mao’s attentions, now that his goals had been defined so dramatically. The association already had a following among a wide variety of Hunan operations and laborers—spinning mills, the mint, lead-smelting plants, construction workers, tailors and barbers, machinists and railway workers. In January 1922 it spearheaded a major strike against a Changsha spinning mill, and the military governor of Hunan—the same man who had been Mao’s commanding officer after the murder of the secret-society revolutionaries in 1912—responded by sending troops with machine guns to break the strike and also beheaded two student leaders believed to have aided the strikers.
    Mao’s scale of activities was now broadening swiftly. In the midst of the endless organizational work and the addressing of the somewhat contradictory calls of the Party center, he had managed to spend enough time with Yang Kaihui for them to start a family. Despite the absence of any formal ceremony they now considered themselves married. Their first son, Anying, was born in October 1922. But something curious was happening to Mao. The young man who had struggled so often against the autocratic nature of his father, who hated and despised the shackles of bourgeois marriage and had found joy in a free-love relationship, who detested schools and would never be a student in one again, and who always sought freedom of spirit and the chance to grow and change had willingly accepted, at the age of twenty-eight, a much greater degree of disciplined control from the Communist Party than any he had encountered in his life before.

5
    Workers and Peasants
    IN EARLY 1921, Mao was still a political amateur. The meetings of the New People’s Study Society, over which he often presided, were attended largely by teachers and their students, who seemed absorbed with such problems as whether or not to found a restaurant to provide cheap food for local workers, and whether their goal should be to “transform China” or to “transform China and the world.” By the end of 1922, however, Mao was becoming a professional revolutionary organizer and learning how to coordinate major strikes that affected the lives of tens of thousands of workers.
    The first of these was a strike by construction workers and carpenters, who hitherto had