Word: mao
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...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...
...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 rail system, radios before it had more than a few telephones. Chinese shouted Communist slogans before they could read. Galileo and Einstein, Jefferson and Karl Marx came to China all at once. The nation's youth desperately wanted to grasp the future. What the future was, they...
...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...
...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 Lisan ("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...