II
PROFILE OF A REVOLUTIONIST
Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Tse-tung, 1938
MAO TSE-TUNG, the man who was to don the mantle of Lenin, was born in Hunan Province, in central China, in 1893. His father, an industrious farmer, had managed to acquire several acres, and with this land, the status of a "middle" peasant. He was a strict disciplinarian, and Mao’s youth was not a happy one. The boy was in constant conflict with his father hut found an ally in his mother, whose "indirect tactics" (as he once described her methods of coping with her husband) appealed to him. But the father gave his rebellious son educational opportunities that only a tiny minority of Chinese were then able to enjoy. Mao's primary and secondary schooling was thorough. His literary taste was catholic; while a pupil at the provincial normal school he read omnivorously. His indiscriminate diet included Chinese philosophy, poetry, history, and romances as well as translations of many Western historians, novelists, and biographers. However, history and political sciences par-
