Introduction
ticularly appealed to him; in them, he sought, but without success, the key to the future of China.
His studies had led him to reject both democratic liberalism and parliamentary socialism as unsuited to his country. Time, he realized, was running out for China. History would not accord her the privilege of gradual political, social, and economic change, of a relatively painless and orderly evolution. To survive in the power jungle, China had to change, to change radically, to change fast. But how?
Shortly after graduating from normal school, in 1917, Mao accepted a position as assistant in the Peking University library. Here he associated himself with the Marxist study groups set up by Li Ta-chao and Ch'en Tu-hsiu; here he discovered Lenin, read his essays, pored over Trotsky's explosive speeches, and began to study Marx and Engels. By 1920, Mao was a convinced Communist and a man who had discovered his mission: to create a new China according to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin. When the CCP was organized in Shanghai, in 1921, Mao joined.
The China Mao decided to change was not a nation in the accepted sense of the word. Culturally, China was, of course, homogeneous; politically and economically, China was chaos. The peasants, 400 million of them, lived from day to day at subsistence level. Tens of millions of peasant families owned no land at all. Other millions cultivated tiny holdings from which they scraped out just enough food to sustain life.
The peasant was fair game for everyone. He was pillaged by tax collectors, robbed by landlords and usurers,
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