Mao Zedong in 1919

Reading an old Reader's Digest magazine I found the following curious tidbit of trivia that struck me as ironically amusing, and I couldn't find any reference to it anywhere online. It's related with the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-tung, December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) also known as Chairman Mao, who was a Chinese communist revolutionary that became the founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he ruled as a totalitarian autocrat styled as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China from 1949 until his death in 1976. Among his most remembered "feats" is the democide of anywhere from 20 to 70 million human beings through starvation, forced labour and political executions.

He was born the son of a wealthy farmer (the original irony) in Shaoshan, Hunan Province. During his younger formative teen years Mao viewed himself as an intellectual, and read many of the core works of classical liberalism such as Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (yes, even more ironic) and Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (yup, triply ironic), as well as the works of western scientists and philosophers such as Darwin, Mill, Rousseau, and Spencer. years later he admitted that at this time he thought himself better than working people (I don't think he actually got over that, ever). His father saw no use in his son's intellectual pursuits, cut off his allowance, and forced him to move into a hostel for the destitute.

The late Jiang Menglin (1886-1964, known as Chiang Monlin as well, who was a Chinese educator, writer, and paramount politician, a graduate of Berkeley and post-graduate of Columbia University, that had to flee to Taiwan with all the other nationalists of China after Mao's revolution triumphed.) was the acting President of the University of Peking (1919-1927) during the period when Mao Zedong held an insignificant post at this University.

Jiang Menglin

After graduating from Hunan First Normal University in 1919, Mao moved to Beijing, where his mentor got a job at Peking University. Mao's mentor managed to secure him a job as assistant to the university librarian. Paid a low wage, Mao lived in a cramped room with seven other Hunanese (from Hunan Province, China) students. At the university, Mao was widely snubbed by other students due to his rural Hunanese accent and lowly position. Many years later Jiang Menglin, Mao's former boss, once confided to some close friends:

"I frequently lament not having given Mao a salary raise to, say, 30 silver dollars a month. Had he lived more comfortably then, he might have not become what he is now."

Could history have been rewritten from just a modest pay raise? We will never know...

#history #economics #socialism #communism #liberty

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