PART ONE LUKEWARM BELIEVER

1 ON THE CUSP FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN

1 走出韶山

(1893–1911 AGE 1–17)

1893～1911 年 1～17 岁

MAO TSE-TUNG, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. He was born into a peasant family in a valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland of China. The date was 26 December 1893. His ancestors had lived in the valley for five hundred years.

毛泽东，这个主宰世界四分之一人口命运数十年，导致至少七千万中国人在和平时期死亡的统治者，出生在湖南省湘潭县韶山一个普通农民家庭。那是一八九三年十二月二十六日，他的祖先已在这丘陵山冲居住了五百年。

This was a world of ancient beauty, a temperate, humid region whose misty, undulating hills had been populated ever since the Neolithic age. Buddhist temples dating from the Tang dynasty (AD 618–906), when Buddhism first came here, were still in use. Forests where nearly 300 species of trees grew, including maples, camphor, metasequoia and the rare ginkgo, covered the area and sheltered the tigers, leopards and boar that still roamed the hills. (The last tiger was killed in 1957.) These hills, with neither roads nor navigable rivers, detached the village from the world at large. Even as late as the early twentieth century an event as momentous as the death of the emperor in 1908 did not percolate this far, and Mao found out only two years afterwards when he left Shaoshan.

The valley of Shaoshan measures about 5 by 3.5 km. The 600-odd families who lived there grew rice, tea and bamboo, harnessing buffalo to plough the rice paddies. Daily life revolved round these age-old activities. Mao’s father, Yi-chang, was born in 1870. At the age of ten he was engaged to a girl of thirteen from a village about ten kilometers away, beyond a pass called Tiger Resting Pass, where tigers used to sun themselves. This short distance was long enough in those years for the two villages to speak dialects that were almost mutually unintelligible. Being merely a girl, Mao’s mother did not receive a name; as the seventh girl born in the Wen clan, she was just Seventh Sister Wen. In accordance with centuries of custom, her feet had been crushed and bound to produce the so-called “three-inch golden lilies” that epitomized beauty at the time.

山冲有五公里长、三公里半宽，聚居着六百多户人家。他们种茶、竹、水稻，年复一年的日出而作，日落而息。这里既没有公路也没有通航的河流，与外界少通消息，甚至到了二十世纪初叶，光绪皇帝和慈禧太后相继在一九0八年驾崩这样的大事，也没能传到村里，毛泽东是在事过两年离开韶山后才听说的。

Her engagement to Mao’s father followed time-honored customs. It was arranged by their parents and was based on a practical consideration: the tomb of one of her grandfathers was in Shaoshan, and it had to be tended regularly with elaborate rituals, so having a relative there would prove useful. Seventh Sister Wen moved in with the Maos upon betrothal, and was married at the age of eighteen, in 1885, when Yi-chang was fifteen.

毛的父亲毛贻昌生于一八七0年，十岁时跟一个十三岁的女孩订婚。女家隔着一座叫虎歇坪的山坳，来去只有十公里，这样短的距离，两村人却语言各异。毛的母亲由于是女人，没有自己的名，在文氏家族姊妹中排行第七，就叫作“七妹”。定亲多半出于现实的考虑，七妹的祖父葬在韶山，每年要扫墓，文家希望当地有门亲戚做歇脚之地。订婚后，七妹搬進了毛家；一八八五年，贻昌十五岁时他们圆房。

Shortly after the wedding, Yi-chang went off to be a soldier to earn money to pay off family debts, which he was able to do after several years. Chinese peasants were not serfs but free farmers, and joining the army for purely financial reasons was an established practice. Luckily he was not involved in any wars; instead he caught a glimpse of the world and picked up some business ideas. Unlike most of the villagers, Yi-chang could read and write, well enough to keep accounts. After his return, he raised pigs, and processed grain into top-quality rice to sell at a nearby market town. He bought back the land his father had pawned, then bought more land, and became one of the richest men in the village.

婚后不久，贻昌出去当兵挣钱以偿还祖上留下的债务，几年后他攒足钱还清了债，回家做起了贩运白米和生猪的营生。他能写会算，又有生意头脑，不仅逐渐赎回了祖上典出的田产，而且买了更多的地，成为村里最富的人之一。

Though relatively well off, Yi-chang remained extremely hardworking and thrifty all his life. The family house consisted of half a dozen rooms, which occupied one wing of a large thatched property. Eventually Yi-chang replaced the thatch with tiles, a major improvement, but left the mud floor and mud walls. The windows had no glass—still a rare luxury—and were just square openings with wooden bars, blocked off at night by wooden boards (the temperature hardly ever fell below freezing). The furniture was simple: wooden beds, bare wooden tables and benches. It was in one of these rather spartan rooms, under a pale blue homespun cotton quilt, inside a blue mosquito net, that Mao was born.

贻昌人很勤俭，他家老屋是茅草顶，有了钱多年后，他才下决心把草顶换成瓦顶，但仍留下了泥墙泥地。玻璃在当时是稀罕的东西，所以窗户只是些木框口子，晚上用木板遮起来。家具不过是木床、木桌、木板凳。就是在这样一间简陋的屋子里，在罩着蓝色土布蚊帐的床上，毛泽东出世。

MAO WAS THE third son, but the first to survive beyond infancy. His Buddhist mother became even more devout to encourage Buddha to protect him. Mao was given the two-part name Tse-tung. Tse, which means “to shine on,” was the name given to all his generation, as preordained when the clan chronicle was first written in the eighteenth century; tung means “the East.” So his full given name meant “to shine on the East.” When two more boys were born, in 1896 and 1905, they were given the names Tse-min (min means “the people”) and Tse-tan (tan possibly referred to the local region, Xiangtan).

毛是第三个儿子，但却是第一个活下来的。为了求菩萨保佑他不再夭折，毛的母亲到处烧香拜佛，还吃上了观音斋。毛取名泽东。“泽”在十八世纪毛氏族谱初修时，就定为他这一辈的辈名。泽东：施光泽于东方。当他的两个弟弟在一八九六年跟一九0五年出生时，他们分别取名泽民、泽覃。

These names reflected the inveterate aspiration of Chinese peasants for their sons to do well—and the expectation that they could. High positions were open to all through education, which for centuries meant studying Confucian classics. Excellence would enable young men of any background to pass imperial examinations and become mandarins—all the way up to becoming prime minister. Officialdom was the definition of achievement, and the names given to Mao and his brothers expressed the hopes placed on them.

But a grand name was also onerous and potentially tempted fate, so most children were given a pet name that was either lowly or tough, or both. Mao’s was “the Boy of Stone”—Shi san ya-zi. For this second “baptism” his mother took him to a rock about eight feet high, which was reputed to be enchanted, as there was a spring underneath. After Mao performed obeisance and kowtows, he was considered adopted by the rock. Mao was very fond of this name, and continued to use it as an adult. In 1959, when he returned to Shaoshan and met the villagers for the first—and only—time as supreme leader of China, he began the dinner for them with a quip: “So everyone is here, except my Stone Mother. Shall we wait for her?”

Mao loved his real mother, with an intensity he showed towards no one else. She was a gentle and tolerant person, who, as he remembered, never raised her voice to him. From her came his full face, sensual lips, and a calm self-possession in the eyes. Mao would talk about his mother with emotion all his life. It was in her footsteps that he became a Buddhist as a child. Years later he told his staff: “I worshipped my mother … Wherever my mother went, I would follow … going to temple fairs, burning incense and paper money, doing obeisance to Buddha … Because my mother believed in Buddha, so did I.” But he gave up Buddhism in his mid-teens.

毛爱他的母亲，对她保留了一种从未给与过他人的深情。母亲温和宽容，从不训斥毛。从她那里毛继承了圆圆的脸庞、传情的嘴唇和沉静自持的眼神。毛一生常谈起她，谈时还十分动容，说小时候母亲到哪里他都跟着，赶庙会，烧香纸，拜菩萨，母亲信佛，他也信佛，直到十几岁时才与佛绝缘。

Mao had a carefree childhood. Until he was eight he lived with his mother’s family, the Wens, in their village, as his mother preferred to live with her own family. There his maternal grandmother doted on him. His two uncles and their wives treated him like their own son, and one of them became his Adopted Father, the Chinese equivalent to godfather. Mao did a little light farm work, gathering fodder for pigs and taking the buffalo out for a stroll in the tea-oil camellia groves by a pond shaded by banana leaves. In later years he would reminisce with fondness about this idyllic time. He started learning to read, while his aunts spun and sewed under an oil lamp.

毛的幼年无忧无虑。他在母亲娘家住到八岁，外婆将他视为心头肉，两个舅舅、舅母拿他当自己儿子看待，一个舅舅作了他的“干爹”。在文家，毛做些轻松的农活，有时在芭蕉塘边的油茶林里割草放牛。他也开始识字，晚间，舅妈在油灯下纺线，毛坐在她身旁看书。毛后来说他十分眷念那些日子。

MAO ONLY CAME back to live in Shaoshan in spring 1902, at the age of eight, to receive an education, which took the form of study in a tutor’s home. Confucian classics, which made up most of the curriculum, were beyond the understanding of children and had to be learned by heart. Mao was blessed with an exceptional memory, and did well. His fellow pupils remembered a diligent boy who managed not only to recite but also to write by rote these difficult texts. He also gained a foundation in Chinese language and history, and began to learn to write good prose, calligraphy and poetry, as writing poems was an essential part of Confucian education. Reading became a passion. Peasants generally turned in at sunset, to save on oil for lamps, but Mao would read deep into the night, with an oil lamp standing on a bench outside his mosquito net. Years later, when he was supreme ruler of China, half of his huge bed would be piled a foot high with Chinese classics, and he littered his speeches and writings with historical references. But his poems lost flair.

一九0二年，毛回韶山上学。上学就是進私塾，儒家经典是主要课程。深奥的古书不是孩子懂得了的，只能生吞活剥地背下来。毛具有超人的记忆力，当年的同学记得他学习很用功，艰深的书本不仅能背诵，还能默写。就是在这时，毛打下了扎实的古文基础，使他后来能写一手好文章、好诗词、好书法。读书成了最大的嗜好，一盏油灯放在蚊帐外的板凳上，一读就到深夜。许多年后，做为中国的最高统治者，他的偌大无比的床有一半用来堆书，他的谈话和写作旁征博引，散落着各种历史典故。只是他的诗词在当权后大半丧失了诗意。

Mao clashed frequently with his tutors. He ran away from his first school at the age of ten, claiming that the teacher was a martinet. He was expelled from, or was “asked to leave,” at least three schools for being headstrong and disobedient. His mother indulged him but his father was not pleased, and Mao’s hopping from tutor to tutor was just one source of tension between father and son. Yi-chang paid for Mao’s education, hoping that his son could at least help keep the family accounts, but Mao disliked the task. All his life, he was vague about figures, and hopeless at economics. Nor did he take kindly to hard physical labor. He shunned it as soon as his peasant days were over.

毛跟老师的关系不怎么好。十岁时他从学校逃走，说老师要求苛刻，粗暴严厉。至少有三间私塾因他的倔强不服管教而委婉地请他父亲“另找高明”。母亲对他是听之，任之，但父亲不能忍受。父子俩常发生冲突。贻昌付学费让儿子上学，希望儿子起码能给家里记帐，而这正是毛所讨厌的。终生他对数字都不甚了了，对经济学更是一塌糊涂。

Yi-chang could not stand Mao being idle. Having spent every minute of his waking hours working, he expected his son to do the same, and would strike him when he did not comply. Mao hated his father. In 1968, when he was taking revenge on his political foes on a vast scale, he told their tormentors that he would have liked his father to be treated just as brutally: “My father was bad. If he were alive today, he should be ‘jet-planed.’” This was an agonizing position where the subject’s arms were wrenched behind his back and his head forced down.

体力劳动对毛也不具吸引力，一旦脱离了农民生活，他就再也不做了。贻昌见不得儿子闲着不干活，自己辛勤劳作，要求儿子也要照办。毛不听话，他忍不住就打毛，毛于是恨父亲。文化大革命的一九六八年，当毛向政敌展开全面报复时，有一种通行的折磨方式叫做“喷气式”：受害者面对气势汹汹的人群，双臂被狠狠地拧在身后，左右两人一手拧臂，一手重重地按头。毛对红卫兵领袖说他父亲“要是现在也得坐喷气式”。

Mao was not a mere victim of his father. He fought back, and was often the victor. He would tell his father that the father, being older, should do more manual labor than he, the younger—which was an unthinkably insolent argument by Chinese standards. One day, according to Mao, father and son had a row in front of guests. “My father scolded me before them, calling me lazy and useless. This infuriated me. I called him names and left the house … My father … pursued me, cursing as well as commanding me to come back. I reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any nearer … My father backed down.” Once, as Mao was retelling the story, he laughed and added an observation: “Old men like him didn’t want to lose their sons. This is their weakness. I attacked at their weak point, and I won!”

其实少年的毛并没有受父亲虐待，也绝不是弱者。父亲责备他懒惰，他便顶嘴说父亲年长，应该多干。一天，父子俩当着许多客人的面吵了起来，毛后来说：“父亲当众骂我懒而无用，这一下激怒了我。我回骂了他，接着就离家出走。我母亲追着我想劝我回去，父亲也追上来，边骂边命令我回去。我跑到一个池塘边，并且威胁说如果他再走近一步，我就要跳進水里……我父亲就软了下来”。一次，毛讲完这个故事，笑着说出他的结论：“他们都怕失去儿子，这就是他们的弱点。攻其弱点，就能取得胜利！”

Money was the only weapon Mao’s father possessed. After Mao was expelled by tutor no. 4, in 1907, his father stopped paying for his son’s tuition fees and the thirteen-year-old boy had to become a full-time peasant. But he soon found a way to get himself out of farm work and back into the world of books. Yi-chang was keen for his son to get married, so that he would be tied down and behave responsibly. His niece was at just the right age for a wife, four years older than Mao, who agreed to his father’s plan and resumed schooling after the marriage.

无可奈何的父亲对毛只有一项武器：钱。一九0七年，毛离开第四个私塾后，贻昌拒绝再为他付学费，十三岁的毛只得成为全日制农民。但毛很快找到办法逃离农活，重新回到书的世界，这就是接受父亲的安排结婚。贻昌想要毛安顿下来，做个负责任的一家之长。他给毛找了个媳妇，是自己的侄女，年纪大毛四岁。结婚后毛复了学。

The marriage took place in 1908, when Mao was fourteen and his bride eighteen. Her family name was Luo. She herself had no proper name, and was just called “Woman Luo.” The only time Mao is known to have mentioned her was to the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, when Mao was strikingly dismissive, exaggerating the difference in their ages: “When I was 14, my parents married me to a girl of 20. But I never lived with her … I do not consider her my wife … and have given little thought to her.” He gave no hint that she was not still alive; in fact, Woman Luo had died in 1910, just over a year into their marriage.

结婚那年毛十四岁。新娘姓罗，人称罗氏。毛对她没有丝毫感情，只有一次提起她，是跟美国记者斯诺(Edgar Snow)，口气轻蔑，还把他们的年龄差距从四岁夸大到六岁。毛说：“我十四岁的时候，父母给我娶了一个二十岁的女子，可是我从来没有和她一起生活过--而且后来也一直没有。我不认为她是我的妻子，当时也几乎没有想到过她。”毛没提及罗氏早在他们结婚后一年多就去世了。

Mao’s early marriage turned him into a fierce opponent of arranged marriages. Nine years later he wrote a seething article against the practice: “In families in the West, parents acknowledge the free will of their children. But in China, orders from the parents are not at all compatible with the will of the children … This is a kind of ‘indirect rape.’ Chinese parents are all the time indirectly raping their children …”

毛一生对“性”都兴趣十足，但似乎对他第一任妻子毫无欲望，跟她结婚是出于不得已。这使毛成为包办婚姻的强烈反对者。九年后他在《赵女士人格问题》一文里措辞激烈的写道：“西洋的家庭组织，父母承认子女有自由意志。中国则不然，父母的命令，和子女的意志完全不相并立……这叫做“间接强奸”。中国的父母都是间接强奸自己的子女。”

As soon as his wife died, the sixteen-year-old widower demanded to leave Shaoshan. His father wanted to apprentice him to a rice store in the county town, but Mao had set his eye on a modern school about 25 kilometers away. He had learned that the imperial examinations had been abolished. Instead there were modern schools now, teaching subjects like science, world history and geography, and foreign languages. It was these schools that would open the door out of a peasant’s life for many like him.

妻子一死，这位十六岁的鳏夫就要离开韶山。父亲想让他到县城的米店去当学徒，但毛有自己的打算。他已看中了二十五公里外的一所新式学堂。这时，新风气已穿透了韶山的山峦，吹進了少年毛的脑子里。科举制度废除了，旧的教育体系没用了，取而代之的是新式学堂，教一整套外国来的东西，像科学、世界历史、地理，还有外文。这些新学堂是毛那样的农家孩子走出乡村、進入外部世界的大道。

THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY, China had embarked on a dramatic social transformation. The Manchu dynasty that had ruled since 1644 was moving from the ancient to the modern. The shift was prompted by a series of abysmal defeats at the hands of European powers and Japan, beginning with the loss to Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42, as the powers came knocking on China’s closed door. From the Manchu court to intellectuals, nearly everyone agreed that the country must change if it wanted to survive. A host of fundamental reforms was introduced, one of which was to install an entirely new educational system. Railways began to be built. Modern industries and commerce were given top priority. Political organizations were permitted. Newspapers were published for the first time. Students were sent abroad to study science, mandarins dispatched to learn democracy and parliamentary systems. In 1908, the court announced a program to become a constitutional monarchy in nine years’ time.

十九世纪中叶鸦片战争后，中国出现改革的巨变。除了整个教育体制彻底改变外，铁路开始修建，现代工商业开始兴办，政治团体允许存在，报纸也第一次出版。留学生派出国去学习科学，大臣们则出洋考察政体。一九0八年，清廷公布了《钦定宪法大纲》，宣布九年后实行立宪。

Mao’s province, Hunan, which had some 30 million inhabitants, became one of the most liberal and exciting places in China. Though landlocked, it was linked by navigable rivers to the coast, and in 1904 its capital, Changsha, became an “open” trading port. Large numbers of foreign traders and missionaries arrived, bringing Western ways and institutions. By the time Mao heard about modern schools, there were over a hundred of them, more than in any other part of China, and including many for women.

毛的家乡湖南在当时有三千万人口，是改革如火如荼的省分之一。虽然这里是内地，但通航的河流把它连向沿海，一九0四年，省会长沙开辟为对外商埠，外国商人跟传教士纷至沓来。新式学堂如雨后春笋，当毛在乡间听说时，湖南已经有一百多所了，比中国任何一个地方都多，还有好几所女子学校。

One was located near Mao: Eastern Hill, in the county of the Wens, his mother’s family. The fees and accommodation were quite high, but Mao got the Wens and other relatives to lobby his father, who stumped up the cost for five months. The wife of one of his Wen cousins replaced Mao’s old blue homespun mosquito net with a white machine-made muslin one in keeping with the school’s modernity.

毛想上湘乡县的东山高等小学堂。学费住宿费贵，毛就请亲戚们帮忙，说动父亲给他出了五个月的钱。东山使毛眼界大开。从课本里，他读到拿破仑、威灵顿、彼得大帝、卢梭、林肯等人的小传，也第一次亲眼见到去过外国的人：一位曾在日本留学的教师，学生们管他叫“假洋鬼子”。多少年后，毛还记得那位老师教他们唱的日本歌，庆祝日本在日俄战争中打败沙俄的惊人胜利。

The school was an eye-opener for Mao. Lessons included physical training, music and English, and among the reading materials were potted biographies of Napoleon, Wellington, Peter the Great, Rousseau and Lincoln. Mao heard about America and Europe for the first time, and laid eyes on a man who had been abroad—a teacher who had studied in Japan, who was given the nickname “the False Foreign Devil” by his pupils. Decades later Mao could still remember a Japanese song he taught them, celebrating Japan’s stunning military victory over Russia in 1905.

东山学堂的几个月为毛开启了新世界的大门。省会长沙有所专为湘乡人办的中学，在毛的请求下，一位老师介绍他前去就读，尽管他不是湘乡人。一九一一年春，毛心情激动地到了长沙。这年他十七岁，是他与农民生涯从此告别的日子。

Mao was only in Eastern Hill for a few months, but this was enough for him to find a new opening. In the provincial capital, Changsha, there was a school specially set up for young people from the Wens’ county, and Mao persuaded a teacher to enroll him, even though he was strictly speaking not from the county. In spring 1911 he arrived at Changsha, feeling, in his own words, “exceedingly excited.” At seventeen, he said goodbye forever to the life of a peasant.

MAO CLAIMED LATER THAT when he was a boy in Shaoshan he had been stirred by concern for poor peasants. There is no evidence for this. He said he had been influenced while still in Shaoshan by a certain P’ang the Millstone Maker, who had been arrested and beheaded after leading a local peasant revolt, but an exhaustive search by Party historians for this hero has failed to turn up any trace of him.

毛从故乡的泥土中带走了什么呢？他后来说他带走了对贫苦农民生活的“深感不平”。事实却非如此。毛当时的老师、后来的岳父杨昌济教授一九一五年四月五日的日记中记载着毛谈论家乡的话：“人多务农，易于致富。”毛说当农民容易致富，并未说农民的生活艰苦。

There is no sign that Mao derived from his peasant roots any social concerns, much less that he was motivated by a sense of injustice. In a contemporary document, the diary of Mao’s teacher, Professor Yang Chang-chi, on 5 April 1915 the professor wrote: “My student Mao Tse-tung said that … his clan … are mostly peasants, and it is easy for them to get rich” (our italics). Mao evinced no particular sympathy for peasants.

Up to the end of 1925, when he was in his early thirties, and five years after he had become a Communist, Mao made only a few references to peasants in all his known writings and conversations. They did crop up in a letter of August 1917, but far from expressing sympathy, Mao said he was “bowled over” by the way a commander called Tseng Kuo-fan had “finished off” the biggest peasant uprising in Chinese history, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64. Two years later, in July 1919, Mao wrote an essay about people from different walks of life—so peasants were inevitably mentioned—but his list of questions was very general, and his tone unmistakably neutral. There was a remarkable absence of emotion when he mentioned peasants, compared with the passion he voiced about students, whose life he described as “a sea of bitterness.” In a comprehensive list for research he drew up in September that year, containing no fewer than 71 items, only one heading (the tenth) was about labor; the single one out of its 15 sub-heads that mentioned peasants did so only as “the question of laboring farmers intervening in politics.”

通观所有毛早年文章和谈话记载，直到一九二五年底，毛只提到过农民几次。除了说家乡农民容易致富外，一九一七年八月二十三日，毛在致黎锦熙信里讲到中国历史上最大的农民起义：太平天国--但不是对他们表示同情，而是对消灭他们的人曾国藩表示倾倒。毛说：“愚于今人，独服曾文正，观其收拾洪杨一役，完满无缺。” 一九一九年七月二十八日，毛在《民众的大联合(二)》里提起“种田人”，但只是泛泛的，不带感情，不像他描述学生那样长篇大论地诉苦，说学生的生活是“苦海”。同年九月一日，毛拟了一份详尽的问题研究单子，足足有七十一个大项目，农民只占第十项中的十五个分项之一，还无关贫苦农民的生活，而是“劳农干政问题”。

From late 1920, when he entered the Communist orbit, Mao began to use expressions like “workers and peasants” and “proletariat.” But they remained mere phrases, part of an obligatory vocabulary.

一九二0年下半年，毛与共产党结缘后，开始使用“工人们农人们”、“无产阶级” 这样的字眼，但不过是辞藻而已。

Decades later, Mao talked about how, as a young man in Shaoshan, he cared about people starving. The record shows no such concern. In 1921 Mao was in Changsha during a famine. A friend of his wrote in his diary: “There are many beggars—must be over 100 a day … Most … look like skeletons wrapped in yellow skin, as if they could be blown over by a whiff of wind.” “I heard that so many people who had come here … to escape famine in their own regions had died—that those who had been giving away planks of wood [to make coffins] … can no longer afford to do so.” There is no mention of this event in Mao’s writings of the time, and no sign that he gave any thought to this issue at all.

毛后来说，在韶山他钦佩一个被捕并被斩首的农民起义英雄彭铁匠，但中共党史学者费尽心机找来找去也找不到这位铁匠存在的蛛丝马迹。毛还说，饥民的痛苦影响了他的一生。这很可质疑。一九二一年，毛在长沙时正好遇上饥荒。他的朋友谢觉哉的日记中记载说：“乡间荒象特着……本地乞食者特别多，每日总在百数以上……大半黄皮裹骨，风吹欲倒。”“死者颇多，小街上施木板[做棺材]也施不起了。” 毛在这段时间写的文章对饥荒、荒民一个字也没提，没有任何迹象表明他关心这件事。

Mao’s peasant background did not imbue him with idealism about improving the lot of Chinese peasants.

农民的根并没有滋养出一个同情穷苦百姓的毛泽东，从韶山他没有带走改善中国农民命运的理想主义。