ABSTRACT

The evidence for Mao Zedong’s earliest years comes largely from his own remembrances, as recorded in conversations he had with Edgar Snow, an American communist who stayed with Mao in the 1930s and was one of the first Westerners to get to know him. Obviously, the recollections give only Mao’s side. There are one or two early biographies written by members of the Chinese Communist Party, but these tend to be panegyrics and unreliable. Similarly, the anecdotal evidence about Mao’s youth comes largely from sympathetic associates who were recounting what he had told them and who were careful to say nothing to his detriment. As a consequence, what can be pieced together about his early background is sketchy, though fascinating. A family tree does exist which traces Mao back to Prince Mao Bozhang, son of the emperor Zhou Wen. However, Mao did not allow the genealogy to be published during his lifetime. One reason may be that as the leader of the great proletarian revolution he was anxious not to reveal his privileged descent. But it is more likely that Mao

regarded the tree as largely fictitious. Like the family name Smith in the English-speaking world, the patronym Mao was one of the commonest among the population of 1.3 billion in China at the end of the twentieth century. In Shaoshan, the village where he was born in 1893 and where he was brought up, all the families bore the name Mao and were closely related.