ABSTRACT
Mao Zedong did not become a revolutionary because he was a Communist; he became a Communist because he was a revolutionary. The 4 May movement in China created a political and intellectual clamour in which the dominant theme was the regeneration of the nation through collective endeavour. It was an atmosphere which excited Mao and into which Marxism easily fitted. The first detailed reference in China to Marxist theories had been in an article by a British missionary in the Globe Magazine, published in Shanghai in 1899. A number of Chinese progressives had subsequently alluded to it, but it was not until the period of the First World War that Marxism began to be considered seriously. This was largely due to the writings of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, the leading lights in New Culture, an organisation which sought the rebirth of China through democracy and science. Chen, whom Mao later acknowledged as ‘the supreme commander’ of the 4 May movement,1 argued that the 1914-18 war had raised large question marks against the value and durability of Western capitalist culture. He held that science, which for him
included political science, was the key to the transforming of China from a feudal to a modern society while avoiding the failings of capitalism. He believed that events in Russia had shown how this could be done. Democracy, the establishment of the will of the people, had been achieved by Lenin’s Bolshevik party by applying the scientific principles of Marxism. Chen saw the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the first sign of the breakdown of the West’s stability and dominance.
