Word: maos
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...evening, when Mao was 13, his father, in front of a group of guests, denounced him as lazy and useless. This meant a terrible loss of face for young Mao. He ran out of the house, his father in hot pursuit. Young Mao reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if his father came any nearer. "Demands and counter-demands were presented for cessation of the civil war," Mao recalled. "My father insisted that I apologize and kowtow . . . I agreed to give a one-knee kowtow if he would promise not to beat me. Thus...
...Young Mao remembered the lesson, and modified it. In his long march to power, he knew how to appear meek when the occasion demanded. But he himself was never moved by meekness. China's new master is no man to settle-permanently-for a one-knee kowtow from an opponent...
...Grasp the Future. Mao began to develop a social conscience. Once there was a famine in the Shao Shan district and the poor, asking help from the rich farmers, started a movement called "Eat Rice Without Charge." This seemed reasonable to Mao, but not to his father who, like other farmers, kept selling rice to cities despite the local famine. Young Mao read pamphlets about the Western powers that were dismembering China. He read books that proclaimed China's need to modernize herself. He began to cut classes and teach himself from books. The principal reprimanded him and Mao...
...Mao's father wanted to apprentice him to a rice merchant, but Mao again rebelled. He went to study in Changsha, where he hoped to find answers to many questions...
...order in the China of Mao's youth was crumbling under the influence of Western civilization, like a broken mummy suddenly exposed to the harsh air. China tried to reproduce 500 years of Western evolution in a few decades. Twentieth Century China was to have bombers before it had a good rail system, radios before it had more than a few telephones. Chinese shouted Communist slogans before they could read. Galileo and Einstein, Jefferson and Karl Marx came to China all at once. The nation's youth desperately wanted to grasp the future. What the future was, they...