Before ruling China, Mao Zedong quit soap school and lived in libraries
In his late teens and early twenties Mao Zedong signed up for, then abandoned, a police academy, a soap-making school, a law school, an economics school and a government middle school. What stuck was a public library in Changsha, where he taught himself from Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Darwin, Mill and Rousseau.
He was born on 26 December 1893 near Shaoshan in Hunan, son of a once-poor peasant who had become one of the village's richest farmers and a harsh disciplinarian. His Buddhist mother tried to soften the household. At school he disliked the Confucian classics and preferred adventure novels such as Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. At 13 his father arranged his marriage to a 17-year-old, which Mao refused to accept, turning him into a vocal opponent of arranged unions.
Politics arrived early. In Changsha in 1911 he and a friend cut off their queues, the braids that signalled loyalty to the Manchu throne, and when revolution broke out he enlisted as a private, serving six months without seeing combat. His father, unimpressed by all the reading, stopped his allowance, pushing him into a hostel for the destitute.
Teacher training at the First Normal School of Hunan gave him direction. A professor, Yang Changji, pointed him to the radical magazine New Youth, which printed Mao's first article in April 1917, urging readers to build physical strength for the revolution. After graduating third in his year in 1919, he followed Yang to Beijing and landed a job assisting the Peking University librarian Li Dazhao, an early Communist whose articles on Russia's revolution drew Mao towards Marxism. Classmates snubbed him for his rural accent, and he shared a cramped room with seven other students from Hunan.
Two years later, in 1921, he helped found the Chinese Communist Party, and from 1949 until his death in 1976 he led the People's Republic. His rule is credited with ending foreign domination and expanding literacy and healthcare, yet it also brought tens of millions of deaths, mostly in the famine after the Great Leap Forward.
Source: Mao Zedong
