Imaginary interview with Mao Zedong
by Charactorium · Mao Zedong (1893 — 1976) · Politics · 5 min read
Beijing, winter 1975. In an overheated room in Zhongnanhai, cluttered with books piled on the floor, an old man receives visitors at nightfall, as was his habit. The cigarette never leaves his fingers; behind him, the frozen lake reflects the lights of the Forbidden City. He speaks slowly, his Hunan accent intact.
—How did you go from being a studious young man to a revolutionary convinced that everything began in the countryside?
People imagined me behind a lectern, commenting on texts. But in 1925, and especially in early 1927, I took to my feet and walked. Hundreds of li through the villages of Hunan, sleeping among the peasants, listening to those who had never had the right to speak. From that I wrote my Report on an Investigation of the Hunan Peasant Movement. The urban theorists kept telling me the revolution would be made with the workers; but I had seen with my own eyes these gaunt men overthrow landlords in a few weeks. What the democrats hadn't achieved in thirty years, they accomplished in a few months. Magnificent, yes. Not terrible at all.
I took to my feet and walked: hundreds of li listening to those who had never had the right to speak.
—Why did you cling so tightly to this peasantry that orthodox Marxists rather looked down on?
Because in China, the factory proletariat could be counted in handfuls, while the peasant carried the country on his bent back. I wrote that power grows out of the barrel of a gun; but who holds that gun? The man of the rice paddies, not the intellectual of Shanghai. Later, at Yan'an, I formulated what I call the mass line: the Party consults the people, gathers their scattered ideas, organizes them, and then returns them as directives. This is not rustic romanticism. It is a conviction born of my bare feet in the mud of Hunan, where I understood that knowledge always begins with practice before returning to it.
—What remains within you of the Long March, that retreat of 1934?
Hunger, cold, and the sound of men falling. We were nearly a hundred thousand when we set out, fleeing the armies of Chiang Kai-shek; we crossed rivers, frozen passes, twelve thousand li of flight. Upon arrival, in the caves of Yan'an, in Shaanxi, we were only a few thousand. Some call that a defeat. I say that is where everything was decided. Those who remained were steel tempered by fire. On those roads the Party stopped looking to Moscow for orders and began to follow me. The Long March was not a retreat: it was a seed cast across all of China.
Some call that a defeat; I say those who remained were steel tempered by fire.
—Do you remember what those years in the caves of Yan'an were like?
We lived in cavities dug into the hillside, yellow loess under our nails, an oil lamp for light. And yet it was there, between 1937 and the war against Japan, that I wrote the most. On Practice, On Contradiction: I dictated these essays in that cold. The law of the unity of opposites, you see, is not an armchair abstraction; I saw it at work in the precarious united front we formed with the Kuomintang against the invader. Two enemies forced to march together: that is contradiction made flesh. Yan'an was my university, a university without walls or diplomas, only necessity.
—How could an army of poorly equipped peasants defeat far superior forces?
By refusing to play the enemy's game. A regular army wants the great pitched battle, the frontal clash; we were fish in the water of the people. In my treatise On Guerrilla Warfare, written in 1937, I laid down this principle: when the enemy advances, we retreat; when he tires, we harass; when he retreats, we pursue. I always had a staff map before me, reading the terrain like a peasant reads his field. The ancient Chinese strategists already knew that cunning is better than force. China's immense territory was our best ally: you cannot surround an ocean.
We were fish in the water of the people: you cannot surround an ocean.
—What did you really mean by that phrase, power grows out of the barrel of a gun?
That you don't change the world with polite petitions. In 1927, in Shanghai, I saw our comrades massacred by the nationalists who only yesterday claimed to be our allies. That betrayal cured me of all illusion. All political questions, in the final analysis, come down to the question of power — and power is not picked up in a ballot box, it is seized. But beware: the Party must command the gun, never the gun the Party. That is the whole difference between a revolution and a barracks coup. The weapon serves the idea; if it tries to replace it, it becomes just another warlord, and China has known too many of those.
—There was much talk about your swim in the Yangtze in 1966. What were you trying to show that day?
That the old river had not yet carried me away. I was seventy-two, whispers were going around the corridors of Zhongnanhai that the Helmsman was tired, past it. So I entered the Yangtze, at Wuhan, and swam before the cameras, carried by the current. All of China knew it that very evening. It wasn't a pleasure trip: it was a signal. A few weeks later, I launched the Cultural Revolution. Swimming that river was a way of telling those who thought I was finished that I was going to stir up the country one last time, from the bottom to the surface.
At seventy-two, swimming the Yangtze was a way of telling those who thought I was finished that I was going to stir up the country.
—Why did you entrust the task of overturning the country to the youth, the Red Guards?
Because youth has not yet learned the caution of the old mandarins. I feared the revolution would become bourgeois, that my own comrades would become a new caste sitting on their privileges, in the manner of the revisionism I accused Khrushchev of. So I called upon the Hongweibing, the Red Guards, to destroy the four olds — old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. They gave me the title of Great Helmsman, and I wanted the ship never to fall asleep in port. I knew that once fire is lit among the young, it is hard to put out. A revolution is not a dinner party.
—You are known as a strategist and head of state, but you also wrote poems. What place did they hold?
A secret place, and yet the oldest. Before being a man of the gun, I was a man of the brush. All my life, even in the worst bivouacs of war, I composed in classical forms, the ci and the shi, those molds a thousand years old that moderns find outdated. My poem Snow, written in 1936 at the end of the Long March, is still recited in schools. At night, in Zhongnanhai, when the reports were signed, I would pick up my calligraphy brush. The Marxist and the scholar from Hunan never stopped coexisting in me, sometimes quarreling.
Before being a man of the gun, I was a man of the brush.
—What were those nights like, which they say you spent awake until dawn?
The day belongs to others; the night is mine. I rose late, often around noon, and it was when the palace fell asleep that my mind lit up. I read in bed, surrounded by thousands of volumes — especially the history of the dynasties, those emperors whose mistakes I studied so as not to repeat them. Sometimes I had a film screened, even an American western, curious about that cowboy gallop. Then, cigarette in mouth, I would dictate a directive or revise a verse until the Yangtze of dawn whitened the windows of Zhongnanhai. Sleeping has always seemed to me a concession to death.
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This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Mao Zedong's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.