Page 126 - Communism in Ambush

A Chinese
Communist
propaganda
poster.

But the man who brought the young Mao to embrace Communism
was not from Beijing. After spending a few months at the Beijing library,
Mao went to Shanghai and met C Chen Duxiu, a classical scholar and a
friend of Li Dazhao who had made a special study of Darwin. 77 This
Communist leader's most striking feature was that he was an ardent
Darwinist. He can be considered as China's most important advocate of
Darwinism and became Mao's most important tutor. Years later, Mao
was to say, "He had influenced me more than anyone else." 78
In her book Mao, Clare Hollingworth, a historian at the University
of Hong Kong said that Mao was greatly influenced by the Darwinist
views of Chen Duxiu and even in the 1970s he looked back nostalgically
to the studies of Darwin he did in his youth. 79
Chen Duxiu educated Mao in the scientific aspects of Darwinism;
on the political level, he was influenced by Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese
leader of the time. Interestingly, Sun Yat-sen, regarded as the founder of
modern China and of the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Chinese Party),
was also a Darwinist. In an article in The New Republic, the American
researcher Jacob Heilbrunn writes:
...[I]t was the great Chinese revolutionary and nationalist Sun Yat-sen who
decisively influenced Mao. Sun held that the Chinese had to embrace na-
tionalism in order to defeat the Western powers, and he preached a doc-
trine of political Darwinism: "although natural forces work slowly, yet
they can exterminate great races."