Cai Hesen: A Provincial Scholar becomes a Young Radical

LIYAN LIU 84 CAI HESEN: A PROVINCIAL SCHOLAR BECOMES A YOUNG RADICAL LIYAN LIU, GEORGETOWN COLLEGE In the 1910s, Cai Hesen (蔡和森 1895-1931), Mao Zedong (毛澤東 1893-1976), and many other important Communist leaders were educated at the Hunan First Normal School (湖南第一師範學校 Hunan diyi shifan xuexiao) in Changsha, the capital city of Hunan province. Their schooling there shaped them profoundly. It was a period of political upheaval and intellectual ferment, and a “modernized” school system had supplanted the traditional Chinese educational system that had been centered on the classical and had been directed toward the civil service examinations. At First Normal, those students who would become so crucial in China’s history underwent an intellectual transformation. As Stephen C. Averill notes, the new schools provided multi-channeled networks , which were major transmission routes and staging areas for spreading new concepts and movements out of China’s major cities. Study societies formed the essential interfaces through which these ideas and energies were “operationalized” and translated into concrete political action.1 For Cai and his friends, the national moral crisis, and the new knowledge and new ideas they acquired, made them consciously and seriously question established ways. Many became cultural iconoclasts and then communists as a result of the sharp differences between the two worlds, home and school, past and present. In particular, many of those students at the First Normal who took an active role in the May Fourth Movement as members of the New Citizens Study Society (新民學會 Xinmin xuehui) eventually became the founders, principal ideologues, and activists of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Such actions confirm Averill’s argument that urban study societies served as incubators for anarchist groups and the early CCP in the late 1910s and 1920s.2 Contextualizing the education at First Normal into the larger changing circumstances of China shows the distinctiveness of this particular school. It shaped the students’ thoughts and mindsets and contributed to their intellectual transformation in the first decade of the twentieth century. In general, much of the school’s curriculum had followed the standard early-Republican curriculum, with extensive Chineselanguage classes, moral cultivation classes, and physical education. However, First I am indebted to Lindsey Apple and James Klotter for their thoughtful remarks and editing, and wish particularly to thank Professor Klotter who read several drafts of the paper and raised invaluable questions. I am also grateful to Dai Zuocai and Sun Hailin who helped me gain access to relevant materials at archives in Hunan. Special thanks go to Xiaoping Cong, Robert Culp, and Christopher A. Reed for their insightful comments and suggestions. 1 Stephen C. Averill, “The Cultural Politics of Local Education in Early Twentieth Century China,” in this issue, 32. 2 Ibid., 33. Volume 32, No. 2 TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 85 Normal reformed that curriculum to suit its own needs and added some more distinctive features. For instance, it allowed students to pick moral exemplars from among their peers and it held regular essay-writing contests. Cai Hesen was greatly influenced by First Normal, especially by his mentor, Yang Changji (楊昌濟 1871-1920). Under Yang’s influence, Cai became an idealist. He encouraged Cai to attend the meetings of the Chuanshan Association (船山學社 Chuanshan xueshe), whose members studied, discussed, absorbed, and selected the most useful parts of traditional Chinese learning. As directed by Yang, Cai became a serious reader of the most radical and Westernized journal, New Youth (新青年 Xin Qingnian). In such ways, Cai acquired at First Normal the foundation of his worldly knowledge and his political ideas. Like Mao, Cai was prepared for his transformation by his training at First Normal and the May Fourth activities in the New Citizens Study Society. In fact, Cai personifies what Hunan First Normal School meant to those who attended, and to the China that they eventually crafted. His life provides a detailed example of the intellectual transformation of his fellow students and supplements the better-known example of Mao. An examination of Cai Hesen’s thought and mindset at First Normal, and his eventual ideological transformation, tells much about the era and those it shaped, and who, in turn, would shape modern China. One of the first Chinese Marxists and apparently the first Chinese to...