The Hunan People Are Fighting for Their Moral
Character (June 9,1920)
The purpose of the Hunan people’s movement to expel Zhang was explained in detail one day by “a Hunanese.” But as I understand it, there are also two further points.
One is that if Zhang wanted to grow opium and had just openly forced the people
to grow opium, it might not have been regarded as a crime. But he did not do that.
He hung up signs everywhere banning opium even while Yu Zhaotong, the Changsha
xian magistrate, summoned more than 100 heads of organizations from all over Changsha xian last July to a secret meeting in the xian office to announce the general’s 118
instructions and distributed 40,000 packets of opium seeds. After the meeting, these
leaders made this secret public. The other point concerns the teachers’ wages. They
actually received only 70 percent of their wages, but had to write on the receipt that
they had received 100 percent. The teachers were so angry that they sent a representative to the capital with the evidence to file a suit. When this representative arrived
at Xinyangzhou, however, he was grabbed by detectives who had rushed to get there
the same night. These two things are more than enough to arouse the bitter hatred
of the Hunan people. In sum, after murder and arson, to cheat people so blatantly
is quite unbearable. When the movement to expel Zhang began, all kinds of people,
both young and old, joined in, precisely because of these many kinds of severe provoca118 The Association of Hunanese Scholars Resident in Beijing was established in the spring of 1920.
The head of the Association was Fan Yuanlian, and Mao was one of those in charge of editorial work.
The main task of the Association was to hold an academic gathering each Sunday to which an important
speaker would be invited. A monthly publication was planned, but never appeared. The Association
ceased its activities in the fall of 1920.