Book Society.

                                                                A Couplet for the Hero Yi Baisha1
                                                                                (1921)

                                                                The useless one died not, the useful one died in anger; I weep
                                                                        for the future of the Republic.

                                                                Last year I mourned Mr. Chen,2 this year I mourn Mr. Yi;
                                                                        what can be done now about Changsha’s backwardness?

We have translated this text from _Shici duilian_, p. 160. It was first published in 1987 in
_Duilian_, Vol. 3, No. 2.
1. Yi Baisha (1886–1921), a native of Changsha, had been a teacher at First Normal
School, Nankai University in Tianjin, and Fudan University in Shanghai. In May 1921, he
went to Beijing with the intention of killing the leader of the warlord government, but
failed. He then went south to organize an army for a northern expedition but was not
successful in this either. Thereupon, he committed suicide by drowning himself in the sea
off the coast of Guangdong, on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, in the hope of
arousing the masses.
2. Mr. Chen (_Chen gong_) refers to Chen Tianhua (1875–1905), who like Yi Baisha
had committed suicide for patriotic reasons by throwing himself into the sea. Mao’s only
known writing in praise of him is a passage in the “Overall Account of the Hunan United
Students’ Association,” translated in Volume I, pp. 402–3. This text was published not
“last year,” i.e., in 1920, but on August 4, 1919. Perhaps a poem in his memory has been
lost; perhaps Mao was using _qu nian_ loosely to mean “in recent years.”
Statement on the Founding of the
Hunan Self-Study University
(August 1921)

Hunanese have recently founded a “Self-Study University,” the primary aim of
which is to adopt the form of the old-style academies and infuse it with the
content of the modern schools, in the hope that all of the students enrolled will
read on their own and study together. In the midst of China’s present tide of
“university mania,” this may be considered the most practical system of education. This school has recently issued a statement explaining the principles underlying its establishment:

Man cannot but seek learning, and the search for learning requires both a
place and an organization. In the past, the place to pursue learning was the
academies.1 When the academies were abolished and turned into schools, everyone strove to censure the academies and praise the schools. In fact, there are
things about both the academies and the schools that may be censured and things
about both that may be praised. What the academies should be censured for is the
fact that the content of their studies was wrong: it consisted of such instruments
of official employment as the “eight-legged essay.”2 These were merely play-

things; how can they be regarded as genuine learning? If we base ourselves on
this point, we may say that the academies were greatly in error. But the academies had their extremely good points. If we want to understand the good points
of the academies, we must first understand the bad points of the schools. As a
matter of fact, the schools have many good points, but they also have not a few
bad points. The first bad point of the schools is that there is no personal
relationship between teachers and students. The teachers mainly think
about making money and the students think mainly about getting a diploma.
The exchange is made and they leave, each getting what he is after, so that
the giving and receiving of learning becomes nothing more than a commercial transaction.3 The second bad point of the schools is a kind of mechanical
uniformity of teaching methods and management methods that is destructive to
human life. Each person has different qualities. They differ in their abilities and
understanding, but the schools ignore these aspects totally and know only how to
stuff the same thing down everyone’s throat. If human beings are to respect the
personality, we must not say that someone “administers” someone else. Carrying
on the legacy of the despotic emperors, the schools ignore the personality of the
students and openly “administer” them. Because the faculty treat everyone the
same way, the human nature of the students is not fulfilled; because the students
are administered mechanically, their personalities are not fulfilled. This is the
gravest defect of the schools, and one that persons concerned about education
must absolutely not overlook. The third bad point of the schools is that there are
too many hours and a complicated curriculum so that students’ heads are buried
in class all day long, and no one knows that there is also a world outside of the
classroom. The students’ spirits are so exhausted they cannot think, and they are
totally unable to apply their minds to spontaneous self-motivated study. In generalizing about these bad points, we do not mean, of course, that all schools are
like this, and where these faults do exist there is usually still hope that they may
be reformed in the future. But in general it is like this, and there is no way to
conceal it, even if you wanted to. The general root of this problem is that the
students are put in a passive position, where their personalities are ground down
and their spirits annihilated, where the weak sink or swim as usual and the
talented are hobbled. If we take another look at the academies, although their
form also has its bad points, it has none of the bad points of the schools listed
above. First, the teachers and students have strong feelings for each other. Sec-ond, there is no faculty management but rather a spirit of communication and
free research. Third, the curriculum is simple, the research and study are thorough, and it is possible to relax and enjoy life. Thus, in regard to the “form of
study,” the academies are far superior to the schools. The modern schools do,
however, have one especially strong point, which is that their “study content” is

This manifesto was first published in Dongfang zazhi Vol. 20, No. 6, March 1923. Our
translation has been made from the version in Mao Zedong ji, Vol. 1, pp. 81–84, where it is
dated April 17, 1921. Chinese sources, including the Nianpu, confirm that Mao actually
drafted this document in August 1921.

1. Academies, or shuyuan, which had first appeared in the tenth century, remained the
most important institutions of higher education in China down to the early twentieth
century. Supported by the gentry and the officials, they existed at various levels, mainly in
xian and prefectural seats. Following the Reform Movement of 1895, Western learning
came to occupy a small place in their curriculum, but their focus remained essentially, as
Mao indicates in this passage, on preparing young scholars for official careers. They lost
their raison d’être with the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905.
2. The stereotyped form of writing required for all imperial examinations from the
Chenghua reign (1465–87) in the mid-Ming to the abolition of the system in the late Qing.
As the term suggests, the essays had to be written according to a rigid eight-part schema.
Bagu, or eight-legged essays, remained a favorite target of Mao’s, and a synonym for all
sorts of pedantry, to the end of his life. The most celebrated instance is no doubt his second
keynote speech of February 8, 1942, for the Rectification Campaign, attacking dang bagu
or “Party formalism.”

3. The passage in bold is emphasized in the Chinese by the use of dots next to the
characters.