Telegram of Condolence Mourning the
Death of Cai Yuanpei¹

(March 7, 1940)

For the perusal of the family members of Mr. Cai Jiemin, Austin Road, Kowloon,
Hong Kong:

We are shocked to learn that Mr. Jiemin, a giant in the world of learning and a
model for man, has breathed his last. This telegram conveys our sincere condolences, and urges you to restrain your grief.

Mao Zedong
bows respectfully

This document was first published in the Chongqing Xinhua ribao, March 8, 1940. We
have translated it from Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, Vol. 6, p. 149, where it is reproduced from
that source.
1. Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), hao Jiemin, was a Hanlin scholar, a revolutionary activist
before 1911, and the leading liberal educator of early Republican China. It was during his
tenure as chancellor, from 1916 to 1926, that Beijing University became the center of the
Chinese renaissance and the May Fourth movement. In 1928, he became the first president
of Academia Sinica, but in 1935 he resigned all official posts and issued a public statement
denouncing the political and intellectual controls exercised by the Guomindang government. Already in retirement and in poor health when the war broke out, he made his way to
Hong Kong, where he lived in partial seclusion. Cai was the translator of Paulsen's work on
ethics which Mao had studied assiduously while at school in Changsha in 1917-1918 and
had been chancellor of Beijing University when Mao spent some time there in 1919 and
1920. (See Volume I, passim.) In a letter of September 22, 1936, to Cai, translated in Volume V of this edition, urging him to support resistance to Japan, Mao recalled having heard
Cai "expound his marvelous ideas in the classrooms of Beijing University" during the May
Fourth period.