Home > Early life of Mao
Mao_Zedong#Early_LifeDuring the 1911 Revolution he served in the Hunan provincial army. In the 1910s, Mao returned to school, where he became an advocate of physical fitness and collective action.
After graduation from Hunan Normal School in 1918, Mao travelled with his high-school teacher and future father-in-law, Professor Yang Changji (杨昌济), to Beijing during the May Fourth Movement, when Yang lectured at Peking University. From Yang's recommendations, he worked under Li Dazhao, the head of the university library and attended speeches by Chen Duxiu. While working for the Peking University library, Mao acquired a taste for books, something he was to retain in later years. Also in Beijing, he married his first wife, Yang Kaihui, a Peking University student and the daughter of Mao's high-school teacher. (When Mao was 14, his father had arranged a marriage for him with a fellow villager, Luo Shi [羅氏], but Mao never recognized this marriage.) (See section 6 Family)
Instead of going abroad like many of his radical compatriots, Mao spent the early 1920s traveling in China, and finally returned to Hunan, where he took the lead in promoting collective action and labor rights.
At age 27, Mao attended the First Congress of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai in July 1921. Two years later he was elected to the Central Committee of the party at the Third Congress.
During the first KMT-CCP united front, Mao served as the director of the Kuomintang's (KMT) (or Nationalist Party) Peasant Training Institute, and in early 1927 he was dispatched to Hunan Province to report on the recent peasant uprisings in the wake of the Northern Expedition. The report that Mao produced from this investigation is considered the first important work of Maoist theory.
