Mao Tse-min, the most prominent of Mao Tse-tung’s siblings, played a moderately important role in the Chinese Communist Movement. An adviser to his brother in the Kiangsi Soviet period, he worked in financial affairs in the early thirties and led a transportation unit during the Long March. In north Shensi he headed the Department of National Economy in the Communist government.
Background
Mao Tse-min was born at the family homestead in Shao-shan village, located about 30 miles west of the hsien seat of Hsiang-t'an in eastern Hunan. Shao-shan was connected with the provincial capital of Changsha by steamer down the Hsiang-fan River.
Education
The only one of Mao Tse-tung's siblings to live into his late forties, Mao Tse-min spent his entire life as a revolutionary but his career is so far overshadowed by his famous brother that little is known of his youth aside from those events in which the two brothers are connected. Both spent their middle school years in Changsha, where Mao Tse-min belonged to the small nucleus of radical students who attended Mao Tse-tung's alma mater, the Hunan First Normal School. He may have belonged to the Hsin-min hsueh-hui (New people's study society), which his brother and Ts’ai Ho-sen established in 1918.
Career
In July 1921 Mao Tse-tung and Ho Shu-heng attended the founding congress of the CCP in Shanghai as delegates from Hunan. In the next month, following their return to Changsha, they established the Self-Education College (Tzu-hsiu ta-hsueh). Mao Tse-min and such other latter-day Communists as Hsia Hsi were among the first students. The ostensible purpose of the school was to attract students who wanted to study China's problems and do research on ways of strengthening the nation, but in fact it served as a CCP recruiting and training center. To start the college the Party had used buildings and funds collected by Hunanese literati in the early days of the Chinese Republic for study of the works of the Ming scholar Wang Fu-chih, whose writings were popular among the Chinese patriot-reformers” at the close of the Manchu dynasty. Housed in the same building as the Self-Education College was the Hunan Students’ Union. Mao Tse-min headed the Union's business department.
In 1922 Mao Tse-min joined the CCP. His older brother was then both secretary of the Hunan CCP Committee and head of the Changsha branch of the Chinese Labor Unions' Secretariat. As such, Mao Tse-tung's responsibilities included Party and labor activities on the rail line running cast from Changsha into the important An-yuan and P'ing-hsiang coal mining districts in western Kiangsi. Mao Tse-tung sent his brother to this area to work in the labor movement in which Li Li-san and others had been active for several months. In the fall of 1922 these Communist activists reorganized a workers' club (chi-lo-pu) under the overall direction of Li Li-san. Mao served as a director of the Miners Cooperative (subordinate to the club) for the Anyuan Coal Mines. He also enrolled in a workers' night school where he could propagate Marxist ideology at first hand.
Mao continued to work in the Hunan-Kiangsi labor movement until 1925 when he was transferred to the Party headquarters in Shanghai. There he assumed the direction of the Central Committee Publications Department (ch'u-pan pu). For the next three years he spent most of his time publishing and distributing Communist literature, a task that frequently took him to such centers of Communist activity as Wuhan and Changsha. In this capacity he maintained close connections with the Shanghai Book Store (Shang-hai shu-tien), which was established under CCP auspices in 1923. When it was closed down by the Shanghai authorities in late 1926 Mao was transferred to Wuhan to establish the Yangtze River Book Store (Ch'ang-chiang shu- tien). Mao interrupted his work in the publications field for a brief time in late 1925, when he enrolled as one of 133 students in the fifth class of the Peasant Movement Training Institute in Canton. This had been founded under joint KMT-CCP auspices the year before and its first classes were recruited mainly from Kwangtung. However, probably under the encouragement of the Mao brothers, the number of students from Hunan suddenly jumped to over 35 per cent of the fifth class held from October to December 1925.
During the Long March, which began in 1934, Mao led a transportation unit that was responsible for the "revolutionary assets carried by the troops, with which the Communists made their purchases. In November 1935, after the Communists arrived in north Shensi, he was appointed director of the Department of National Economy. The April 24, 1936, issue of a Communist journal published in Shensi carried an article by Mao on economic work in Shensi and Kansu, but little else is known of his work during this period. After spending a year or two in Yenan, Mao went to Moscow for medical treatment. In 1938, after his brother had appointed him as one of his special envoys to the government of Sheng Shih-ts*ai in Sinkiang, Mao Tse-min went from the Soviet Union to Tihwa, arriving at approximately the same time as Ch’en T’an-ch’iu, Yen- an’s chief representative in Sinkiang.
Ch'en's and Mao's arrival in Sinkiang coincided with increasingly close ties between Sheng's government and both the Moscow and Yenan Communists. By 1938 a large number of Chinese Communists had arrived in Sinkiang, at Sheng’s request, to serve as technical experts. Mao Tse-min, for example, was made director of the Finance Office of the Sinkiang government, a post he held until 1942, and his wife was in charge of a middle school for girls. Mao was known in those years by the name Chou Pin.
Politics
In 1927 Mao was managing the Min-kuo jih- pao (Republic daily) in Wuhan, but he was forced to relinquish this post in mid-1927 when the Communists and the left-KMT severed all relations. He remained in Wuhan in the Communist underground, where he continued his publications work. However, he was soon forced to leave the city and made his way to Hunan. Attempting to go from Hunan to Kiangsi to join the Communist insurgents, he was arrested by the Nationalists. He succeeded in concealing his identity and was therefore able to proceed to Kiangsi where he joined his brother in the Ching- kang Mountains. In the spring of 1928 he took part in the negotiations that brought together the Red armies of Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te. The two forces had been drawing closer together for several months before they actually met, and it was Mao Tse-min who was sent from Ching- kangshan to meet Chu’s troops and make the final arrangements for their uniting.
By no later than 1930 Mao had returned to the Party headquarters in Shanghai, which was now underground. In that year he was arrested again, but once more he gained his release by concealing his identity. In 1931 he was sent to the Communists' Fukien-Kwangtung-Kiangsi base where he became director of the General Affairs Department (ching-li pu), an assignment principally concerned with logistics work for the three-province military region. But he was soon transferred to Juichin to join his brother in the southeast Kiangsi base. Mao Tse-min took part in the preparations for the First All-China Congress of Soviets, which established the Chinese Soviet Republic in November 1931 under the chairmanship of Mao Tse-tung. Immediately after the Congress he was made a member of the Republic's Finance Committee and in the next year he was appointed director of the State Bank (kuo-chia yin-hang). In this connection he was in charge of raising funds and purchasing supplies for military operations and of regulating tax revenues. A report by Mao based on an inspection he made of financial work, in Kiangsi appeared in the important newspaper Hung-se Chung-hua (Red China) on March 2, 1932.
Connections
Mao was survived by his wife, Chu Tan-hua, who had a child while she was in prison in Tihwa. Since the early 1950’s she has been active in cultural and educational work in Kiangsi. When Chu led a women's delegation to the Mongolian People's Republic in March 1960, she was identified as chairman of the Kiangsi Women’s Federation. She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the National Women’s Federation since 1956 and in 1964 she was chosen to represent the Federation on the Fourth National Committee of the CPPCC.
Mao Tse-tung's youngest brother, Mao Tse- t’an, was also a revolutionist. Like his two brothers he was born in Hsiang-t*an (1905). He worked in the labor movement with Mao Tse- min in the early twenties in Hunan and Kiangsi and was probably then already a Party member. He participated in both the labor and peasant movements in Kwangtung when Mao Tse-tung was there in the mid-twenties and then accompanied him to Chingkangshan in the winter of 1927. On one occasion when Mao Tse-tung’s forces were badly in need of supplies, Tse-t’an was sent to contact P’eng P’ai’s peasant guerrillas in the Hai-lu-feng area of eastern Kwangtung. After two months he rejoined his brother and remained in the Kiangsi-Fukien area for the rest of his life. In the early 1930's he was associated with the so-called Lo Ming line. Lo, then acting secretary of the Fukien Party Committee, was severely criticized by the '28 Bolsheviks' leadership of the CCP for being a “defeatist” and for allowing the Party to suffer losses during the Nationalists' Annihilation Campaigns against the Communists from the early to the mid-thirties. In this connection Mao Tse-fan was censured for his association with the Lo Ming line. Mao Tse-t'an, never especially prominent aside from the fact that he was a brother of Mao Tse- tung, was left behind when the Long March began in October 1934.
He remained with the small group of Communist guerrillas led by Hsiang Ying and others who fought rear guard actions in the territory of the old Chinese Soviet Republic. Ch’U Ch’iu-pai was also among the group. By February 1935 the pressures from Nationalist forces became so great that the Communists were forced to seek refuge in the mountains along the Kiangsi-Fukien border. Toward the end of March 1935 Mao was with Ch'u in the vicinity of Shang-hang in southwest Fukien when the Communists were surrounded by Nationalist troops, and in the fighting Mao was killed and Ch'Li was taken prisoner. Tse-t’an’s wife, who engaged in revolutionary work in Hunan, stayed in Hsiang-t’an to carry on her efforts there and did not go to other areas with her husband. In mid-1930, when the Communists attacked Changsha, the Mao family land was taken over by the Nationalists, and at this time she was arrested along with Mao Tse-tung's first wife and his younger sister. The latter two were executed, but the wife of Mao Tse-fan was released. Nothing further is known about her.