The Young Mao was influenced by Kang Youwei's The Great Harmony and the Japanese warrior Mushanokoji Saneatsu's New Village (Atarashikimura) Movement. Mao had joined with others to plan a "New Village" in Yuelushan where thinkers could work and study together and share their assets and the fruits of their labor. He had never had the opportunity to put that plan into practice.
In 1958, Mao believed the time had finally come. He had written "When Kang Youwei wrote The Great Harmony, he had not and could not have found a road to that Great Harmony." Mao believed he had found that road in the communes [of the Great Leap Forward].
(Yang, 2012, p. 170–171)
This essay provides a simple exploration of some of the ostensible sources of Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) ideology, following the cue provided by Yang Jisheng's (楊繼繩) Tombstone (quoted above).
The first and most general discovery is that the connection between Maoism and the sources discussed in this essay has attracted very little attention in the English-language evaluation of Maoist Communism. Chinese and Japanese sources are outside of the scope of this essay, but, in English at least, it seems that remarkably little attention has been paid to this aspect of the legacies of Mushanokoji (武者小路 實篤, also writ Mushakoji) and Kang Youwei (康有為, also writ K'ang Yu-Wei). Both names remain famous, but their significance for Maoism --specifically-- seems to have escaped notice in English.
