Page "Mao Zedong" Paragraph 9

Aged 13, Mao finished primary education, and his father had him married to Luo Yixiu ( 1889 – 1910 ), a woman eight years his senior, in order to unite their two land-owning families.

They never lived together and Mao refused to recognise her as his wife, becoming a fierce critic of arranged marriage.

He began work on his father's farm, but continued to read voraciously in his spare time.

One of the most influential texts that he read was Cheng Kuan-ying's Sheng-shih Wei-yen ( Words of Warning to an Affluent Age ), a political tract that lamented the deterioration of Chinese power in East Asia, arguing for technological, economic and political reform, modelling China on the representative democracies of the western world.

Mao would later claim that he first developed a " political consciousness " from that booklet.

Another influential book which he read at the time was a translation of Great Heroes of the World, becoming inspired by the American revolutionary George Washington and French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military prowess and nationalistic fervour greatly impressed him.