Sir: It is odd of Murray Sayle to call Mao
Tse-tung a 'quintessentially Shanghai per- son' (4 December). China has been a com- munist state for thirty-odd years precisely because he was not. Mao spent little time in Shanghai, and his earliest distinctive con- tributions to the development of Chinese communism emphasised the role of the rural peasantry. By 1929 leadership of the movement was split: Mao was organising a
rural power base in the mountainous Kiangsi-Fukien border area, and was op- posed by the Central Committee of the party who argued that revolution must be based on the urban proletariat and thus on Shanghai. In terms of Marxist theory the Central Committee was correct. Given the realities of Chinese society, Mao's heretical line was the only one with a chance of suc- cess.
Geoffrey Sampson Richmond House, Ingleton, Yorkshire
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