Why did not MAO Zedong go abroad?
Mao, one founding father of the People’s Republic of China, should left for France to pursue his foreign study or working experience in the time of crisis and with the incentive of the French “work-study” program , but he did not go. Meanwhile, Enlai Zhou, former Premier, and Xiaoping Deng, former head of state, are among others took the advantage to travel far away to France to study. The question is why Mao did not go abroad?
I accidentally found two books in which the answer seems convincing: Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1968, and Ross Terrill’s Mao: A biography, New York: Happer and Row, Publishers, 1980.
According to Edgar Snow, Mao said that “I did not want to go to Europe. I felt that I did not know enough about my own country, and that my time could be more profitably spent in China.”
According to Ross Terrill, “preparation for the trip was study of French, and Mao proved poor at it . . . Mao was already too much in debt . . . Yang Kaihui [his wife], a journalism student, had no plans to go and work in a French factory. . . Mao did not really believe the key to his — or China’s — future lay in the west.”
These are several factors to account for Mao’s decision not to go to France to receive foreign education even though he was willing to learn and develop his theory (Mao’s thought).