At the base in Yanan, isolated and far from the Kuomintang government, the Communist Party further reconsolidated its strength with the support of the impoverished northern peasantry, drawn to the virtuous and liberating Red Army. The Red Army was built into a potent revolutionary force driven by the promise of a utopian “New China.” Like Song Jiang and his bandits of the 120 chapter version of The Water Margin, the “red bandits” gained a degree of amnesty in the truce and the tenuous united front with the Kuomintang against the Japanese invasion from 1936–1945. Unlike their literary predecessors however, Mao Zedong and his “red bandits” did not yearn for an Imperial pardon. Indeed, until the forced (and temporary) united front, the Kuomintang government had rather favored complete extermination of the “red bandits” over any form of amnesty.34 By 1946 with the war with Japan concluded, the civil war broke out again in earnest. Despite the superiority of its American Lend Lease equipment obtained ostensibly to fight the Japanese, the war was a disaster for the Kuomintang. Unable to manage spiraling inflation, unable to rebuild an economy crippled by twenty years of civil war and the war with Japan, represented by brutal and uncaring government officials, faced with massive government corruption at the highest levels and conscript soldiers who were simply unwilling to fight, the Kuomintang lost the Mandate of Heaven.
On the other side, the Communists possessed their carefully renamed People’s Liberation Army, a force of peasant soldiers ideologically motivated with a personal stake in the revolution. It was trained to treat the ordinary people with the care and respect that they would have shown their own families, in a way that ordinary people had never experienced before in wartime. In contrast to the Kuomintang government’s ineptitude and inability to deal with pressing social problems, the Communists restored law and order in their “liberated territories,” taught the peasants how to read and write, redistributed food and land, and engaged the peasants in the revolutionary process. From the force of 8,000 ragged survivors of the Long March in 1935, the People’s Liberation Army swelled to some 4 million men by 1949, as peasants flocked to the revolutionary cause, and again like the Liangshan bandits, prisoners of war or defectors were either paroled or welcomed with open arms. Ultimately in October 1949, this peasant rebellion marched into the former Qing capital of Beijing. There, at the Tiananmen Gate of the Forbidden City of the Ming and Qing Emperors, Mao Zedong like so many peasant leaders of so many peasant uprisings before, proclaimed himself “emperor” and founder of a new “dynasty,” ushering in the People’s Republic of China.
Even with the triumph of the Communist revolution, history had not finished with The Water Margin. In 1975, in the final gasps of the Cultural Revolution, when so much of the “old culture” of the traditional arts had been destroyed, The Water Margin was surprisingly revived and republished under the guidance of the radical leftist “Gang of Four” led by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing. This 100 Chapter version was published despite years of criticism of “old literature,” complete with an introductory comment from Mao himself stating that “the guiding principle is that this is about rebelling against corrupt officials, not rebelling against the Emperor.”35 In what was to be the final year of the Cultural Revolution, the resonance of The Water Margin was again unmistakeable. For indeed, the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution in 1966–1969 had overthrown and all but destroyed “the government officials” of the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy. The ranks of the Party, from the highest office in the land down, had been ruthlessly purged by Mao’s new generation of young revolutionaries, the radical “Red Guards.” Few of the veterans of the revolutionary struggle survived, as high office offered little protection, and those who did survive, did so only under the protection of “the emperor” himself, Mao Zedong. Promoted as “material for teaching by negative example,” The Water Margin, as a work of historical fiction was once again used as an allegorical teaching aid and as a “mirror to the present” to enable people to identify “capitulationists in their own day and age.”36
The Water Margin was used by the Gang of Four to head a campaign against the lesson of Song Jiang’s “capitulation” to the “Confucian” and “feudal landlord classes,” in the seeking of amnesty and Imperial pardon. In the Byzantine environment behind the power struggle between the radical left of the Gang of Four and the moderates rallying behind the ailing Premier Zhou Enlai and Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping, this period of revival of The Water Margin underscored a rapidly shifting yet uncertain future. The “emperor” Mao Zedong was, by this time, ailing himself and entering into the final year of his life. With the looming prospect of a titanic power struggle following Mao’s eventual death, the already waning influence of the Gang of Four radicals suggested a very real possibility of their being completely sidelined from power, as well as an abandonment of the hard won Maoist radicalism and a shift towards a more moderate social and economic system. In this climate, the Gang of Four, which still held influence over national cultural policy, used this “capitulationist” theme as a clear allegorical criticism of Zhou Enlai, the upright Confucian hero of the Chinese revolution, beloved of the people and their primary obstacle to power upon Mao’s death. Also targeted was Deng Xiaoping, Zhou’s heir apparent and the pragmatic economic planner who had been previously purged as a “reactionary” and “capitalist roader” and recently rehabilitated and reinstated.37
In 1976, the most senior of the surviving veteran revolutionaries, the heroes of the earliest days of the Communist Party, Zhou Enlai, the “Prime Minister,” Zhu De, the “Marshal” and Mao Zedong the “Emperor” all died (in April, July, and September respectively). Echoes of allegorical criticism of Song Jiang’s “capitulation” were still heard in the purge of Deng Xiaoping, orchestrated by the Gang of Four following Zhou Enlai’s death in April 1976.38 However, Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four’s political aspirations came to naught as they were quickly arrested following Mao’s death by his successor Hua Guofeng, with the backing (or prompting) of the senior Generals of the People’s Liberation Army and the surviving elder revolutionary leaders. In the end, The Water Margin turned full circle. The classic that inspired Mao Zedong’s brilliant revolutionary and military works of the Long March and civil war became the absurd “final chapter of Maoist political culture” and the last gasp of Maoism itself.39
Can The Water Margin still be used as a mirror to the present?
At the time of writing, China is about to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic on October 1st 1949. It has been 60 years since Mao Zedong and his “bandit army” marched into Beijing and founded a new dynasty. After all this time, is The Water Margin still relevant as a work of fiction that inspires, guides, and shapes history?
In Chinese terms of 4000 years of recorded history, of Twenty-four Dynasties and two Republics, 60 years is nothing. 60 years merely marks the end of one complete cycle of the 60 year Chinese calendar of the Heaven Branches and the Earthly Stems. In China, dynasties can last for hundreds of years. As the Chinese nation celebrates in 2009, the Chinese government faces numerous critical, but familiar challenges. It must maintain equality in the share of the wealth of China’s massive free market economy. It must face the eternal challenge of corruption and of self-serving public officials. It must face the challenge of rising unemployment, especially amongst its highly educated young graduates. It must also face the social challenges of a large migrant population of perhaps some 230 million from the interior of the country that flock to work in the booming cities of the southern and eastern provinces and their factories and construction sites. It must face the challenge