The Water Margin and the “Red Bandits”
The web of crossover from history to fiction to history is a pattern that becomes clearly visible once we recognize and become accustomed to the continuum between Chinese historical fiction and Chinese history. Chinese intellectual tradition has always “taken history as a mirror as a guide to the present” and indeed the great historiography of Chinese history by Sima Guang (1019–1086 CE) was titled The Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Zizhi Tongjian, 1084 CE). The sense of historical consciousness is so deeply ingrained in the Chinese cultural system, that it has always influenced the nature of popular culture, as even a superficial glance at contemporary Chinese film, literature, and stage will attest. Early Ming vernacular novels were no exception, and together historical fiction and historiography have guided political and historical commentary since that time.26
The power of The Water Margin and its theme of righteous bandit rebellion has resonated through the course of Chinese history, from its first publication some time around the beginning of the Ming Dynasty through to the modern day. In that time The Water Margin has long been an allegorical tool of historical and political commentary. Amidst the chaos of the final years of the fall of the Ming, an Imperial Edict was issued in 1641 by the last Emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen banning The Water Margin a mere three years before the final collapse of the dynasty.27 Despite official attempts, such as an Imperial Edict issued by the Jiaqing Emperor prohibiting the book, its printing, and distribution, The Water Margin was never wholly suppressed throughout the succeeding Qing Dynasty.28 In time, as is the tradition of dynastic cycles in Chinese history, another peasant rebellion, another band of outlaws rose against the dissatisfaction with everyday life, against the corruption and ineptitude of local officials, and challenged the dynasty itself. Just as Li Zicheng’s (1606–1645) peasant rebellion against the Ming marked the beginning of the fall of the dynasty, the massive Taiping Rebellion under its leader Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864), almost succeeding in toppling the Qing Dynasty, marking the beginning of its eventual fall. By the time of the final collapse of the Qing in 1911 and the subsequent chaos of Republican China, The Water Margin had developed a life of its own, adding further analogy and allegory to fuel the mythology of The Water Margin and its role in Chinese history. However, history had not quite finished with it.
The Water Margin featured amongst the influential works read by a young well to do Hunan peasant boy named Mao Zedong in the final years of the Qing Dynasty. Mao later revealed to Edgar Snow in Red Star Over China (1937):
“I knew the Classics, but disliked them. What I enjoyed were the romances of old China, and especially stories of rebellions. I read the Yue Fei Zhuan (The Yue Fei Chronicles), Shui Hu Zhuan (The Water Margin), Fan Tang (Revolt Against the Tang Dynasty), San Guo (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), and Xi You (Journey to the West, aka Monkey), while still very young, and despite the vigilance of my old teacher, who hated these outlawed books and called them wicked. I used to read them in school, covering them up with a Classic when the teacher walked past. So also did most of my schoolmates. We learned many of the stories almost by heart, and discussed and re-discussed them many times. We knew more of them than the old men of the village, who also loved them and used to exchange stories with us. I believe that perhaps I was much influenced by such books, read at an impressionable age.”29
As the young Mao grew to adulthood, he fell into the radical intellectual revolution of the New Culture Movement following the establishment of the Republic in 1912 and later the May Fourth Movement of 1919. With his eclectic blend of peasant roots, traditional literature, and modern scholarship, Mao Zedong became one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 and went to work alongside its Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) colleagues training and organizing a peasant response to the Chinese revolution. Mao recognized like no other Chinese revolutionary, the potential of the mass of China’s peasantry as a revolutionary force. Initially as a part of the Sun Yatsen’s Kuomintang regime in southern Guangdong province, Mao directed the Kuomintang Peasant Movement Training Institute in the Kuomintang capital of Guangzhou (Canton). In August 1927, during the Kuomintang’s march north on the Northern Expedition to reunify China under its new leader Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang turned against its Communist allies. As the vast majority of Communists were being slaughtered in the urban centers of China, Mao Zedong led a Communist peasant rebellion in Hunan, known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising. Like Communist resistance throughout China, Mao’s peasant rebels were outnumbered and outgunned. Badly mauled and forced to retreat from their base in Hunan, Mao regrouped his forces with the surviving forces of Zhu De in the Jinggang Mountains of Jiangxi province, to form the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.
In the struggle of Mao and Zhu’s Red Army against the Kuomintang government during the Chinese Civil War, the analogy of The Water Margin with reality could not have been more apparent. It was as if The Water Margin was being yet again re-enacted, as the nascent Red Army collected various survivors of the Chinese Communist Party, dubbed “bandits” by Chiang Kai-shek, in the hills of Jiangxi. There at the Jiangxi Soviet, the Communists began regrouping the army and the Party, and re-establishing its revolutionary movement amongst the peasantry. From Jiangxi, surrounded and outnumbered, the Red Army along with several other surviving Communist forces broke out of their encirclement in 1934 and began the year long fighting retreat of the Long March. Covering the most extreme environments of southern, western, and northern China, the Long March meandered its way through rugged mountains and ravines, over snow capped high mountains at the edge of the Himalayas, over vast endless grasslands and swamps of hostile Tibetan homelands, and into the inhospitable deserts of the northwest. Fighting over much of the way, and suffering from battle casualties, desertions, and deaths through starvation and the absence of medical care, this government on the march began with some 80,000 men. When the survivors limped into Yanan in Shaanxi province in 1935, they numbered some 8,000 men. It was an incredible feat and a triumph of human endurance and like Valley Forge in 1778 or Gallipoli in 1915, it was to become the centerpiece of the foundation myth of a new nation.
Undoubtedly, Mao Zedong carried a copy of The Water Margin with him on the epic 12,500 km fighting retreat.30 Certainly in Pearl Buck’s introduction to her 1933 translation All Men Are Brothers, she noted that, “Today, the newest and most extreme party in China, the Communists, has taken the “Shui Hu Chuan” and issued an edition with a preface by a leading Communist, who calls it the first Communist literature of China, as suitable to this day as the day it was written.”31 During the Long March, Mao Zedong gradually rose to prominence amongst the Communist leaders. While composing some of his most important writings on revolution and warfare, Mao