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 liberally quoted from The Water Margin.32 Indeed at the time, Mao was accused by his opponents in the Central Committee of behaving like the Water Margin bandits.33 The analogy with The Water Margin is complete, with final destination of the Red Army being the barren and remote region of Yanan, the place of exile of Wang Jin in The Water Margin, and the birth place of the Ming bandit leader, Li Zicheng.
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
