Why The Water Margin Matters Historically

First externally attested in 1524, the Ming-dynasty Chinese novel Water Margin collects legends about a band of merry men of genius who love righteousness, and who fight to stop a corrupt imperial bureaucracy from exploiting the people. However, the leader of these social bandits, Song Jiang, comes to see his mission in terms of a monarchist restorationism which is a common conservative reaction to capitalist upheaval in early modernity, known internationally by the Russian name “Good Tsar, Bad Boyars”—the breakdown of feudal order under market relations is blamed on the ministers around the monarch, while the monarch himself is seen as a pure, ideal figure who must only be rescued from corruption and he will save the world. Midway through the longer versions of the novel—there are countless versions with different political slants and (on the original prints) commentary on every page by various ideologues of the time—Song Jiang finally receives his longed-for imperial pardon, but now the heroes must join the imperial army as an elite unit fighting to put down rebellions much like their own across the country, as promises of elevation to the bureaucracy are deferred again and again. When (after the smartest of the heroes go back to the thug life) they finally receive their emoluments and sinecures and retire to their country villas, one by one they are poisoned by the bureaucrats with (as the narrator quasi-grudgingly admits) the full knowledge of the emperor. A final poignant scene caps the long debate throughout the novel between Song Jiang and his loyal and simple stalwart Iron Ox, who has argued throughout against Song Jiang’s monarchist fantasies and in favor of something like socialism and democracy. Giving the lie to Eurocentric ideas that revolution is alien to East Eurasia where “oriental despotism” prevails—in fact, the roots of modernity including the modern revolutionary tradition lie in the East—this novel had a tremendous influence on China’s thwarted bourgeois revolution, Japan’s successful bourgeois revolution (it, far more than the Kojiki or anything else, is the bible of the Japanese right wing and the foundation of Japanese monarchism), and a complicated legacy in China’s socialist revolution. In Red Star Over China, Mao is seen praising the Water Margin as an inspiration, but during the Great People’s Cultural Revolution he held it up as a “negative example” (反面教材), calling Song Jiang’s desire for a pardon “capitulationism” and equating it to the attitude of the capitalist roaders. So who was correct: Song Jiang or Iron Ox?

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