Water Margin and the Jianghu

Author: Wang Xuetai
Publisher:
Publishing Time: Not available
Features: This book is not within my writing plan; it was entirely written at the invitation of Editor-in-Chief Wang Jianxun. I have known Jianxun for a short time, but I had heard of him before. He has long been renowned in Beijing's publishing industry, and the "Xueleng" and "Rén zhī chū" series he edited have had a significant impact and popularity among readers. Many of the authors he has connected with are also my old and new acquaintances. After meeting Jianxun, we got along very well. He rode his electric bicycle from outside An Ding Men to my humble abode far beyond the third ring road in the southeast, and the journey took half a day. We hit it off instantly. Later, Jianxun invited me to write a book for the "Rén zhī chū" series. Although I was very eager to do so, I was overwhelmed with work, especially with an ongoing project for my institute that I couldn’t complete. I often felt regret about it. Later, Jianxun said he wanted to create a series called "Huà lǐ huà wài" (Stories Within and Beyond Paintings) featuring several classic ancient works, and asked me to select one. I had been working on my own project, the second volume of "Yóumín wénhuà yǔ Zhōngguó shèhuì" (Nomad Culture and Chinese Society), where I had offered new perspectives and evaluations of "Water Margin." By cutting and piecing together these ideas, I was able to compile a new book. Many of my thoughts had not yet been shared with the world, and this was a chance to see how society would react. However, this "Huà lǐ huà wài" series has a special format: it must include illustrations, with one illustration per page. This means the text on each page cannot exceed 600 words, forcing many longer arguments to be cut into pieces. It’s like a long, straight, and wide street in Beijing being divided into segments by traffic lights. This disrupts the flow of the article and hinders a comprehensive exploration of the issues, but there’s nothing we can do about the series’ format. As a result, many of the book’s viewpoints are only touched upon and not deeply explored. For example, issues like the "Emperor Dream" and "Equality Dream" of the Chinese people, as well as the differences between the northern and southern versions of "Water Margin," are only superficially addressed. The book is titled "Water Margin and the Jianghu," discussing the relationship between "Water Margin" and Jianghu culture. This is explained in detail in the Preface. Nowadays, the terms "Jianghu" and "Jianghu culture" frequently appear in various media and literary works. Authors and audiences are captivated by its expansive and heroic atmosphere, thereby accepting its rough and crude style as well. This yearning has been cultivated over centuries of cultural and deliberately sown and nurtured in people’s minds in recent decades. On the surface, it seems to promote values of anti-authority, anti-tradition, bravery, and struggle, but in reality, its essence is a disdain for norms and an advocacy of the crude nomad culture, which intentionally or unintentionally undermines traditional classic culture. (The collapse of traditional Chinese culture in the past century—primarily classic culture—was the result of both internal disintegration within nomad culture and external shocks from foreign culture.)