The very popular book Once Upon a Time in Northeast China, Underworld Stories in 20 Years traces the development of a particular Chinese gang from a small group of gangsters into a mafia in the real sense. Such a story reminds me of the greenwoods outlaws in ancient China being described in numerous fictions.

If there is anything in common between ancient outlaws and their modern counterparts, it is the way they regard reality as a natural state, in which they solve their own problems in their own way rather than with the aid of rules and conventions. This phenomenon is the remains of jungle law from the old times when the human being as a whole was in a natural state. As British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes described, no one would feel safe in such a state. Only then can whoever is stronger prevails.

The irony is that they were called outlaws because they never observed established legal codes in whatever they did, but they did have their own rules. They called them rules in the rivers and lakes (jianghu guiju). We had many novels describing such outlaws. One of the most well known was the Outlaws of the Marsh.