A New War and Peace

The second volume of United Village, New War and Peace, is set in an imagined present-day world in the post-globalization era. Its central figures are Meilong Town in United Village, Qin Dachuan, and Cao Ruhai and Cao Jicheng of the Shanhai Group. A group of veteran soldiers bring the blood-and-steel logic of the battlefield into the business jungle. As they pursue overseas farming and settlement, they are swept into a chain of crises: espionage in Russia’s Far East, a shootout on Sakhalin Island, an aerial battle over the Kerch Strait, a rescue in the Sea of Azov, commercial warfare in Odesa, the Wagner Group’s campaign against the Azov Battalion, and a battle of wits with foreign officials in Vancouver. Amid the tangled forces of capital expansion and geopolitical conflict, the novel unpacks the deep paradoxes of business ethics and the risks of war, capturing a glimmer of humanity amid a grand clash of civilizations.