In the winter of 1942, two months after the Japanese army took control of the Shanghai French Concession, Shen Yanzhi, general manager of Yuchang Trading Company, has just wiped away the “collaborator” graffiti from his doorway, a daily humiliation for those working in the puppet administration. Then he stumbles upon Lu Chengan, the Military Statistics Bureau’s “Cold-Faced Sharpshooter,” attempting to assassinate Asano, chief of the Special High Police. With the situation hanging by a thread, Shen Yanzhi rams a wine cart into the line of fire, shielding Asano and saving his life. His younger brother, Shen Yanming, publicly denounces him as a “traitor” and hides his true intentions behind a vicious reputation.
One crisis follows another. Asano uses a photo of Shen’s mother, whom he has imprisoned, to force him into interrogation, a common Japanese tactic for controlling the families of their targets. The Military Statistics Bureau mistakes Shen for a defector and secretly moves to kill him, while the underground organization contacted by his younger brother turns out to have a mole! Surrounded on all sides, Shen Yanzhi is actually carrying out a top-secret mission: intercepting the Japanese army’s second-phase “rural pacification” plan, recorded in the Wang Jingwei regime’s Pacification Campaign Files, and blowing up an arsenal of incendiary bombs jointly developed by Germany and Japan.
To break the deadlock, he teams up with Asano, a former classmate turned enemy, and Lu Chengan, who is hostile to the Communists, forming an absurd yet deadly squad: a Shen Bao reporter who hides explosives in his fountain pen, and a German-educated doctor who can crack Enigma codes. They pass intelligence amid verbal sparring at banquets, destroy evidence by setting fire to the trading company in seven minutes, and have Shen’s mother spill a medicine bowl outside her cell to distract the guards…
With strategy as his blade and faith as his shield, Shen Yanzhi navigates the dangers of Shanghai’s foreign concessions. He evolves from a lone boat fighting his way through the Japanese, the puppet regime, and the Military Statistics Bureau to joining forces with comrades of vastly different convictions to break through like a dagger. This is a rousing, thrilling tale of the belief that “I would rather die than live as a slave in a conquered nation”!
