Luo Bin was born in June 1908. As a child, he was adopted by Gu Hansen, a wealthy Tianjin merchant, becoming Gu’s first adopted son.
In 1919, amid political turmoil, Luo Bin was not yet eleven. The national disaster and patriotic movement that unfolded that year left a deep mark on his heart.
In 1926, Luo Bin enrolled in the meteorology department of the science faculty at Nankai University in Tianjin. But events around him began to change him. He could no longer see any hope for his country, so he decided to leave his books behind and join the army. From then on, he resolved to put the nation’s interests above everything else and find a way to save his country and its people.
At eighteen, in 1926, Luo Bin resolutely applied to the infantry program at the fifth class of the Whampoa Military Academy. Shortly before graduating, inspired by his mentors at Whampoa, he joined the Chinese Communist Party. There he met his closest brother-in-arms, Luo Tianqiang, who would remain his sworn brother for life.
In November 1927, Luo Bin and Luo Tianqiang took part in the Guangzhou Uprising. After it failed, they searched everywhere for their organization. In 1928, they finally found it and joined the Communist Party’s Central Special Operations Division.
In 1929, the Central Special Operations Division ordered Luo Bin and Luo Tianqiang to remain undercover in the upper ranks of the Kuomintang for the long term.
From then on, Luo Bin moved between the Kuomintang, the Communist Party, and the Japanese puppet regime, hiding his true loyalties from all three. He was a Communist ordered to infiltrate the Kuomintang, a Kuomintang agent ordered to infiltrate the Communist Party, and later an infiltrator in the upper ranks of the Japanese military.
This novel tells the extraordinary story of Luo Bin’s life, from 1908 to 1950.
