Plot summary
The novel occurs during a 21 day period mostly in Shanghai, China, and concerns mainly the socialist insurrectionists and people involved. The four protagonists are Ch’en Ta Erh (whose name is spelled Tchen in the French version of the book), Kyo Gisors, the Soviet emissary Katow, and Baron De Clappique. Their individual plights are intertwined throughout the book.
Chen Ta Erh is sent to assassinate an authority, succeeds, and is later killed in a failed suicide bombing attempt on Chiang Kaishek. After the assassination he becomes governed by fatality and desires simply to kill, and thereby fulfill his duty as a terrorist, a duty which controls his life. This is largely the result of being so close to death since assassinating a man. He is so haunted by death and his powerlessness over inevitability that he wishes to die, simply to end his torment.
Kyo Gisors is the commander of the revolt and believes that every person should choose his own meaning, and not be governed by any external forces. He spends most of the story trying to keep power in the hands of the workers rather than the Kuomintang (KMT) army, and resolving a conflict between himself and his wife, May. He is eventually captured and, in a final act of self-determination, chooses to take his own life with cyanide.
Katow had faced execution once before, during the Russian Civil War, and was saved at the last moment - which gives him a feeling of psychological immunity. After witnessing Kyo's death, he watches with a kind of calm detachment as his fellow revolutionaries are taken out one by one, to be thrown alive into the chamber of a steam locomotive waiting outside - intending, when his own turn comes, to use his own cyanide capsule. But hearing two young Chinese activists talk with trembling fear of being burned alive, he gives them the cyanide (there is only enough for two), himself being left to face the more fearsome death - and so he dies in an act of self-sacrifice and solidarity