Wu Ling Shan Jiao Fei Ji 武陵山剿匪记

Description:

At the crossroads of four provinces — Yu, E, Xiang and Qian — lies the Wuling mountain region, a place where bandits have roamed for generations. At the end of 1949, the Chinese People's Liberation Army swept through the Great Southwest like a crushing avalanche and then marched on Tibet. The remnants of several bandit gangs holed up in the Wuling mountains, relying on the rugged terrain and treacherous heights, kept up their desperate resistance, hoping to strangle the newborn democratic power in its cradle. Shi Zhong, a battalion commander of the PLA, is ordered to carry out the bandit-suppression mission and returns to his hometown in the Wuling mountains, only to be drawn into a tangled whirlpool of conflicts, setting off a story of twisting romance and tense, perilous battles.
On Longtou Mountain, the bandit chieftain Zhang Xiao-Feng was once the daughter-in-law of a bureaucrat. Unable to endure the humiliation inflicted by both father and son, she shot dead her incestuous father-in-law in a fit of rage, took to the hills, and joined forces with the hardened bandit Chen Zi-Quan to prey upon the people.
In the Bajiao Cave at Ran Family Pond in Gongtan lived a hardened bandit. His father, Ran Wen-Tong, was a cunning, sinister and ruthless "kindhearted man Ran." To fulfill the dream of the Ran family ruling Gongtan forever, he did not hesitate to use his own daughter-in-law to trap the PLA with feminine wiles, while his son Ran Da-Xing lurked year-round in the deep mountains, committing every kind of evil.
The bandit chieftain of Baishui Cave, Black Eagle, had once been a hot-blooded anti-Japanese officer. Because he killed many of his anti-Japanese superiors at the front, he was wanted; after fleeing home he found his father had died unjustly in prison, so he killed his enemies and took to the hills, robbing the rich to help the poor.
The three bandit gangs entrenched on Longtou Mountain, in Baishui Cave and Bajiao Cave both allied with and schemed against one another, and were filled with hostility toward the PLA and the newly established democratic power. In the fierce clashes, Black Eagle, the leader of Baishui Cave, discovered that the commander of the PLA's plainclothes bandit-suppression brigade, Shi Zhong, was in fact his own full brother, and that Black Eagle's "fortress mistress" was none other than the childhood sweetheart of his younger brother. The brothers had once plunged together into the anti-Japanese torrent, but after years of separation they had become enemies.
The underground Party member Yu Qing was sent into the bandits' lair, and both the bandit chieftain Zhang Xiao-Feng and her orderly A Xiang fell in love with him at the same time. Test and affection in equal measure, crisis and tenderness coexisting.
The reconnaissance hero, old company commander Qin Tian-Le, and the young widow Xu Er-Sao rose from the soldier-people bond to a sacred love, but before the words in their hearts could finally be spoken, Qin Tian-Le fell under the bullets of a bandit agent. Clutching Qin Tian-Le's blood-soaked body, the heartbroken Xu Er-Sao had no tears to shed.
Xiu Yun hanged herself, remonstrating with her husband in death to surrender to the PLA. At the foot of the green hills, beside the azaleas, facing Xiu Yun's lifeless body, Shi Zhong and Shi Liang stood speechless.
Pei Xuan, a female soldier of the Southwest Work Team, had always dreamed of becoming a writer. Her feelings for the hero Shi Zhong beside her grew from gratitude and admiration into secret love. Yet when Shi Zhong saw the love letter in which Pei Xuan expressed her affection, Pei Xuan had already been laid to rest in the monument beneath the hero tree.