Why this book

Mao Dun wrote this novel to prove a thesis in fiction: that China could never build its own capitalism while foreign powers ruled its markets and its money. Midnight became a cornerstone of modern Chinese literature, an entire trembling society pressed alive into the span of a single, breathless novel.

The Story

Our story opens as Wu Sunfu, a mighty and iron-willed industrialist, brings his frail aged father down into the city. Peasant revolts have made the family's country estate unsafe; therefore the terrified old man flees the only world he ever knew, clutching his little book of ancient moral scriptures.

But roaring Shanghai overwhelms the old landlord at once: the screaming motorcars, the bare-armed dancing women, the blinding electric glare of a world he cannot comprehend. His stiff feudal heart simply cannot bear the shock, and on that very first night the old man collapses and dies.

Therefore Wu Sunfu holds a lavish funeral, and all of moneyed Shanghai comes pouring through his mansion to pay respects. Among the mourners circle industrialists, speculators, and bankers, each of them whispering far less of grief than of profit, of the distant civil war, and of the trembling government bond market.

There Wu Sunfu meets Zhao Botao, a sleek financier quietly backed by powerful foreign banks. Zhao builds nothing and produces nothing, living by pure speculation alone, and he studies Wu Sunfu's hard-won industrial fortune the way a patient hawk studies a warm, unguarded nest far below.

Yet Wu Sunfu dreams far larger than any speculator among them. He longs to weave a whole national empire of silk mills, steamships, and railways, to prove for all to see that Chinese hands, and not foreign masters, can build a strong and modern nation from the ground up.

Therefore Wu Sunfu gathers several fellow capitalists into a bold new trust, pooling their silver together to swallow up the smaller, failing factories around them. For one shining moment the whole future seems to glitter, and he believes the entire industrial map of China lies within his eager reach.

But the ground beneath his rising empire is already rotten. Civil war rages across the countryside, choking off the very inland markets meant to buy his goods, while cheap mass-made foreign products flood the crowded harbor and ruthlessly undercut everything that his mills can manage to produce.

Worse still, deep inside his own silk filatures the workers themselves begin to rise. Their wages keep falling while their hours climb, and secret organizers move quietly among the women at the steaming reeling machines, whispering to them that they should lay down their tools together and strike.

Among those workers stands one determined young woman, thin from hunger yet fierce of eye, who refuses to be bought or beaten down. She rallies her frightened sisters at the gate, and for one blazing moment the powerless press so close together that even the hired thugs falter and fall back.

Therefore Wu Sunfu turns to his cold and ruthless aide, Tu Weiyue, ordering him to crush the growing unrest by whatever means it takes. Tu plants spies among the workers, buys informers with silver, and finally unleashes hired thugs upon the strikers gathering at the locked factory gates.

The strike is beaten down at last in the muddy street, but never the deep anger beneath it. Every silenced worker becomes a live coal still glowing in the dark, and Wu Sunfu senses uneasily that the fragile peace he bought with fists and money cannot possibly hold for long.

At home, meanwhile, Wu Sunfu grows steadily colder and more distant, consumed entirely by figures and creeping fear. His lonely young wife drifts untouched through their silent, opulent mansion, and the very man who would master an entire nation can no longer even sleep through the sweltering summer nights.

Far away, the family's abandoned country town brings him fresh ruin. Angry peasants and roving soldiers together seize the estate Wu Sunfu left behind, and the steady rents and harvests he had counted on to help steady his empire vanish completely into the swirling chaos of the interior.

But Wu Sunfu's true battlefield lies not in the factory or the farm; it is the roaring bond exchange. There immense fortunes are won and lost in a single morning as desperate men gamble on government war-bonds, and there the patient Zhao Botao has been quietly waiting for him.

For Zhao Botao has secretly amassed an enormous war-chest of foreign silver, coldly resolved to master the entire market himself. Therefore he baits Wu Sunfu deeper into the speculation, knowing full well that his rival's cash lies trapped inside slow, struggling mills that he cannot possibly sell in time.

Wu Sunfu wagers everything that the bond prices will fall, selling short with heavily borrowed money. But Zhao Botao, calmly reading his every desperate move in advance, quietly drives those same prices upward instead, and each single rising point bleeds Wu Sunfu a little whiter and a little weaker.

As the terrible losses mount higher, Wu Sunfu's proud trust begins to crack apart. His frightened partners whisper of pulling their money out, and some of them are secretly siding with Zhao Botao, so that the very allies he needs most may become the knife slipped quietly into his back.

Cornered now on every side, Wu Sunfu still refuses to retreat a single inch. Therefore he mortgages his beloved factories, drains his weakening partners dry, and pours every last dollar he can possibly seize into one final, furious gamble to break Zhao Botao before Zhao can finish breaking him.

Remember clearly what now hangs in the balance. Wu Sunfu wants a great empire raised up by Chinese hands; Zhao Botao, the smiling servant of foreign money, wants only to devour it whole. The roaring bond market has become the single narrow arena in which one of these two men must fall.

At last the final day erupts, and the whole exchange dissolves into a howling storm of shouting men. Wu Sunfu hurls his entire remaining fortune against the rising current, straining with all his will and nerve to force the bond prices back down, but the merciless tide will not turn.

Instead Zhao Botao's foreign silver drives the market relentlessly upward hour by hour, and Wu Sunfu's vast short position collapses completely beneath him. In a single scorching afternoon, the towering industrial empire he had dreamed of all his life is ground down into nothing but dust and mountainous debt.

Therefore Wu Sunfu stands utterly and finally ruined: his factories mortgaged away, his partners scattered and fled, his one great dream forever extinguished. Broken and hollow inside, he abandons the roaring city for a cool and distant mountain resort, an emperor now of absolutely nothing at all.

What it means

Here at last lies Mao Dun's hard and unflinching verdict. A lone Chinese capitalist could never hope to out-build the foreign powers who already owned his markets and his money; caught helplessly between imperialism above and rebellion below, even the very strongest industrialist was doomed. Midnight is that impossible hour, named.

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