Number 666 is a novel by Yan Geling published in 2020, and her first foray into war fiction with a male protagonist, set in Northeast China during the 1930s and 1940s. Min Zhihong, an itinerant performer of the song-and-dance duet known as errenzhuan, scrapes by on a fine voice and a glib tongue. Onstage his bawdy banter draws village girls and wives around him; offstage he dodges gambling debts and stays on the run. Because he is short and resembles the resistance general Zhao Linyu around the eyes and brow, he is reported while getting a haircut in the street; the Japanese puppet police arrest him as Zhao and assign him prisoner number 666. In the cell, the resistance fighters held there are elated to see their "general"—all except the tall Zhang Guitang, who once carried the ailing General Zhao on his back during guerrilla fighting and sees through the ruse at a glance. But Zhang is plotting a massive prison break, and what he needs is precisely this "spiritual leader" who can rally hearts, so he seizes the mistake and forces Min to play the part to the end. Through the puppet warden's repeated probing, the covert protection of his cellmates, and the example set by the resistance fighters, Min is gradually captured by a sense of honor, transformed from a shiftless rogue who clings to life and fears death into a man willing to die calmly under Zhao Linyu's name, buying the real general time to keep fighting the Japanese. With a doppelgänger structure in which true and false are hard to tell apart, the novel portrays the conscience and courage awakened in a lowly nobody, and sketches a panorama of Northeast Chinese society under the iron heel of the Japanese invaders. The twist at the end extends the story into a longer stretch of history, leaving behind a lingering compassion and reflection.
People's Literature Publishing House publishes across classical literature, foreign literature, documentary writing and folk literature, with 492 titles in its catalogue. Representative books range from the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms to Lao She's Teahouse and Longxu Ditch in the Selected Works of Lao She, as well as translated foreign literature such as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Dante's Divine Comedy and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, alongside documentary and fictional works including Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and João Guimarães Rosa's The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Its authors include Chinese writers such as Lao She, translators such as Shen Emeri and Li Wenjun, and foreign authors such as James Wood. Overall, the house has a strong record in editing classic works and translating foreign literature, with a publishing character that bridges Chinese and foreign writing and values textual quality.
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