Framed, disgraced and on the run, what would China's top cyber-warrior do for revenge?

Rise of the Water Margin immerses the reader in a near-future world grounded in American and Chinese cultural and political landscapes bickering over climate responsibility wherein technology challenges humanity to redefine its relationship with the Earth. Nations seek to leverage and subvert technology to further political ambitions while losing sight of human elements beyond their control - lust, corruption, greed, piety, revenge, freedom of expression and longing for acceptance. In the background is the tangled whorl of the Jianghu - the Rivers and Lakes of China's wuxia demimonde- ever seeking to evade the surveillance state, ever seeking justice in an unjust world.

Chinese People's Liberation Army Major Lin Chong is framed, disgraced, and on the run. Hunted for a trumped-up act of treason and manslaughter, the resourceful leader of China's elite cyber-warfare unit takes refuge at a hacker enclave in one of China's deserted "ghost cities." Devastated by his wife's suicide, he unleashes a cyber-weapon that threatens to draw China and the US into a nuclear war.

Dr. Mili Parekh, the brilliant head of the US National Security Agency's Attribution Division, is tasked to identify the source of the attack. Parekh's technical skills point to China's culpability in the cyber-attack, and to Major Lin himself. Complicating matters for the wheelchair-bound Parekh are nagging doubts about another entity emerging in her analysis-and its possible links to Lin.

Of literary interest to fans of Asian history and fiction, all of the Chinese characters and their approximate character arcs are based on modernizations of figures within the famous Chinese historical wuxia novel written in the 14th century 水滸傳 ShuiHuZhuan, known in the West under the titles it has been translated: Tales of the Water Margin, All Men are Brothers, and The Outlaws of the Marsh. That, however, is only half the story, and seeing them in the 21st century mesh with the technology, weapons and political rivals of a global landscape is one of the delights for the reader.

Christopher Bates has been doing business in China since 1982, is fluent in Mandarin and lived in Asia for over 40 years. His insights have been published in Harvard's Negotiation Journal and his translations of wuxiaxiaoshuo in Journal of Asian Martial Art. This is his second novel.