The Public Security Bureau intercept a telegram notifying foreign agents to retrieve the "110 secret". Shi Yan, head of the Reconnaissance Section, starts a campaign of counter-espionage, but one of his agents is soon killed on board a train.
A taut wartime thriller, Red Crag: Life in Eternal Flame anticipates the paranoia and violence of the imminent Cultural Revolution while harking back to the aesthetic splendour of the Golden Age Shanghai cinema of the late 1940s. (This opulence is largely due to the work of cinematographer Zhu Jinming, the master visual stylist of Shangrao Concentration Camp and other key "Seventeen Years" films.) The film concerns a hard-boiled woman working in the Chongqing Communist underground during World War II, whose commitment to the guerrilla cause is only intensified after she witnesses her husband's head mounted on the city walls by the Nationalist forces.
At the age of 16 Zhou Lian, who lost her parents at the age of two and was raised by a stepmother, marries Jiang Mei, a progressive young man from Changsha No. 1 Normal School. Jiang Meiqing has also lost both of his parents. The couple has two sons, Liqun, Xiaoqing and daughter Xiaolian. The film follows the family through turbulent times from 1924 to 1930.
