Political Upheaval and the Transformation of Power in Our Violent Ends
The Thematic Claim: History Overwhelms the Gang Feud
In Our Violent Ends, political upheaval functions as the great equalizer of Shanghai's power structures. The workers' uprisings, the Nationalist occupation, and the Shanghai Massacre of 1927 do not merely interrupt the Scarlet Gang–White Flower feud—they render it obsolete. The novel's central political theme is that power in Shanghai is not held by any single gang or family but by the shifting tides of history itself. Gang control, built on territory, fear, and blood allegiance, proves fragile against mass movements and state military force. By the novel's end, the old gang order has been so thoroughly dismantled that the surviving characters must either adapt to a new political reality or be consumed by it.
The Workers' Uprising: The First Crack in Gang Rule
The novel traces the transformation of power through three escalating phases. The first phase is the workers' uprising, which directly challenges gang authority. In chapter twenty-four, the novel shows a factory foreman killed by his own workers—a symbolic inversion of the gang hierarchy that had long controlled labor through violence. The workers' strikes and protests grow from scattered riots into a coordinated movement, and by chapter thirty-one, the workers have taken control of Shanghai's districts. The evidence shows that Nanshi, Hongkou, Wusong, East Shanghai, West Shanghai, and Zhabei all fall to the workers, with the White Flowers relinquishing their hold on Zhabei after a night-long fight.
This phase is crucial because it demonstrates that gang power was never truly sovereign. The gangs had promised to rein Shanghai into order, but the workers' uprising reveals that this promise was built on fear rather than legitimacy. The novel makes this explicit: the Scarlets have long known that the people no longer fear them, and that is something for the Scarlets to fear. The gangs' authority depended on the people's belief in their power; once that belief erodes, the power itself evaporates.
The Nationalist Occupation: Power Shifts to the State
The second phase is the Nationalist occupation. After the workers seize the city, the Nationalist Army under Chiang Kai-shek marches in and takes control. The workers, who had been allied with the Kuomintang in the Northern Expedition, are asked to give way to Nationalist soldiers. This moment is deeply ironic: the workers' revolution succeeds in ousting the gangs and imperialists, only to be immediately subsumed by a state power that claims the victory as its own.
The evidence shows Juliette Cai's growing awareness of this transformation. At a funeral in chapter thirty-three, she observes that Shanghai is now under the rule of the Nationalist Army. The gang's territory has been replaced by Nationalist soldiers stationed along the streets. The foreign concessions are sealed off with barbed wire and chain-link fences. The gangs are reduced to hosting private dinners with Nationalist guests, their power now contingent on the state's tolerance rather than their own strength.
Juliette's reflection at Tyler's funeral crystallizes this theme. She whispers that the heir title is soon going to be rendered null, recognizing that the Scarlet Gang's power structure is becoming meaningless. The novel then gives her a moment of profound self-awareness: she once wanted power, but beneath it all, she realizes she wanted safety. This is the thematic heart of the transformation: the old power structures promised safety through dominance, but the political upheaval reveals that dominance was never sustainable.
The Shanghai Massacre: The Final Collapse
The third phase is the Shanghai Massacre itself. In chapters forty and forty-three, the Nationalists, foreigners, and the Scarlet Gang form an informal alliance to purge Communists from the Kuomintang. The author's note confirms this historical basis: the purge occurred at dawn on April 12, with unarmed students and workers fired upon. The novel compresses the timeline, having the protest march occur the same day as the purge.
The evidence from chapter forty-two shows the aftermath: rain washing blood from the sidewalks, the city quiet after the Nationalists and Scarlets stormed it with military-grade weapons. Juliette, Roma Montagov, and Alisa navigate a city where the Nationalists have taken control and the Scarlets have been deployed as enforcers. The gangs are now instruments of state violence, not independent powers.
This phase reveals the ultimate transformation: the gangs have been co-opted. The Scarlet Gang, which once ruled Shanghai through its own authority, now serves the Nationalists. The White Flowers are inserted among the purged, as the author's note explains—the historical Green Gang's role is swapped for the Scarlet Gang, and the White Flowers become targets. The gangs are simultaneously perpetrators and victims of the state's violence, a contradiction that underscores their loss of agency.
Character Connections: Adaptation and Obsolescence
The theme of political upheaval transforms each major character in distinct ways. Juliette moves from heir to the Scarlet Gang to someone who recognizes the title's nullity. Her arc is defined by this recognition: she begins the novel operating within gang logic, but by the end, she is willing to sacrifice herself in a plan that has nothing to do with gang territory and everything to do with stopping the blackmailer's chaos. Her final act—scattering the vaccine and triggering an explosion—is a rejection of the old power games in favor of a desperate, personal gambit.
Roma undergoes a parallel transformation. As the White Flower heir, he is equally displaced by the political upheaval. His reunion with Benedikt Montagov and Marshall Seo in chapter thirty-one shows him clinging to personal relationships as the political order crumbles. His insistence on talking to Juliette during the revolution—her exasperated You want to talk now? While the city undergoes revolution?—is both absurd and poignant: the personal cannot be separated from the political, even as the political overwhelms everything.
Alisa Montagova represents the most complete adaptation to the new order. In the epilogue, she has become a Communist spy after the White Flowers are run out of Shanghai. She forges a marriage certificate for Roma and Juliette and sends it to the press, which begins to fracture the blood feud. Her transformation from sheltered gang daughter to political operative demonstrates that the old gang identities can be shed entirely—but only by those willing to embrace the new political reality.
Kathleen Lang witnesses the revolution's appeal firsthand. At a Communist meeting, she hears a speaker condemn the gangsters for sacrificing the people for their pride and meaningless blood feud. Kathleen's internal response—questioning why the Scarlet Gang had the power to whip her sister Rosalind bloody—shows her recognizing the moral bankruptcy of the gang system. The revolution's rhetoric exposes what the gangs' power had always concealed: that their rule was arbitrary and cruel.
Symbol Connections: The Rose, the String, and the Vaccine
The novel's symbols reinforce the theme of power's transformation. The rose is the Scarlet Gang's emblem, but its meaning shifts as the political order changes. At Tyler's funeral, Juliette notes that the gang uses faded pink flowers instead of white, since the Scarlet Gang would never use white flowers under any occasion. The rose's color is a marker of allegiance, but as the gangs lose power, the rose becomes a relic—a symbol of a dying order.
The string represents control and manipulation. The blackmailer's threat to make the city dance on strings positions the blackmailer as a puppeteer, but the novel's political upheaval reveals that no single puppeteer controls Shanghai. The workers, the Nationalists, the foreigners, and the gangs all pull at different strings, and the result is chaos rather than control. The string symbol thus becomes ironic: the attempt to control the city through manipulation is itself rendered obsolete by forces too large for any individual to command.
The vaccine represents a different kind of power—scientific, modern, and detached from gang politics. Juliette uses it as a bargaining chip in the final confrontation, offering herself in trade for Marshall and Alisa. However, she ultimately destroys the vaccine by scattering and igniting it, eliminating both the threat and the cure. This ambiguity suggests that the new order is not necessarily better than the old—it simply operates differently. The vaccine's destruction mirrors the novel's broader refusal to present any faction as wholly good or wholly evil.
Complexity and Contradiction
The theme of political upheaval is not presented as a simple triumph of good over evil. The author's note explicitly states that there is no good faction and no bad faction, and that power changes hands in the blink of an eye. This complexity manifests in several ways.
First, the gangs are both victims and perpetrators. The Scarlet Gang is displaced by the Nationalists, but it also collaborates with them in the purge. The White Flowers are purged, but they had previously suppressed worker protests with violence. The novel refuses to romanticize either the gangs or the revolutionaries. The workers' uprising is shown as both a legitimate cry for freedom and a source of indiscriminate violence—the brothel owner shot from her balcony in chapter thirty-one is a civilian casualty, not a gangster.
Second, the transformation of power does not lead to liberation. The Nationalist occupation replaces gang rule with state rule, but the state is no less violent. The novel's compression of the historical timeline—the protest march occurring the same day as the purge—emphasizes that the new order is built on the same bloodshed as the old. The epilogue's setting in April 1928, during the Qingming festival, is a time of mourning and remembrance. Alisa burns paper money for the dead, and her whispered Don't worry, we will be okay is a fragile hope rather than a certainty.
Third, the personal and political are inextricably entangled. Juliette and Roma's romance is not separate from the political upheaval; it is shaped by it. Their reunion in the alley during the revolution, their final kiss before the explosion, and Alisa's forged marriage certificate all demonstrate that the transformation of power transforms even the most intimate relationships. The blood feud that defined their families is fractured not by their love alone but by the political forces that make the feud irrelevant.
Study Questions
1. How does the workers' uprising in chapters twenty-four through thirty-one challenge the Scarlet Gang's claim to control Shanghai?
The workers' uprising demonstrates that gang control was never based on legitimacy but on fear and violence. The novel shows workers killing a factory foreman, seizing police stations, and taking control of multiple districts. The gangs' promise to rein Shanghai into order is exposed as hollow when the people stop fearing them. The uprising reveals that gang power was contingent on the people's belief in it, and once that belief erodes, the power collapses.
2. What does Juliette's reflection at Tyler's funeral reveal about her changing relationship to power?
At Tyler's funeral, Juliette whispers that the heir title is soon going to be rendered null. She recognizes that the Scarlet Gang's power structure is becoming obsolete under Nationalist occupation. Her subsequent reflection—that she once wanted power but realizes she wanted safety—reveals that her desire for power was actually a desire for security, and that the political upheaval has forced her to question whether gang dominance ever provided real safety.
3. How does the novel use the Shanghai Massacre to show the gangs' loss of agency?
The Shanghai Massacre shows the gangs being co-opted by the Nationalists. The Scarlet Gang collaborates with the Nationalists in the purge, while the White Flowers are among the purged. The gangs are simultaneously perpetrators and victims, demonstrating that they no longer control their own fate. The author's note confirms this by explaining that the historical Green Gang's role is swapped for the Scarlet Gang, positioning the gangs as instruments of state violence rather than independent powers.
4. In what ways does Alisa Montagova's transformation in the epilogue represent the theme of political upheaval?
Alisa's transformation from gang daughter to Communist spy represents the complete adaptation to the new political order. After the White Flowers are run out of Shanghai, she refuses to leave for Moscow with Benedikt and Marshall, choosing instead to become a spy. Her forging of the marriage certificate for Roma and Juliette fractures the blood feud, showing that the old gang divisions can be dismantled by political action. Her journey to Zhouzhuang and her whispered Don't worry, we will be okay suggest a fragile hope for the future built on the ruins of the old order.
5. How does the novel's treatment of the vaccine symbol complicate the theme of power's transformation?
The vaccine represents a modern, scientific form of power that is detached from gang politics. Juliette uses it as a bargaining chip in the final confrontation, offering herself in trade for Marshall and Alisa. However, she ultimately destroys the vaccine by scattering and igniting it, eliminating both the threat and the cure. This ambiguity suggests that the new order is not necessarily better than the old—it simply operates differently. The vaccine's destruction mirrors the novel's broader refusal to present any faction as wholly good or wholly evil.