Admiral Xu Zhicai–Captain Chen service relationship

The Admiral Xu Zhicai–Captain Chen service relationship is a relationship of institutional authority tested by national extinction. Admiral Xu Zhicai represents the Chinese naval command structure from which Captain Chen’s submarine departs, while Captain Chen transforms an order-bound officer into the leader of an unauthorized exodus aboard the Admiral Zheng. Their connection matters because the submarine is not merely a vessel: it is described as one of the People’s Republic’s most advanced and valuable national assets, and taking it becomes both a military crime and, in Captain Chen’s judgment, the only remaining act of service to China’s civilization.

Command Structure and the Crisis of Loyalty

Captain Chen reaches his decisive break with the fleet after recognizing that the war’s existing strategy is destroying the population it claims to defend. The army’s vast manpower reserves are becoming a liability because every dead soldier returns as another enemy. Captain Chen concludes that continued fighting may leave no Chinese people and eventually no people anywhere. If he had believed there was still hope in the established campaign, he would have taken up a rifle and attacked the living dead; instead, he tells senior officers that the submarine crew may be the only chance to preserve something of civilization.

That proposal directly challenges the command system associated with Admiral Xu Zhicai. Escape aboard the Admiral Zheng would not be ordinary desertion. The vessel is one of only three ballistic-missile submarines, the newest Type 94, and the product of Russian assistance, black-market technology, anti-American espionage, and nearly five thousand years of Chinese history. Its theft is therefore presented as the seizure of the nation’s most expensive, advanced, and powerful machine. Captain Chen’s decision places personal initiative above formal authority, but his motive remains profoundly patriotic: he treats disobedience as a means of saving the country’s people and inheritance rather than abandoning them.

The Submarine Exodus

The preparation takes three months while Qingdao remains under near-constant siege. Army units are repeatedly brought in to maintain order, each successive force less trained, less equipped, younger, or older than the one before it. The submarine’s perimeter is attacked almost daily, yet its crew must simultaneously provision the vessel for what appears on paper to be a routine patrol. Emergency supplies and family members are smuggled aboard at night in uniforms; children and elderly people are hidden in supply crates.

The need for secrecy intensifies the moral pressure within Captain Chen’s relationship with the naval command. Every crew member is ordered to remain silent because discovery by the Ministry of State Security would make the living dead the least of their dangers. The families are not fully informed, and the boat must leave according to its normal patrol schedule. Captain Chen wants to wait for relatives who may be only hours or days away, but understands that doing so could endanger the entire operation. He reluctantly orders the submarine to cast off, concealing his feelings from most of the crew while the fires of Qingdao recede behind him.

The initial route is deliberately conventional. The Admiral Zheng first travels to its assigned patrol sector so that the departure will appear normal; beyond that point, no one knows the destination. This sequence shows Captain Chen still operating within the outward forms of naval obedience even as he has rejected the command structure’s underlying purpose. The service relationship has become a dangerous double posture: the captain must imitate a loyal subordinate long enough to escape the state whose authority he has already defied.

The Fleet as Threat

The exodus does not free Captain Chen from the consequences of command. After several months on a small island community, the submarine’s crew begins to relax and imagine that the island might become home until the crisis ends—or until the world ends. That fragile security collapses when the Madrid Spirit explodes in a missile strike. Commander Song sees the missile’s streak, and the Admiral Zheng’s foghorn sounds almost immediately afterward. Captain Chen and his crew understand that one of their own submarines has attacked the ship.

The crew identifies a second submarine at ninety meters by its hull-popping sounds: a Type 95 hunter-killer with the brittle acoustic signature of a titanium hull. Only the Russian Federation and China use titanium attack-boat hulls, and the blade count confirms that the vessel is Chinese. Two Type 95s were in service when the Admiral Zheng left port, so the crew cannot initially determine which one is responsible. That uncertainty is devastating to Captain Chen because knowledge would be painful, but ignorance leaves open the possibility that the attacker is commanded by his own son.

Captain Chen first refuses to fight. He bottoms the Admiral Zheng on a sandy plateau at the edge of its crush depth, using the ocean floor to defeat the pursuing submarine’s active sonar. The crew reduces the reactor to marginal output, shuts down unnecessary machinery, and stops all movement. For half an hour they wait almost motionless, unable even to know whether the hunter-killer remains nearby. The scene converts the command relationship from a political dispute into a crisis of kinship and responsibility: Captain Chen’s wish to avoid the fleet is not simple cowardice, because the attacking commander may be Commander Chen Zhi Xiao, the son he raised and trained.

The danger then becomes even more intimate. Lieutenant Liu detects scraping noises around the hull, initially suspected to be biological contact. When the crew finally observes the seafloor, hundreds of Zombies are swarming over the Admiral Zheng, with more arriving each second to climb across the barren sand and claw at the steel. Captain Chen must survive both the human military force hunting him and the inhuman mass surrounding the submarine, while the question of which Type 95 fired the missile remains unanswered.

Father, Commander, and the Cost of Command

Captain Chen raised Commander Chen Zhi Xiao alone, teaching him to be a good sailor, to love and serve the state, to obey orders, and to become the finest officer the Chinese navy had ever seen. The son’s first command—a new Type 95 hunter-killer—is described as the happiest day of Captain Chen’s life. That same achievement becomes the source of his worst fear. He would do anything to avoid the fleet because he cannot bear the possibility that his betrayal of the homeland led to the murder of his own son.

The uncertainty destroys him before the final confirmation arrives. When he fails to appear for first watch, the narrator finds him in his cabin transformed into an old man: his hair has turned white, his skin is sallow, and his eyes are sunken. Captain Chen’s physical collapse gives visible form to the conflict between command duty and paternal attachment. The living dead are not the most terrifying monsters in this account; the deepest horror lies in the guilt carried by those who must issue orders whose consequences they cannot escape.

After the encounter, the crew cuts all contact with the outside world and heads toward the Arctic ice, seeking the farthest, darkest, most desolate refuge available. The Admiral Zheng attempts to preserve ordinary life by maintaining the boat, growing food, and schooling, raising, and comforting the children aboard. Yet Captain Chen’s loss of spirit spreads through the crew. The narrator becomes his sole intermediary, delivering meals, collecting laundry, reporting the submarine’s condition, and transmitting his orders day after day. Their service relationship persists, but it has narrowed into a routine of isolation and delegated authority, with Captain Chen physically present yet socially withdrawn from everyone except the officer who attends him.

Final Duty and Legacy

Captain Chen’s last major act of command is the launch of a missile carrying a massive multimegaton prototype warhead designed to penetrate the hardened surface of the NORAD facility in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The order is presented as another burden rather than a triumph. The missile destroys Xilinhot, and the crew later learns that loyalist forces have surrendered and reunited with rebels to fight the real enemy. The political world Captain Chen tried to preserve has therefore changed while his submarine remains beneath the ice, and his command decision acquires an irreversibility that no later political settlement can erase.

When the crew finally emerges from under the ice pack, news arrives that China has begun its own version of the South African Plan. Captain Chen sits in the attack center with a cup of tea beside him, watching the crew with the tired smile of a father observing his children’s happiness. The tea has gone cold. When asked whether he wants another cup, he declines, reaches for the narrator’s hand, and fails to recognize the face before him. Instead, he mistakes the narrator for Commander Chen Zhi Xiao and murmurs that Zhi Xiao is a good boy. He dies still holding the hand of the officer who served him through exile, carrying the son, the fleet, the homeland, and the consequences of command into his final moment.

The relationship’s significance lies in this convergence of naval hierarchy and tragic family history. Admiral Xu Zhicai’s command world helps establish the authority Captain Chen must violate, but the evidence gives the relationship its fullest meaning through Captain Chen’s choices under that authority: he steals the Admiral Zheng to preserve civilization, hides the plan from the state, risks losing his crew by waiting for no one, avoids the fleet because it may contain his son, and finally continues to command after guilt has hollowed him out. The service bond is therefore not a simple chain of obedience. It is the structure against which Captain Chen measures patriotism, betrayal, responsibility, and the price of preserving even a remnant of humanity.