China Gate (novel)

China Gate is a 1983 crime fiction novel by William Arnold (born 1945) that tells the story of modern Taiwan as an epic Chinese-American gangster saga. It was acquired by editor-publisher Marc Jaffe of Ballantine Books for what at the time was one of the highest first-novel advances on record, and was the inaugural fiction offering of Random House’s new imprint, Villard Books. It was simultaneously published in the U.K. by Macdonald/Futura and Brazil by Editora Record.

Based loosely on Arnold's high school years spent in the Far East, China Gate traces a large cast of American and Chinese characters on Taiwan from the fall of the Mainland in 1949 to its U.S. diplomatic recognition in 1979. Arnold’s agent, Russell Galen of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, described the novel in a pre-publication interview as the "Taiwanese Godfather".