Empire Corporation

Empire Corporation’s Public Relations Department is the company’s most visible institutional arena in the supplied evidence. It is a busy, understaffed division whose work includes managing corporate appearances and accompanying Lu Xun to business banquets with foreign merchants. Yet its operations are never separated cleanly from the private authority of Lu Xun or from the marriage between Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan. When Su Xiangwan enters the department as a young acting supervisor, the office becomes a testing ground for whether authority comes from formal appointment, demonstrated competence, or personal access to the company’s leader.

Structure and Corporate Function

The department is described as busy, particularly because its supervisor has been absent for some time. In that vacuum, employees have become idle, and the arrival of a new acting supervisor immediately unsettles the existing hierarchy. The division is not merely administrative: it is responsible for arranging or supplying personnel for Lu Xun’s evening meeting, including a banquet attended by foreign merchants who do not know Su Xiangwan’s identity. That unfamiliarity gives her an advantage, because she can perform the assignment without the assumptions attached to her private connection with Lu Xun.

The department also reflects the wider commercial network around Empire Corporation. Elsewhere, a western-district parcel is described as a difficult upcoming bid for another company, whose representative hopes Su Xiangwan will persuade Lu Xun to take an interest. Lu Xun’s control over land, funding, and corporate decisions therefore extends beyond the office itself. His authority can redirect commercial opportunities, as when he straightforwardly grants Lin Yanche the East District land in exchange for Lin Yanche’s promise not to interfere in his affairs with Su Qingrou. The company’s business power is consequently intertwined with private alliances and conflicts rather than confined to impersonal market procedure.

Su Xiangwan’s Appointment and Office Resistance

Su Xiangwan’s appointment exposes the department’s distrust of authority associated with youth and appearance. Company gossip quickly reduces her arrival to an alleged affair with an executive, with employees speculating that Lu Xun must have transferred her there for personal reasons. The rumors show that her position is judged through her perceived relationship with the executive before her performance is assessed. Her being young and beautiful is treated as evidence against her competence, while the qualifications of an experienced deputy supervisor are invoked as the apparent standard she has failed to meet.

Annie becomes the most direct representative of this resistance. She leads members of the department to Lu Xun’s office and argues that the acting supervisor cannot convince the staff, has abused her authority by punishing them, and should begin at the bottom instead of taking charge immediately. Other employees gather outside to watch, turning a managerial complaint into a public challenge. Lu Xun, however, continues annotating documents and responds by asking what Annie wants, allowing the confrontation to reveal that the department’s opposition is also a struggle over who has the right to define legitimate workplace authority.

Su Xiangwan does not treat the hostility as a reason to retreat. She has anticipated the department’s reaction and regards the challenge as an opportunity to prove herself. The appointment therefore gives her an institutional position that is distinct from the role of Lu Xun’s wife, even though the employees repeatedly attempt to collapse the two identities. Her authority begins under suspicion, but the conflict also supplies the plot with a practical measure of her independence: she must make the department function while refusing to rely solely on Lu Xun’s protection.

Executive Power and Intimate Governance

Lu Xun’s relationship to Empire Corporation is both executive and personal. His position enables him to place Su Xiangwan in the PR Department, defend the appointment when employees object, and determine the conditions under which commercial assets are exchanged. At the same time, his language toward Su Xiangwan repeatedly treats work as an extension of their intimate life. When she considers working for the company, he presents the arrangement as a way to keep her close, inviting her to rest with him in his lounge at noon. The office is thus framed not only as a workplace but also as a space through which marital proximity can be organized.

His authority appears again when he meets Su Xiangwan after she has not eaten. He proposes taking her out for food and jokes that he must feed her before she has the strength to work for him. The exchange combines care, possessiveness, and managerial control: nourishment is presented as affection, while her labor remains rhetorically his to command. Su Xiangwan helps him put on his coat, fixes his tie, and puts on his hat before they leave, a domestic gesture placed directly beside the company’s executive routine.

This fusion of corporate and private governance has wider consequences. When Su Xiangwan becomes ill with a fever and asks Butler Wu to buy antipyretic medicine, the household’s concern is immediately linked to Lu Xun’s likely reaction. When Su Qingrou proposes a small engagement ceremony with Jin Zhengnan partly for the benefit of their two companies, family and commercial interests likewise become inseparable. Within this world, companies are not neutral backdrops: marriage, kinship, bodily vulnerability, and business strategy continually determine one another.

Work, Conflict, and Narrative Significance

The PR Department gives Su Xiangwan a new route into the story’s power structure. She is not simply protected by Lu Xun; she is placed where she must confront employees, represent the company, and handle external business relations. Her assignment to a banquet of foreign merchants is especially important because it temporarily removes the social knowledge that marks her as Lu Xun’s wife. She can be evaluated through her conduct in a professional setting, even though the department’s gossip insists on reading her appointment as a private favor.

The department also concentrates the book’s recurring contrast between formal institutions and informal power. Lu Xun can enforce his will through corporate hierarchy, land negotiations, personal agreements, bodyguards, and family authority. When police surveillance later records that a young woman brought Mrs. Lu back to her apartment, the official account exists alongside Lu Xun’s private statement and Mo Beiyu’s moral condemnation of the man who left his wife in such a state. The contrast makes clear that corporate and family power operate within a broader field of competing authorities, where formal procedures do not necessarily control the outcome.

Empire Corporation’s PR Department therefore functions as more than a setting for office scenes. It is a miniature of the novel’s larger political economy: access to capital produces status, personal relationships influence appointments and contracts, and women’s legitimacy is repeatedly questioned through their proximity to powerful men. Su Xiangwan’s arrival forces the department to confront a leader whose authority is officially delegated but privately contested. The resulting tension turns corporate management into a drama of recognition, discipline, and self-definition, while the company’s commercial reach continues to shape the romantic and familial conflicts surrounding its executives.