Su Xiangwan Becomes Acting Director of Imperial Group’s Public Relations Department

Su Xiangwan Becomes Acting Director of Imperial Group’s Public Relations Department is a decisive transfer of Su Xiangwan from the protected and contested sphere of marriage into the visible machinery of corporate governance. The appointment places her in charge of a neglected Public Relations Department within Imperial Group, where her authority is immediately questioned because she is young, unfamiliar to the staff, and known to have been sent by Lu Xun. Her first day therefore becomes more than an office transition: it is a test of whether private influence can be converted into institutional command, and whether Su Xiangwan will accept the role as a favor or make it function as a real position.

Appointment and Corporate Setting

The appointment occurs after the department’s supervisor has been absent for some time. In that vacuum, the employees have become notably idle, leaving the Public Relations Department without effective direction. Su Xiangwan arrives to take charge as acting supervisor, and her youth makes the staff even less inclined to accept her authority. The scene presents the department as an organization whose formal structure remains intact while its everyday discipline has weakened; the acting appointment must restore both work and belief in the chain of command.

Her position is also inseparable from Lu Xun’s power. Earlier, Lu Xun used an East District land arrangement as leverage in a conflict with Lin Yanche, demanding that Lin Yanche stop interfering in his affairs with Su Xiangwan. That transaction shows how business resources and intimate loyalties repeatedly circulate through the same network. Against this background, Su Xiangwan’s corporate appointment carries an unavoidable ambiguity: it is an official role, but the staff understand that Lu Xun’s decision stands behind it. The appointment thus turns the couple’s private alliance into a source of public authority while exposing Su Xiangwan to the suspicion that she is merely benefiting from it.

The First Day of Resistance

The department’s resistance begins in gossip. Employees speculate about who may have sent the new acting supervisor and connect corporate advancement with Lu Xun’s romantic and marital situation. When Su Xiangwan enters, wearing high heels and making coffee, she does not interrupt the gossip with a solemn managerial speech. Instead, she asks whether the work has been completed. The question is ordinary in form but disciplinary in effect: it shifts the room from rumor to accountability and makes visible the gap between the employees’ conversation and their neglected duties.

The central confrontation comes when Su Xiangwan openly acknowledges the implication behind her appointment. She says that, as acting supervisor, she was effectively placed there after sleeping with an executive, challenging the employees to find another executive to sleep with if they could obtain the same position. This deliberately abrasive statement does not deny the gossip; it seizes control of its language. Rather than allowing the staff to use sexual rumor to define her, she turns the rumor into a weapon against their presumption and forces them to confront the fact that Lu Xun sent her to the company that morning.

Annie becomes the clearest opponent. She is identified as the most ambitious woman in the Public Relations Department and responds that Su Xiangwan is arrogant, inexperienced, and merely a substitute supervisor. Su Xiangwan does not retreat from the temporary nature of her position. She answers that being a substitute supervisor is precisely enough to give her the authority to act, and tells Annie that anyone dissatisfied may report her. The exchange establishes a narrow but important principle: interim status does not mean powerless status. The acting director’s legitimacy is not based on seniority or popularity, but on the authority attached to the office and the willingness to exercise it.

Discipline, Penalties, and Incentives

Su Xiangwan’s managerial method combines punishment with the possibility of reward. After several employees hesitate and return to work, others remain deliberately idle, signaling that they have decided to test whether she can enforce her threats. Su Xiangwan responds by declaring that each remaining defiant employee will lose three months of salary. The penalty is concrete, collective, and immediately legible; it transforms workplace insolence into a material consequence.

At the same time, she offers bonuses to those capable of producing results. The arrangement is not simply punitive. It establishes a performance system in which refusal and achievement have opposite financial outcomes: obstructive employees lose income, while effective employees can receive additional compensation. This combination gives her authority an operational form. She is not merely defending personal dignity after being mocked; she is attempting to restore work through rules that connect behavior to pay.

The declaration also reveals the precariousness of corporate governance in this setting. Su Xiangwan has to make the department obey before she has had time to build relationships, demonstrate expertise, or gain institutional trust. Her authority is therefore performative in the strongest sense: the act of announcing punishment and bonuses begins the process of making her an acting director. Whether the employees accept her personally is initially less important than whether the department must respond to the rules she has publicly proclaimed.

Private Power and Public Legitimacy

The appointment belongs to a wider pattern in which Lu Xun’s private decisions govern other people’s movement, reputation, and opportunities. He has instructed Manager Wu to escort Song Yun’er away rather than asking her to stay, and he has treated business negotiations with Lin Yanche as a means of protecting Su Xiangwan from interference. In each case, personal relationships are managed through institutional or quasi-institutional power: a driver is summoned, a land deal becomes leverage, and a corporate office becomes available.

Su Xiangwan’s appointment differs because she does not remain a passive beneficiary of that power. At the Public Relations Department, Lu Xun’s influence gets her through the door, but she must still face the employees’ eyes, questions, and refusal. The staff’s challenge is aimed not only at her gender or age but at the suspicion that her marriage has substituted for professional qualification. Her response is forceful because she recognizes that merely possessing the title will not secure the role. She must make the title produce consequences.

The scene also contrasts public naming with hidden arrangements. Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun maintain a secret marriage, and Song Yun’er previously attempted to discuss that secret marriage in Su Xiangwan’s presence, only to be sent away by Lu Xun through Manager Wu. In the office, however, Su Xiangwan’s connection with Lu Xun is no longer an intimate secret that others can politely avoid. It becomes the basis of gossip, suspicion, and managerial confrontation. Her public role is formed at the exact point where private marriage becomes corporate knowledge.

Narrative Significance

The appointment marks a change in Su Xiangwan’s position from someone acted upon by powerful men to someone who acts within a powerful institution. Her life has repeatedly been shaped by conflict among Lu Xun, Lin Yanche, the Su Family, and the wider business network. She has also experienced physical vulnerability, including a fever that left her body sore and nearly without strength. The Public Relations Department scene places that vulnerable figure in a setting where she must control other people rather than be rescued or protected by them.

The episode’s importance lies in its unresolved tension. Su Xiangwan’s authority is genuine enough to impose a three-month salary deduction and threaten further consequences, yet it remains vulnerable to the accusation that she obtained the position through Lu Xun. Her answer is neither a conventional denial nor an appeal for sympathy. She accepts the scandalous premise as a provocation, then redirects attention toward work, punishment, and results. In doing so, she turns an appointment that could have remained a symbol of marital favoritism into the beginning of an independent managerial performance.

The Public Relations Department becomes a small model of the novel’s larger power structure. Formal titles, family capital, romantic loyalty, reputation, and coercion overlap rather than operating separately. Su Xiangwan’s first day demonstrates that entering the institution is only the opening move. To remain there, she must control the story told about her, command employees who doubt her, and make private backing visible as enforceable public action.