Su Qingrou and Jin Zhengnan's Engagement Plan

Su Qingrou and Jin Zhengnan's Engagement Plan is presented as both a possible marriage and a defensive maneuver. Su Qingrou proposes holding a small engagement ceremony with Jin Zhengnan, primarily for the benefit of their two companies, at a moment when her conflict with Lin Yanche makes private choices inseparable from corporate survival. The plan gives her a prospective ally and a public position from which to resist Lin Yanche, while its announcement becomes a deliberate pressure point in the surrounding struggle.

Causes and Strategic Background

Su Qingrou raises the proposal late at night with Su Xiangcheng, asking what she thinks of an engagement ceremony with Jin Zhengnan. She frames the ceremony as small and emphasizes its usefulness to both companies rather than presenting it only as a romantic celebration. That wording makes the plan an instrument of collective defense: the sisters are no longer confronting Lin Yanche without support, because Chu Fei is now recognized as their brother and potential backer.

The proposal emerges against the background of Su Qingrou's earlier suffering and vulnerability. The family history includes the revelation that her mother had a terminal illness and, fearing that the illness would implicate the family, ultimately walked onto a balcony after Su Xiangcheng drew a picture of both parents holding her hand. This inherited trauma gives the engagement plan a wider emotional context. Marriage is not treated as an isolated personal decision; it is entangled with family guilt, protection, and the attempt to prevent another woman from being left alone with an unbearable burden.

The Plan and Its Immediate Obstacle

The proposed engagement is endangered almost immediately by Su Qingrou's acute appendicitis. After she is taken to the Hospital and undergoes surgery to remove her appendix, Su Xiangcheng worries that the approaching ceremony will have to be delayed. The medical emergency therefore interrupts the public timetable of the plan, even though it does not resolve the conflict that produced it.

Lin Yanche reacts with open contempt when he hears that the ceremony may proceed. He questions whether Su Qingrou and Jin Zhengnan could succeed even without a delay, turning the hospital crisis into another opportunity to challenge their intentions. His hostility shows that the engagement is not merely a private arrangement: in his eyes, it is a direct rejection of his claim over Su Qingrou and a public test of whether she can establish a future outside him.

Lin Yanche's Reaction

Lin Yanche describes himself as having broken his word and lied excessively for Su Qingrou's sake, then presents her wish to marry someone else as an intolerable betrayal. His declaration that he will not remain a man if she marries another person converts wounded attachment into a threat of retaliation. The engagement plan thus activates the possessive logic that has governed their relationship: Su Qingrou's attempt to choose Jin Zhengnan is interpreted by Lin Yanche not as an independent decision but as an injury directed at him.

The news reaches Lu Xun through Lin Yanche, and Lu Xun immediately senses that the engagement may have been timed to strike at Lin Yanche's weakness. From this perspective, Su Qingrou appears to be using the announcement to press directly on the wound left by their conflict. The image is not of salt scattered over an injury but of a hand closing around the ribs, making the engagement announcement a more intimate and dangerous form of pressure. Its force lies precisely in its public symbolism: it demonstrates that Su Qingrou can name another man and another alliance while Lin Yanche remains unable to control the outcome.

Alliances and Consequences

Su Qingrou's reliance on Jin Zhengnan is strengthened by the recognition that Chu Fei stands with the family. When Su Xiangcheng fears Lin Yanche's reaction, Su Qingrou reminds her that they have a brother. The engagement therefore belongs to a larger realignment in which familial solidarity and corporate cooperation are mobilized against a threatening former relationship.

Yet the plan also exposes the limits of treating marriage as protection. The ceremony is placed under the pressure of illness, corporate interests, and Lin Yanche's threatened response before it can become a stable emotional commitment. Jin Zhengnan is publicly positioned as a prospective partner, but the available scenes place greater emphasis on what the engagement does to the balance of power than on the couple's private intimacy. Its immediate consequence is escalation: Lin Yanche becomes more defiant, the public event becomes uncertain, and the surrounding characters are forced to choose between appeasing him and supporting Su Qingrou's stated decision.

Narrative Significance

The engagement plan crystallizes the book's recurring contrast between marriage as emotional shelter and marriage as a social instrument. Su Qingrou and Jin Zhengnan's proposed ceremony is meant to serve two companies, protect a vulnerable family, and answer a controlling former lover at the same time. Those purposes cannot remain neatly separate. The more the engagement functions as an alliance, the more sharply it challenges Lin Yanche's possessive understanding of love.

As a narrative event, the plan is a midpoint reversal rather than a settled resolution. It shifts Su Qingrou from the position of someone acted upon by Lin Yanche's decisions toward someone capable of creating a counter-move of her own. But the interrupted ceremony and Lin Yanche's reaction ensure that the announcement produces danger before it produces security. The plan's decisive significance lies in that contradiction: it offers Su Qingrou a route toward autonomy while proving that, in this conflict, even a proposed engagement can become a battlefield.