“Work is like a carrying-pole lying on the ground before us”

“Work is like a carrying-pole lying on the ground before us” is a Mao quotation that presents work as a moral test: comrades may take up a difficult burden themselves or leave it for others. In the novel, the Division Commander uses it to praise self-sacrifice, but the episode that follows leaves the proposed facility unfinished. The saying thus becomes more than an exhortation; its ideal of shared responsibility is measured against the hierarchy and private arrangements surrounding the officers’ compound.

The quotation and its occasion

The quotation appears when the Division Commander inspects an abandoned building site east of his residence. His predecessor had planned a recreational conference facility where senior officers could read newspapers, talk, play chess or ping-pong, and meet close to their homes. After surveying the land and hearing opinions from subordinates, the Commander invokes Mao’s image of the carrying-pole: work may be heavy or light, and it is wrong to seize the easier task while pushing the harder one onto someone else. The exemplary Communist, he says, takes on the heavier work and leaves the lighter work to others.

The speech is explicitly framed as a quotation from Mao, and the Commander presents it as a standard that his fellow officers should emulate. Its agricultural image makes the principle concrete: work is a burden to be shouldered, and character is revealed by who accepts it. Yet the scene supplies no account of the Commander assigning himself or another officer the building project as a burden.

The abandoned project

After delivering the speech, the Commander returns home to drink the after-dinner tea Liu Lian has prepared. Construction then comes to a vigorous halt, and weeds overrun the site. The sequence makes the quotation’s lesson ironic without requiring anyone to dispute its words: the facility described as useful to senior officers is left unrealized immediately after the Commander’s public praise of taking on difficult work.

The site’s location also matters to the surrounding story. It lies east of the Commander’s house, while the sentries patrol the other side of the red-brick wall rather than near the residence. The unfinished project and the limited patrols help establish how the officers’ residential space is separated from the wider barracks, a separation that later shapes what can be heard or observed there. The quotation belongs to this material setting as much as to the Commander’s speech: the proposed common facility remains empty, while the officers’ private homes remain the active center of their lives.

Political language and practical authority

Elsewhere, the Political Instructor extends the logic of service into a chain of institutional consequences. He tells Wu Dawang that failing to look after the Commander’s wife could distract the Commander from meetings in Beijing, impair the Division’s battle training, and ultimately affect the army. His reasoning turns a private household duty into a contribution to national and military service. This is not the carrying-pole quotation itself, but it echoes its claim that a person’s willingness to accept assigned work has consequences beyond the immediate task.

The same language of service accompanies decisions that do not follow a simple impersonal rule. The Political Instructor gives Wu another day in the Commander’s household after Liu Lian has asked for him to be replaced, and says he will accept blame if she objects. Later, amid the Division’s restructuring, Wu receives an exception: despite the cancellation of promotions, the Commander arranges city work for him and a move for his family. Political ideals, formal military procedures, and personal influence operate together. The carrying-pole’s moral test therefore sits within a system where officers and subordinates do not shoulder equal burdens or possess equal power to choose their work.

Meaning in the novel

The expression’s force comes from the contrast between its selfless ideal and its immediate aftermath. The Commander praises those who take the heavy load upon themselves, then returns to domestic comfort as the construction site falls idle. The novel does not need to declare the principle false; instead, the gap between speech and action makes political language available for both sincere instruction and satirical scrutiny.

That gap recurs in the larger narrative’s use of revolutionary rhetoric. Wu’s military record is built around honors, competitions, and the recitation of Mao’s writings, while his hopes for promotion and city employment make service inseparable from personal advancement. In the farewell ceremony that closes his army career, officials publicly praise him as an exemplary servant and explain his city job as a reward for serving the People, although the arrangements have also depended on the Commander’s favor and exceptional instructions. Against this pattern, the carrying-pole quotation asks who bears the work and who benefits from its public justification. Its apparently plain lesson becomes a measure of the distance between proclaimed collective duty and the unequal, privately mediated choices shown in the novel.