Fewer, Better Troops and a Streamlined Administration

Fewer, Better Troops and a Streamlined Administration is the revolutionary principle the novel places at the center of a far-reaching military reorganization. Presented as a proposal adopted because it was judged beneficial to the people, it becomes the official rationale for dismantling the Division, while its uneven effects expose the distance between an ideal of public service and the personal bargains, anxieties, and losses through which policy is carried out.

Revolutionary Principle and Public Benefit

In the passage from Mao Zedong’s speech commemorating Zhang Side, the principle is part of an argument about how revolutionary service should be judged. Mao’s account distinguishes deaths by whether they serve the people, insists that shortcomings should be open to criticism, and says that a proposal should be accepted when it benefits the people. He cites Li Dingming, who was not a Communist, as the source of the proposal for fewer but better troops and a simplified administration. Its adoption is thus framed not as loyalty to the proposer’s status, but as a practical act in the people’s interest.

That public-minded formulation supplies the principle’s stated moral test: the organization should correct what is wrong and preserve what serves the people. The novel does not simply detach the policy from this ideal. Instead, it puts the ideal beside the consequences of applying it, asking what a claim of collective benefit means to soldiers whose units, careers, and futures are being reorganized.

The Division as a Pilot

The Division Commander volunteers at a seminar in Beijing, organized and directed by the Central Military Commission, for the Division to test a pilot scheme intended to streamline and restructure the army. The practical consequence is stark: the Division is to be disbanded and disappear from the larger institution. The formal language of administrative improvement therefore describes not a minor adjustment, but the dissolution of the military formation in which Wu Dawang and his comrades have served.

The effects unfold unevenly. Promotions are cancelled while the restructuring proceeds; most companies are slated for demobilization, while a minority are transferred. By the time the Corps Commander arrives to take charge, three battalions and four companies have already been sent to a remote frontier division five hundred miles away. The First Regiment, then the First Battalion of the Second Regiment, and then the Machine Gunners leave in turn. Farewell banquets give way to anger and grief: soldiers break windows and equipment, then weep openly as they prepare to depart, expecting not to meet again in this life. A red-ink doggerel on paper sealing vacated dormitories turns the language of national direction into an image of involuntary drift.

Administration, Exceptions, and Private Advantage

The novel shows policy reaching individuals through decisions by officers and administrators, not through abstract directives alone. The Political Instructor explains the disbandment to Wu Dawang while arranging hospitality for his unexpected return to barracks: hot water, scented soap, and egg noodles. He also explains that the Commander’s wife has secured Wu an extended home leave, and that the Commander has ordered an exception to the suspension of promotions in the form of a city job for Wu and work for his wife. When the Captain later orders Wu to say nothing about what he has heard or seen, the handling of the transition includes both patronage and enforced discretion.

For Wu, the exception appears to resolve a long-standing personal problem. A written prenuptial pledge had bound him to earn commendations, join the Party, and become an official, with the further promise of moving his wife to a city where she could eat steamed rolls every day. After years in which ambition did not immediately deliver its promised rewards, he advanced from Deputy Sergeant of the Catering Squad to full Sergeant, joined the Party, and received commendations, but promotion to officialdom remained out of reach. Now the Division’s general promotion freeze threatens that goal again, even as the Commander arranges civilian work and housing for Wu’s family.

The Commander’s wife’s influence is presented as both personal and consequential. Earlier, she had promised to help Wu bring his family to the city when promotions resumed; the eventual job arrangement arrives through the Commander’s special instruction, despite the general cancellation of promotions. Within a week of Wu’s return, he and his family have work and housing in the city nearest their village, while his comrades remain uncertain about their own prospects. The Head of Management makes the connection explicit when he tells Wu that he has come out better than anyone else thanks to Liu Lian. The administrative outcome may be described in official forms, but the novel makes clear that personal relationships shape who benefits from it.

Unequal Outcomes and the Policy’s Meaning

The policy’s consequences are not limited to Wu’s exceptional arrangement. His Political Instructor, facing demobilization despite years of service, asks Wu to use his relationship with Liu Lian to persuade the Division Commander to let him remain in the army. He says he needs only another year or two of service so that his wife can join him after he reaches fifteen years in the Division. His appeal echoes Wu’s own earlier bargain: both men’s military careers are entangled with promises made to their wives’ families and hopes of moving to the city. The comparison makes the costs of restructuring personal without claiming that all affected soldiers share the same outcome.

Wu initially treats the changes chiefly as the route to his own civilian future. He does not concern himself with the details of restructuring, and at first the forms, housing, and employment seem to make the transition unusually painless for him. But the departures of other units and the destruction of long-used barracks equipment begin to alter his understanding. He suspects that his affair with Liu Lian and the Division’s dismantling may be connected, yet resists believing that the Commander has exploited the initiative for self-interested reasons. His divided response exposes the gap between the policy’s collective language and a soldier’s private calculations: his immediate distress is less about the comrades’ losses than the warning that he must not return to the Commander’s house.

The principle thus carries two meanings at once. In Mao’s speech, it names an accountable willingness to adopt a useful proposal, even from outside the Party. In the plot, it becomes the rationale for transfers, demobilization, suspended advancement, and the disappearance of a Division, while private influence softens the result for some and leaves others facing uncertainty. The novel’s tension lies not in disproving the declared public purpose, but in showing how a policy announced in the people’s name is experienced through unequal outcomes and intimate dependence on those who control exceptions.