Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China appears both as the setting named in Mao Zedong’s speech commemorating Zhang Side and as the highest political horizon against which the novel’s military bureaucracy operates. Its presence links the ideal of serving the people to a story in which a central restructuring plan dissolves a division, redirects soldiers’ lives, and helps erase Wu Dawang’s service record.

Revolutionary Authority and Public Doctrine

The novel reproduces the formal setting of Mao Zedong’s speech: it was delivered on 8 September 1944, at a meeting held by departments reporting directly to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, to honor Zhang Side. The speech describes the Communist Party and the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army it leads as revolutionary forces devoted to the people’s liberation and interests. Zhang Side’s service is presented within that collective ideal, and his death is measured by whether it served the people.

This documentary passage gives the Committee a distinct symbolic role. Its name anchors a canonical statement of revolutionary purpose, while the surrounding narrative tests the practical meanings attached to that purpose. In the military world of the novel, service is routinely rendered through immediate duties and institutional hierarchies: Wu Dawang is taught to regard care for the Division Commander and his wife as service to the people. The grand political ideal therefore reaches him not only as doctrine, but as a rule interpreted by superiors and applied to his daily work.

Central Policy and the Division’s Disbandment

The Committee’s institutional reach is also evoked through the Central Military Commission, which organizes and directs a seminar in Beijing. There, the Division Commander volunteers his division for a pilot scheme to streamline and restructure the army. The practical consequence, as the Political Instructor explains to Wu Dawang, is that the division will be disbanded and disappear from the People’s Liberation Army’s structure.

The restructuring changes the conditions of service throughout the barracks. Most companies are to be demobilized and a minority transferred; promotions are suspended, leaving Wu Dawang’s hoped-for advancement uncertain. Yet his status as a favorite of the Division Commander and his wife produces an exception: a city job in his native province is to be arranged for him, with work found for his wife and the family moved there. The plan thus operates through both sweeping institutional decisions and personal interventions that distribute their benefits unevenly.

The novel presents the policy’s implementation as an administrative process with intimate consequences. On returning to barracks, Wu Dawang is told that his extended home leave has been authorized because of serious family problems, while the division’s restructuring continues. A captain warns him not to repeat what he has heard, since disclosure to the Division Commander could endanger them all. Within a week, Wu Dawang and his family have work and housing in the nearest city, while his fellow soldiers remain anxious about their prospects.

Institutional Erasure and Individual Memory

The Committee is not depicted as personally directing the concealment of Wu Dawang’s history. Rather, the novel places the division’s preparations to disappear within the larger state military system and shows the Division Commanders conducting an officially authorized effort to remove the sergeant and his past from view. During Wu Dawang’s furlough, he does not know that his former division is preparing to vanish, or that its leaders are arranging to obliterate his service record. The narrative names amnesia as the division’s new watchword.

That institutional forgetting stands against Wu Dawang’s private recollection. During his leave, he thinks obsessively about the barracks and remains preoccupied with Liu Lian, while the organization that once structured his life is being dismantled without his knowledge. After he returns, the Political Instructor’s hospitality—hot water, scented soap, and a bowl of egg noodles—briefly steadies him before the news of the disbandment and its personal arrangements. The ordinary gestures make the institution’s power tangible: decisions about a soldier’s leave, employment, and future arrive through officials, conversations, and paperwork rather than through any direct encounter with the central authority.

Later, as Wu Dawang’s army career rapidly ends, time to reflect leads him to suspect that his affair with Liu Lian had been staged as part of a larger scheme. He can sense that events were choreographed, but resists connecting the relationship to the dismantling of the division or believing that the Division Commander would exploit the streamlining initiative for self-interest. The Committee’s political world therefore remains both consequential and distant: its stated ideals frame the narrative, and central policy supplies the conditions for upheaval, while local authorities mediate those forces through favors, secrecy, and erasure.