Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong functions in the novel less as a character in the present-day action than as the source of an authoritative revolutionary vocabulary. His writings and remembered speech enter soldiers’ competitions, political instruction, ceremonies, and institutional decisions. The resulting contrast is central: ideals of serving the people are repeatedly invoked to explain conduct shaped by career ambition, hierarchy, and the upheaval of military restructuring.

Writings and Military Formation

Wu Dawang’s ability to recite Mao Zedong’s work is one measure of his value as a soldier. At a Mass Theory and Practice of Frontline Logistics Competition, he recites 286 quotations and three essays, including “Serve the People,” “Commemorating Norman Bethune,” and “The Foolish Old Man who Moved the Mountains.” He also prepares a four-dish meal and soup within thirty minutes. The competition joins political learning to practical performance: Wu’s command of Mao’s words is displayed alongside his competence in cooking and logistics, and the combined achievement helps earn him recognition as a Model Soldier and selection as the Division Commander’s full-time orderly and cook.

Maoist language also supplies the standards by which Wu’s conduct is judged. The Political Instructor invokes “The Revolution is not a dinner party” while rebuking Wu for failing to care properly for Liu Lian during the Division Commander’s absence. He expands the matter from domestic service into a chain of military and political consequences: Liu Lian’s care affects the Commander’s ability to concentrate, which is said to affect the Division’s training and the army’s readiness. The grand scale of this argument makes an intimate household duty appear part of revolutionary service, exposing how political doctrine can be applied to the daily work of a subordinate.

Ideals and Personal Advancement

The novel places Mao’s principles beside Wu’s material hopes. Wu is portrayed as an unusually decorated, ambitious soldier who wants promotion and a transfer of his family to the city. His premarital pledge to Zhao Ezi turns those hopes into a timetable: he promises commendations within a year, Party membership within two, and official status within three, linking success to a city home where she can eat steamed rolls every day. The pledge is a personal bargain, but its terms depend on the military system’s rewards and its language of service.

Wu’s route upward passes through labor that is both practical and politically legible. After prolonged frustration over commendations and Party membership, he competes for a catering position known to offer quicker advancement because the work is exhausting and undesirable. Once transferred to the Catering Squad as Deputy Sergeant, he takes responsibility for food and water; over the next year and a half he becomes a full Sergeant, joins the Party, and receives awards with help from the Political Instructor. The official four-pocket jacket remains beyond reach. Maoist study and service rhetoric thus overlap with a plainly personal pursuit of rank, without the novel treating the two as identical motives.

Revolutionary Speech and Collective Memory

The closing pages reproduce a speech attributed to Mao Zedong and dated 8 September 1944. It was delivered at a meeting of departments reporting directly to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to honor Zhang Side. In the speech, Mao identifies the Communist Party, the Eighth Route Army, and the New Fourth Army as forces devoted to the people’s liberation, and presents Zhang Side’s death in service to the people as carrying a weight greater than Mount Tai. The speech gives public commemoration an explicit political meaning: remembering the dead is not only an expression of sorrow but a means of uniting people.

The speech also describes a model of criticism and correction. Mao says shortcomings should be identified openly and corrected when criticism is right; proposals beneficial to the people should be adopted even when they come from outside the Communist Party. As an example, he cites Li Dingming’s suggestion for “fewer but better troops and a simplified administration.” The passage’s stated logic is that serving the people requires both persistence in what is right and willingness to correct what is wrong. It also stresses care among comrades and minimizing unnecessary sacrifice, extending the principle of service from public purpose to the treatment of individual soldiers.

Restructuring and Official Recognition

The reform principle in the reproduced speech acquires a pointed later echo in the plot. At a seminar in Beijing organized by the Central Military Commission, the Division Commander volunteers to test a pilot scheme for streamlining and restructuring the army. The practical consequence is that the Division is to be disbanded. Promotions are suspended, and Wu’s anticipated rise to official status is again blocked—not through a failure to study or work, but through a change in the institution that had structured his ambitions.

Even as the Division prepares to dissolve, its officials frame Wu’s departure in the language of exemplary service. At a farewell meeting held before his train leaves at 12:30 at night, the Political Instructor announces Wu’s special early discharge to take a factory job in the city. The Head of Management then presents him with the Third Order of Merit and calls him the Division’s sole Exemplary Servant of the People, crediting his study of Mao’s collected works and his success in putting theory into practice. The announcement astonishes the assembled company, and the evidence makes clear that Wu, his Captain, and the Political Instructor had not known beforehand that the evening would end with this honor. Wu says nothing when asked to address the company; he accepts the badge, bows, and salutes the officers.

This ceremonial ending folds an individual benefit into a public lesson. The officials tell the company that people who serve selflessly will be remembered and helped, presenting Wu’s state-allocated job as an example of the army enabling continued service to socialism. Yet the same sequence follows the cancellation of promotions and the disbandment of the Division. Mao’s language therefore links the novel’s most official accounts of work, sacrifice, remembrance, and reform, while the plot lets the reader see how those ideals are administered through a changing military hierarchy and how they intersect with Wu’s concrete prospects.