Mao Zedong style revolutionary ideology

Maoist revolutionary ideology in the novel is both a public creed and a working vocabulary through which military service, personal conduct, and career prospects are explained. Its emblematic command to serve the people links sacrifice and collective purpose to the daily labor of Wu Dawang, while the plot repeatedly exposes a gap between that ideal and the uses to which its language is put. The same slogans can define a soldier’s duties, help officials manage a delicate domestic situation, and furnish a ceremonial account of an outcome arranged through personal favor.

Symbols and Political Education

The “Serve the People!” sign gathers the ideology into a compact visual program. Its five stars represent the Revolution; a rifle and canteen recall the Party’s history of armed struggle; and wheat signifies the harvest of a future Communist society. Wu Dawang understands this symbolic language well, and the sign’s movement from the dining table to the kitchen worktop gives its command a more immediate presence in the space where he performs his work. At the same time, its position beside ordinary condiments makes the lofty political emblem part of the household’s everyday routine.

Wu Dawang’s political knowledge is presented as learned, recited, and tested through institutional performance. In a logistics competition, he delivers 286 quotations and three classic essays associated with Mao Zedong, then completes a stove, food preparation, and a four-dish meal with soup within thirty minutes. The combination of correct recitation and practical skill earns him recognition as a Model Soldier and helps secure his appointment as the Division Commander’s full-time orderly and cook. Ideological competence is therefore not separate from work: the organization rewards a soldier who can demonstrate both verbal mastery and material execution.

The rules governing his new post make political loyalty a discipline of silence as well as action. Wu Dawang is instructed not to say, ask, or do what he should not, and is told that serving the Division Commander is serving the people. His superior adds that he must mean what he says, unite theory with practice, and make his conduct match his words. Wu Dawang accepts the formulation and promises to be both “Red and Expert.” The novel thus establishes an ideal of unity between belief and practice before showing how selectively that unity is applied.

Revolutionary Work and Military Routine

The ideology also organizes time and gives ordinary labor a historical scale. The Division Commander begins each day with drills before reveille and returns home after lights-out; revolution and work dominate his life. He measures his present against national historical events, including the Sino-Japanese War, Land Reform, and the struggle for liberation. His habits contrast with the comparatively restricted domestic life of Liu Lian, his much younger wife, who had trained as a nurse but had not worked in a hospital since their marriage and had spent five years at home.

That contrast widens beyond the household into the barracks. During a hot summer evening in eastern Henan, soldiers fill the drill ground, roads, and company yards for post-meal drills and political education. The activities are framed as preparation to oppose imperialism and consolidate socialism, while the senior officers’ residential compound remains divided from the rest of the barracks by walls, guards, and reinforced fences. The narrative places collective mobilization alongside a sharply ranked military environment: the rhetoric invokes shared service, but officers inhabit separate residences and maintain distance from one another after work.

The Political Instructor’s response to a domestic complaint shows how the language of revolutionary duty can turn private service into a matter of national consequence. He rebukes Wu Dawang for allegedly failing to look after Liu Lian, then links the Commander’s ability to concentrate on meetings in Beijing to the Division’s battle training and, in turn, to the army’s preparedness. His argument expands from household care to the prospect of world war. The scale of the reasoning is deliberately disproportionate, but it demonstrates the institution’s method: even a personal assignment can be described as a contribution to the entire revolutionary cause.

Slogans, Private Conduct, and Performance

The ideology’s formal rules are also used to manage what can be said. After Liu Lian asks for Wu Dawang to be replaced, the Political Instructor says that he has agreed to send someone else but gives Wu one more day to put matters right. He takes responsibility for the decision and tells Wu that the matter is now in his hands. Wu, angry with Liu Lian, considers disclosing her conduct but does not do so. The episode places his trained discretion beside the organization’s expectation that he protect the household’s functioning and reputation, without making clear whether his silence is only discipline or also a choice shaped by his private attachment.

The affair that develops between Wu Dawang and Liu Lian further entangles political language with personal life. After the liaison begins, Liu tells the Captain and Political Instructor that she is afraid to remain alone in the house while her husband is away, and says that Wu has since satisfied her requirements as orderly. She asks that he stay overnight. His superiors agree, treating any failure in his duties as a reflection on the company and its Party representatives. An administrative arrangement intended to secure proper service thus creates the conditions in which the relationship can continue.

The resulting double life is sustained by the appearance of unchanged routine. Wu still tends the vegetable garden and the flowers and shrubs, but those tasks now also reassure people looking through the gate that Liu remains the Division Commander’s wife and Wu remains the household orderly. The sign becomes a recurring summons, appearing in the garden and around the house as the lovers meet in different rooms and, at times, beneath the vine trellis. The public duties and the private relationship occupy the same setting; the service that is supposed to express collective virtue becomes the cover under which a concealed personal arrangement operates.

The novel makes the contradiction explicit through the lovers’ changing relation to revolutionary performance. They initially occupy assigned roles within the military household, but the performance becomes real to them, as if they had forgotten that it began as theater. The affair’s intensity develops alongside the Division’s preparations for field training, when the barracks fill with war-readiness posters, military supplies, slogans, and councils of war. While the organization mobilizes around the prospect of conflict, Wu has nearly forgotten what it is to be a soldier. The contrast is not simply between ideology and desire: the same atmosphere of performance that disciplines the barracks also supplies the language and stage through which the private plot unfolds.

Institutional Outcomes and Public Meaning

Revolutionary language continues to shape Wu Dawang’s prospects when he returns to the barracks during the Division’s restructuring. The Political Instructor welcomes him with hot water, scented soap, and a meal, then explains that Liu Lian had said serious family problems required a three-month home leave. He also reports that the Division Commander volunteered at a Beijing seminar to test a pilot scheme for streamlining the army, a decision that means the Division will be disbanded. Most promotions are suspended, but the Commander has directed that an exception be made for Wu: a city job is to be found for him, his family is to move there, and work is to be arranged for his wife.

This favorable arrangement is distinct from the general uncertainty facing Wu’s comrades. The Political Instructor says the Commander’s household has seen a high turnover of orderlies and asks Wu not to return to his old post or visit the house unless necessary. The Captain separately warns him to tell no one what he has heard or seen, because disclosure to the Commander could have grave consequences for them all. Wu learns that the affair remains undiscovered, but he interprets the restructuring mainly through the benefits it may bring him. The institution’s official reorganization and its personal arrangements therefore meet in a result that he experiences as unusually fortunate.

The discharge is then given a public ideological explanation. Although the company has arranged Wu’s departure quickly and packed his belongings in boxes and crates, it also holds a farewell supper and meeting before his late-night train. In front of a hundred uniformed soldiers, officials announce his early discharge to take up a factory job and award him the Third Order of Merit. The Head of Management describes him as an exemplary revolutionary thinker who has put theory into practice and names him the Division’s sole Exemplary Servant of the People. The speech presents his state-allocated job as the consequence of selfless service, though the soldiers and even the officers had not known that the ceremony would end with this account.

The ending exposes the distance between the official story and the complicated circumstances that produced it. Wu says nothing at the ceremony, accepts the badge, and bows to his comrades rather than delivering the requested speech. The revolutionary formula remains publicly intact: the army has helped a soldier continue to contribute to socialism. Yet the plot has shown that his exceptional future also depends on his standing with the Division Commander and Liu Lian, as well as decisions made during the restructuring. Ideology retains institutional force not because every outcome straightforwardly fulfills its ideals, but because its language can make an exceptional, personally shaped outcome legible as exemplary public service.

Historical Ideal and Narrative Irony

The novel’s use of Maoist language is not limited to slogans spoken by fictional military officials. Near its conclusion, it reproduces the historical framing of Mao Zedong’s speech commemorating Zhang Side, delivered on 8 September 1944. The speech describes the Communist Party, the Eighth Route Army, and the New Fourth Army as forces devoted to the people’s liberation, and distinguishes deaths according to whether they serve the people or their exploiters. Its appearance supplies the historical ideal behind the novel’s repeated invocation of service, sacrifice, and the people as the source of political legitimacy.

Against that ideal, the earlier household and military scenes become more pointed. The sign’s symbolic promise of revolutionary struggle and future abundance presides over a world of rank, guarded residences, career ambition, discreet administrative choices, concealed intimacy, and public praise. Wu’s record is not fabricated: he has real skill, honors, and experience. But the official account of his departure compresses those facts and the exceptional arrangements around him into a single exemplary moral narrative. The ideology’s recurring power lies in this conversion of lived complexity into a public lesson, even as the story’s irony keeps the complexity visible.