Serve the People
Serve the People!“Serve the People” names an ideal of collective service, but in the novel it also becomes a wooden sign, a domestic instruction, a covert signal, and a language for explaining who deserves institutional help. Its movement between the public and private worlds makes the principle’s changing meanings visible: what begins as a revolutionary exhortation is used to discipline a soldier, organize an affair, reward ambition, and finally measure the distance between official rhetoric and lived conduct.
Political Principle and Wooden Sign
The sign first appears as an object with an unmistakably public message. Wu Dawang, then a Sergeant in the Catering Squad and newly assigned as General Orderly to the Division Commander and his wife, stands in the kitchen holding pak choi when he finds the sign moved from its usual position on the dining table to the kitchen worktop. Its bright red words are flanked by five stars and an image of a canteen hanging from a rifle above a row of wheat. The domestic setting does not diminish its authority: the sign carries the political ideal into the rooms where Wu works and serves.
When the Division Commander’s remarks leave Wu uncertain about whom he means, Wu does not ask for clarification. He instead recalls the People’s Liberation Army’s three rules of conduct: “Don’t Say What You Shouldn’t Say, Don’t Ask What You Shouldn’t Ask, Don’t Do What You Shouldn’t Do.” He returns to the kitchen to prepare soup. From then on, the sign occupies a prominent place on the dining table, looming symbolically over ordinary condiments. Its message is thus paired with a practical order: Wu’s service to the household is framed as service to the People.
That equation receives an explicit formulation when Wu tells Liu Lian, “To serve you and the Division Commander is to Serve the People.” The sentence translates a general political principle into his immediate work for a powerful household. The principle is not simply recited; it becomes a rule by which the orderly’s conduct can be judged and his access to the household directed.
From Emblem to Private Signal
The sign’s meaning changes when Liu Lian takes it from its place against the wall and sets it on the mahogany dining table after dinner, as Wu begins clearing away. The gesture is outwardly ordinary, but the narration presents it as the beginning of a private language. Three days after the scene being recounted, the sign’s placement again gives Wu an instruction: moved to the middle of the living room, at the foot of the stairs, it tells him that Liu Lian is summoning him upstairs. The revolutionary slogan now functions as a discreet signal within their relationship.
Liu Lian later states the arrangement plainly. She dismisses Wu but tells him that whenever the sign is not on the table, she wants him upstairs. Its position separates the sign’s official function from its private one: on the table it belongs to the room’s visible order; elsewhere, it communicates a request without a spoken command. A political emblem becomes an instrument of intimate coordination precisely because both characters understand the authority and significance attached to it.
The signal recurs in the garden. While Wu works, Liu Lian watches from the kitchen doorway or near the vegetable patch, then carries the sign behind her back and sets it a short distance from him. Wu, initially unaware of her meaning, continues working until he sees it. He then takes it inside, returns it to the dining table, and goes upstairs. The routine needs no further explanation: the sign has become a shared code, linking household service to the private relationship while allowing both activities to retain the appearance of prescribed roles.
Their exchanges also extend the language of service into a system of rewards and penalties. If Wu satisfies Liu Lian, she cooks the food he wants; if he does not, she assigns domestic tasks such as washing her clothes, cleaning her ears, or cutting her nails. He interprets the meals as compensation for good work and the chores as penance for failing in his duty. The novel’s formal contrast is pointed: a vocabulary meant to describe public obligation is repurposed to make a private relationship seem like an orderly, reciprocal job.
Discipline, Ambition, and Institutional Favor
The principle’s practical force is apparent in the military’s response when Liu Lian complains about Wu. The company Captain tells him that the Division Commander’s wife says he has failed to understand that serving the Commander and his wife is serving the People, and says she wants him replaced by someone more knowledgeable about political theory. The accusation turns a private dispute into a question of political reliability and job performance. Wu’s rank, Party membership, commendations, and the Captain’s trust do not shield him from the household’s influence.
The Captain nevertheless gives Wu another opportunity. He agrees to send a replacement the next day but also sends Wu back to the Commander’s house for one more day, taking responsibility for the decision himself. His appeal to the image of an outstanding soldier who must add to the brilliance of the Revolution’s beacon makes institutional discipline and personal discretion operate together: the language of political service justifies both the reprimand and the exception.
That episode sits within Wu’s longer effort to improve his standing. Before his appointment to the Commander’s household, he had signed a pledge to Zhao Ezi: after marrying her, he promised to earn commendations within a year, join the Party within two, and become an official within three, so that he could move her from Wujiagou to a city where she could eat steamed rolls every day. He undertook exhausting work and worried over letters from his wife and father-in-law when recognition did not come. Taking the vacant post of Sergeant of the Catering Squad offered a route upward; within a year and a half, he had become a full Sergeant, joined the Party, and accumulated commendations. Promotion to official, however, remained out of reach.
The ideal of serving the People therefore intersects with a concrete hierarchy of work, recognition, and access. Wu’s new post in the Commander’s household draws him closer to authority, but it also makes his conduct answerable to the Commander’s wife. The sign’s domestic authority is backed by an institution in which a complaint can threaten his placement and a superior’s favor can restore it.
Restructuring and Selective Help
The same language of service becomes part of the public explanation for Wu’s future when the Division faces restructuring. At a seminar in Beijing organized by the Central Military Commission, the Division Commander volunteers the formation for a pilot scheme to streamline and restructure the army. The practical consequence is the Division’s disbandment. Promotions are suspended while most companies are to be demobilized and a minority transferred, putting Wu’s long-standing hope of becoming an official at risk once more.
Yet the Commander orders an exception for Wu. A city job is to be arranged for him in his native province, his family is to move there, and suitable work is to be found for his wife. At the same time, the household’s unstable staffing and the Commander’s anger at previous orderlies lead to a restriction: Wu is not to return to his old post or visit the house unless an urgent matter requires it. The institution offers him a new livelihood while cutting off the position that had brought him into daily contact with Liu Lian.
At a company gathering, the Head of Management and the Political Instructor present Wu as an exemplary servant of the People and explain his state-allocated job as recognition of service. Their praise turns a private arrangement into a public lesson for the assembled soldiers, urging them to give of themselves in the hope that the army will help them in turn. The Political Instructor later tells Wu that, despite what he has taught in meetings and classes, soldiers commonly dream of moving up the social ladder or, for a man from the countryside, reaching the city. The Division is going to be disbanded and most soldiers will be sent home, while Wu has achieved his aims in less than three days. The sharp contrast exposes the unequal reach of institutional assistance: the collective restructuring closes prospects for many, while a favored soldier receives a job and a route out of the countryside.
The Political Instructor’s account also changes the force of the ceremony. The public tribute presents Wu’s appointment as the reward for serving with his whole body and soul; the private conversation identifies the practical aspirations, patronage, and luck behind such advancement. In this contrast, “Serve the People” is both an ethical standard and a political explanation that can make selective benefit appear to be the natural result of exemplary conduct.
Historical Speech and the Principle’s Measure
The novel’s closing return to the principle’s historical source provides a standard against which its domestic and institutional uses can be read. The appended speech is identified as Mao Zedong’s address of 8 September 1944, delivered at a meeting of departments reporting directly to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in memory of Zhang Side. It describes the Communist Party, the Eighth Route Army, and the New Fourth Army as wholly devoted to liberating the people and serving their interests; Zhang Side is presented as having served in their ranks.
The speech also describes service as a basis for correcting mistakes. Shortcomings should be open to criticism, and a proposal beneficial to the People should be adopted even when it comes from someone outside the Communist Party. It uses the suggestion of fewer but better troops and a simplified administration as an example. This account makes collective benefit, mutual accountability, and correction central to the stated principle, rather than the advantage of a single household or favored individual.
Its final emphasis on limiting unnecessary sacrifice, attending to soldiers, and ensuring that members of revolutionary units look after one another further clarifies the ideal’s obligations. Even commemoration is presented as service: useful work should be remembered whether the deceased was a cook or a soldier, and village memorial meetings should help unite the People. These details place the principle in a social and institutional frame broader than Wu’s personal advancement.
Read against that speech, the sign’s successive appearances carry an irony the novel builds through action rather than abstract argument. It begins as a public emblem in the Commander’s household, becomes a covert summons, and is later taken up again when Liu Lian reaches for it amid their rupture. Across those shifts, the principle remains legible but its uses change: it can name genuine collective responsibility, enforce an orderly’s subordination, conceal a private relationship, or dignify a favorable job assignment. The novel’s central tension lies in that gap between an ideal addressed to everyone and the unequal, intimate arrangements made in its name.
