Serve the People Principle

The Serve the People Principle is the novel’s governing political maxim and a practical rule for Wu Dawang’s life in the army. Presented first as a revolutionary command embodied by a decorated wooden sign, it is repeatedly narrowed to service to senior officers and their families. Wu Dawang learns to repeat and enact that formula as a route to advancement; later, the same sign becomes a private signal in his relationship with Liu Lian. The principle’s force lies in this double life: it organizes real duties and decisions even as the story reveals how readily public language can be adapted to private desire and advantage.

The sign and its official meaning

The principle enters the story through the red-lettered wooden sign bearing the words “Serve the People!” Wu Dawang, a Sergeant in the Catering Squad who has become General Orderly to the Division Commander and his wife, recognizes its political symbolism. Five stars represent the Revolution; a rifle and canteen recall the Party’s history of armed struggle; and a row of wheat promises abundance after the realization of Communism. Its message is therefore not merely a household instruction but a compact image of revolutionary history, sacrifice, and promised prosperity.

The Division Commander brings the sign home and asks Wu Dawang to explain it while the orderly serves the meal. The Commander approves Wu Dawang’s careful response, though Wu does not know whom the Commander means when he praises him as better than “them.” Rather than pursue the uncertainty, Wu returns to the kitchen to prepare soup. The sign takes its place on the dining table, where its symbolic authority looms over ordinary condiments such as vinegar, chilli sauce, and sesame oil. The juxtaposition makes political doctrine part of everyday domestic routine.

The maxim is also linked to the military’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.” Wu knows these rules well enough to observe the limits they impose. When an officer asks him to explain his obligations, Wu first recites the rules and then supplies the expected conclusion: “To serve the Division Commander is to Serve the People.” The principle thus operates not only as an ideal of public service but as a formula for obedience within a hierarchy.

From public maxim to personal advancement

The formula is repeated in progressively more specific forms. The Head of Management instructs Wu that serving the Division Commander amounts to serving the people, while also insisting that he must mean what he says and unite theory with practice. When Liu Lian challenges him, Wu extends the service formula to include both her and her husband. These exchanges make the maxim elastic: its stated object is the people, but its immediate recipients are the powerful people whose household Wu serves.

That elasticity has material consequences. Wu’s marriage to Zhao Ezi rests on a written pledge that he will earn commendations within one year, join the Party within two, and become an official within three. If he fails to move her to a city home where she can eat steamed rolls daily, he promises not to return to Wujiagou unless she permits it, and pledges lifelong service to her. After their marriage, his mother dies two weeks later. Wu struggles to meet the pledge’s early conditions: he earns no commendation and is not admitted to the Party in the following year. Letters from his wife and father-in-law heighten his anxiety, and he sometimes contemplates suicide when his name again fails to appear among new Party members or award recipients.

A vacant Sergeant’s post in the Catering Squad offers a way forward. Eight ambitious soldiers compete for it, and Wu attracts the Political Instructor’s notice by letting the Instructor’s son ride on his back while he crawls around the room. The Instructor rebukes him for abandoning self-respect, but Wu responds to a request for a suitable account of service with language the Instructor considers a thoughtful union of theory and practice. Wu becomes Deputy Sergeant responsible for the company’s food and water; within a year and a half he is a full Sergeant, admitted to the Party, and receiving commendations with the Instructor’s help. Only promotion to officialdom remains out of reach, blocked in turn by a blood-pressure test, scarce quotas, a rival soldier’s success, and other setbacks. Service is both an ideological demand and a career ladder, but its rewards depend on institutional decisions beyond Wu’s control.

The principle is made into a public performance when the Captain tests Wu on what he must remember while working for a senior officer. Wu initially gives the three rules of conduct, is told that answer is wrong, and corrects himself: serving the Division Commander and his family is serving the people. The Captain orders him to repeat the sentence loudly enough to wake the sleeping soldiers. Wu obeys, shouting the formula in drill-ground cadence; the Captain is pleased, and the startled men peer from doors and windows before returning to bed. The episode shows doctrine being rehearsed as both a test of obedience and a spectacle staged for the unit.

The sign as a private signal

When Wu becomes General Orderly in the Division Commander’s household, the maxim takes on a concealed personal use. He first sees the sign on the kitchen worktop while holding pak choi he had planned to cook for Liu Lian. The sight leaves him momentarily immobilized; the vegetables fall from his hands. The narrative presents the sign’s changed location as the beginning of an impending entanglement, turning an emblem already associated with service into a signal of private danger.

After their relationship begins, Liu Lian tells the Captain and Political Instructor that she is afraid to remain alone at night while the Division Commander is away. She also reports that Wu has satisfied her needs and asks that he stay in the house rather than return to barracks. His superiors agree, treating any shortcomings in his household work as a reflection on the company and its Party representatives. The official arrangement gives the private relationship cover: Wu continues to tend the garden and grounds, while the familiar appearance of orderly and Commander’s wife conceals the change in their relationship from people looking in through the gate.

The sign becomes a wordless means of summoning Wu. When Liu Lian wants him, she can place it where he will discover it; Wu returns it to the dining table and goes upstairs, and no further communication is needed. Their arrangement makes service resemble a game with rewards and penalties. If Liu Lian is satisfied, she cooks what Wu wants; if not, she assigns him domestic tasks. Once she places the sign beneath his knife while he is chopping vegetables, then takes over the cooking afterward. As the affair continues, the sign appears in the garden, among vines, or at the household compound after Wu has been out shopping. It can displace thoughts of his wife and son by drawing his attention back to Liu Lian. A maxim intended to direct service toward the public good has become an instrument of private communication.

Discipline, concealment, and institutional change

The same political vocabulary that enables Wu’s household role also disciplines him when Liu Lian complains. The Political Instructor tells Wu that she has asked for him to be replaced, accusing him of failing to understand that serving the Commander and his wife is serving the people. He invokes revolutionary struggle, military readiness, and the consequences of failing to look after Liu Lian, expanding a domestic complaint into a threat to the division and army. He then gives Wu one more day in the household to put matters right and accepts responsibility for sending him back. The language of duty makes the affair’s domestic arrangements appear to be an organizational obligation.

Wu does not reveal Liu Lian’s advances to his superior. The narration presents his silence as protecting her reputation, while also raising the possibility that he wants to keep the secret for himself. His discretion is therefore difficult to separate from the rules he has learned: he knows what not to say, but his silence also preserves his access to the relationship. The principle works through omission as well as repetition, shaping what Wu can report and what he chooses to conceal.

The military’s restructuring eventually changes the conditions under which the maxim has governed Wu’s service. After returning to barracks, he is told that the Division Commander has volunteered the division for a pilot scheme to streamline and restructure the army, which means that the division will be disbanded. Promotions are suspended, seemingly ending Wu’s hope of becoming an official. Yet the Commander makes an exception for him: a city job is to be arranged, his family moved there, and work found for Zhao Ezi. At the same time, because household personnel have turned over and the Commander’s temper is uncertain, Wu is told not to return to his former post or visit the house without pressing cause. His superiors’ hospitality and the arrangements made for his family contrast with the abrupt institutional removal of the household role that had connected his ambition to the principle.

The Captain warns Wu to tell no one what he has heard or seen, since disclosure to the Division Commander could ruin them all. Wu returns to barracks relieved that his relationship with Liu Lian remains undiscovered and focused on the discharge and urban work he expects to gain. Within a week, he and his family have housing and jobs arranged in the nearest city. The principle’s final significance is thus neither simply its official promise nor its private corruption: it is a language through which hierarchy, career hopes, intimate conduct, discretion, and exceptional treatment become intertwined. When the division itself is slated to disappear, the arrangements built under that language help determine which parts of Wu’s life continue beyond his military service.