Mao Zedong’s “Serve the People” Speech

Mao Zedong’s “Serve the People” Speech is the novel’s historical and ideological point of reference: a 1944 address commemorating Zhang Side whose principles of public service, criticism, and care for soldiers are repeatedly enlisted to explain military life. Its return in full at the close, after Wu Dawang has been swept into a division-wide restructuring, makes the speech more than a political text. It becomes a standard against which the novel’s uses of revolutionary language—and the institution’s treatment of individuals—can be measured.

Historical Occasion and Central Claim

The address is identified as a speech delivered by Mao Zedong on 8 September 1944, at a meeting of departments reporting directly to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held to honour Zhang Side. It describes the Communist Party and the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies as revolutionary forces devoted wholly to the people’s liberation and interests, and places Zhang Side among their ranks. The historical occasion therefore joins an individual’s memory to a collective account of what revolutionary service is for.

The speech makes that principle explicit through its distinction between deaths. All people die, it says, but a death in the people’s cause carries more weight than Mount Tai, whereas a death in the service of fascists, exploiters, and oppressors is lighter than a feather. Zhang Side’s death is presented as significant because he died serving the people. The contrast gives the speech a moral measure: the value of sacrifice is not established by sacrifice alone, but by whom it serves.

That measure is paired with a practical, self-correcting conception of service. Because the Party serves the people, it should not fear having shortcomings identified; a valid criticism should lead to correction, and a proposal beneficial to the people should be adopted. The speech illustrates this openness through Li Dingming, identified as a non-Communist, whose proposal for fewer but better troops and a simplified administration was accepted because it served the people’s interests. Service here includes not only loyalty and sacrifice but also the capacity to revise policy.

Collective Duty and Care for Soldiers

The address sets its claims within a national struggle. It describes revolutionary bases covering areas with a population of ninety-one million, but stresses that this is insufficient to liberate the whole nation. In difficult circumstances, comrades are urged to recognize both the scale of the task and the prospect of success, and to persist in aiding a suffering population. The speech links individual courage to a collective objective without treating loss as an end in itself.

Its treatment of sacrifice is qualified by an insistence on preventing needless deaths. Officers must be mindful of every soldier, and members of revolutionary forces must look after, love, and help one another. This obligation gives the speech’s ideal of service an internal dimension: people serving the public cause also owe concrete care to their comrades. The address proposes memorial meetings for anyone in the ranks, whether cook or soldier, who has done something useful. It extends the practice to village deaths as well, arguing that shared remembrance can unite the people.

The inclusion of cooks alongside soldiers is especially resonant in the novel’s military setting. Wu Dawang’s service and advancement are closely associated with catering work: after taking responsibility for the company’s food and water, he rises in rank, joins the Party, and receives commendations. The speech’s recognition that useful contribution need not belong only to a combat role supplies a broader ideal of service than rank or prestige. The novel, however, also shows how such ideals are translated into personal ambition and institutional favour.

The Speech in the Novel’s Political Language

The address’s central phrase enters the novel as an all-purpose justification for obedience and work. Wu Dawang, an ambitious soldier praised for his memorization of Mao’s writings and his performance in a military competition, is selected as the Division Commander’s orderly and cook. His political reliability and practical skill make him a favoured servant of the household. In the surrounding military culture, service to senior officers is treated as service to the people, turning a public principle into a rule governing a subordinate’s private duties.

That substitution is sharpened when the Political Instructor rebukes Wu Dawang over his treatment of the Division Commander’s wife. The Instructor invokes the broad revolutionary struggle, then traces a chain from the Commander’s ability to concentrate on meetings in Beijing to the division’s readiness and the army’s wider responsibilities. The speech’s language of collective duty is thus made to support a household demand: the orderly must look after Liu Lian because her husband’s work is said to affect the military whole. The novel reveals the slippage between an ideal directed toward the people and the hierarchy that claims to embody it.

The contrast also appears in the narration of military spectacle. During a hot evening in Henan, soldiers fill the barracks to practise drills and take part in political education intended to reconstruct society and consolidate socialism. The scene’s grand collective language stands beside the guarded, fenced compounds where senior officers live apart from one another and each has a personal orderly. The speech’s call to shared purpose and mutual care therefore circulates through a world structured by rank, separation, and unequal obligations.

Restructuring, Return, and Afterlife

Late in the story, the speech’s endorsement of administrative simplification acquires an immediate plot consequence. At a seminar in Beijing organized and directed by the Central Military Commission, the Division Commander volunteers his division for a pilot scheme to streamline and restructure the army. The practical result is the division’s disbandment. Promotions are suspended; most companies are to be demobilized and a minority transferred. In the novel’s chronology, the policy language that the speech had presented as an idea to be judged by its benefit to the people returns as an institutional decision that unsettles the lives of soldiers.

Wu Dawang is not affected in the same way as most of his comrades. Although the cancelled promotions threaten his long-standing hope of becoming an official, the Division Commander arranges a city job for him, relocation for his family, and work for his wife. The Political Instructor tells him not to return to the Commander’s household, partly because the Commander’s temper has become uncertain amid personnel changes. Wu Dawang is relieved that his affair with Liu Lian has not been discovered; the administrative upheaval gives him an exit and an arranged future even as it closes off the promotion he had pursued.

The speech appears in full at the novel’s close, after Wu Dawang has gone to the gate of the compound, handed a sentry an object wrapped in red silk for Liu Lian, and walked away through the snow. The return shifts the reader from an individual separation to the historical address and its collective vocabulary. Its final insistence that comrades care for every soldier, and that useful lives be remembered whether the dead were cooks or soldiers, resonates with Wu Dawang’s service in the kitchen and with the institutional power that has rearranged his future. The speech’s placement does not erase the gap between its principles and their application; it makes that gap the ending’s governing tension.