Mao Zedong’s Speech Commemorating Zhang Side

Mao Zedong’s Speech Commemorating Zhang Side is presented as a 1944 address that makes service to the people both a revolutionary ideal and a standard for judging individual conduct and military administration. Its account of Zhang Side’s death, call to correct shortcomings, endorsement of streamlined forces, and instructions for honoring useful service give the speech a practical reach that later resonates with the novel’s soldiers and their changing institution.

Occasion and Revolutionary Purpose

The speech is identified as having been 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 honor Zhang Side. It describes the Communist Party, the Eighth Route Army, and the New Fourth Army as forces devoted to liberating the people and working in their interests, then places Zhang within those ranks. His service becomes the address’s central example of what it means for a revolutionary to serve.

The speech distinguishes deaths by the cause they serve. It presents Zhang Side’s death in the service of the people as weighty and meaningful, contrasting it with death spent serving fascists, exploiters, and oppressors. The argument does not treat sacrifice as valuable merely because it is sacrifice: its significance depends on whether it serves the people. That distinction is paired with a caution against unnecessary losses, making the address both a tribute to Zhang and a standard for the conduct of the living.

Criticism, Reform, and Care

The speech describes criticism as compatible with loyalty. Because the Party serves the people, it need not fear having shortcomings identified; anyone may point them out, and a valid criticism should lead to correction. Proposals, too, are to be judged by whether they benefit the people rather than by the proposer’s political identity. As its example, the address notes that the proposal for fewer but better troops and a simplified administration came from Li Dingming, who was not a Communist, but was adopted because it was beneficial.

This openness to correction is connected to a reciprocal duty of care. The address calls on officers to be mindful of every soldier and on members of revolutionary units to look after, love, and help one another. It therefore places administrative efficiency beside responsibility for people: reform is not presented as an end in itself, and devotion to a cause does not excuse neglect of those serving it.

Commemoration as a Public Practice

The address proposes a specific way to make service visible after death. If a person in the ranks, whether a cook or a soldier, has done anything useful, a meeting should be held to honor that person’s memory; the same practice should extend to people who die in villages. Public mourning is thus given a collective purpose: remembering the dead should help unite the living.

The inclusion of a cook alongside a soldier widens the scope of recognition beyond combat roles. Usefulness, rather than rank or a single kind of military labor, is the stated basis for commemoration. The speech’s closing prescription turns its account of service into an institutional ritual, linking remembrance to the cohesion of both revolutionary units and the broader population.

Later Resonance in the Novel

The address’s principle of service acquires a complicated afterlife in Wu Dawang’s military career. As an ambitious soldier, he recites Mao’s writings in a competition, wins recognition as a Model Soldier, and is selected as the Division Commander’s orderly and cook. His rise through the Catering Squad brings a sergeant’s rank, Party membership, and commendations, while the novel repeatedly frames service to senior officers as service to the people. The progression makes the speech’s inclusion of cooks especially resonant, even as the gap between public principle and private advancement remains visible.

That tension sharpens when the Division Commander volunteers to test a military streamlining scheme that will disband the division. Promotions are cancelled and the units face demobilization or transfer, while Wu Dawang is granted an exception: work and housing are to be arranged for his family in a city. During his leave, he learns that the institution he served is preparing to disappear from the military system and that officials are attempting to erase his service history. Against the speech’s insistence on caring for every soldier and honoring useful work, this administrative disappearance exposes how the language of collective service can coexist with uneven protection and institutional forgetting.

The novel also uses the address’s reform principle to frame that contradiction rather than simply resolve it. The speech endorses fewer, better troops and a simplified administration when reform benefits the people; the later restructuring invokes the same general rationale, but its costs are borne by individual soldiers facing separation, uncertain futures, and the end of a shared military life. The address supplies an ideal of accountable change, while the division’s dissolution raises the question of whether the people affected by that change are being treated according to the ideal.