A new literary trend in the People’s Republic of China is exposing the workings of the Chinese bureaucracy, illustrating much about the nature of Chinese governance and the morality of contemporary Chinese culture. We in the West ignore these issues at our peril. May this site help us to open our eyes by helping to overcome the linguistic barrier and promoting discussion.
Each page will offer a selection from a Chinese “officialdom novel” in Chinese, as follows:
- Black – subset of text untouched
- Blue – text repeated with glosses added in text
- Black – vocabulary list selected from glosses
- Burgundy – comments on culture, politics.
Translations into other languages are welcome; please submit to me by email. Comments in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Russian, German, Portugese, Italian, Catalan, and Languedoc are also welcome.
Translations are always helpful for non-English comments, but comments in languages not listed above will definitely need to be accompanied by translations into one of the above, please. Insights about the realism and socio-political significance of these novels, as well as comments comparing China’s officialdom novels with equivalent literary trends or socio-political realities elsewhere would also be most welcome.
Bureaucracy is here to stay, both in societies like China where the route to power is primarily through the bureaucracy or in societies like the U.S., where the bureaucratic route competes with the electoral route and the financial route. Wherever we live, we must learn to deal with bureaucracy…
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As officialdom novels flood the market, the following have come to my attention:
- 男人戰爭
- 二号首长by Huang Xiaoyang 黄晓阳 – reviewed by Xujun Eberlein
- 駐京辦主任 Director of the Office in Beijing (Zhujingban Zhuren) by Wang Xiaofang – reviewed by China Daily and Want China Times
- Painting (Guo Hua) by Wang Yuewen – reviewed by China Daily
- 侯卫东官场笔记 Hou Weidong’s Official Diary by Xiaoqiao Laoshu小桥老树 – reviewed by Shenzhen Daily and Want China Times
A comparative study of the political science and cultural insights of these novels will someday make a great dissertation. Will a Chinese Solzhenitsyn emerge? Perhaps not. According to one view:
“They are practical writings, containing little literary value.”
These writings meet the readers’ practical needs, Bai explains. For thousands of years, reverence for officials has been deep-rooted and such books serve as a suitable manual for readers vying to enter the civil service. [Global Times 1/20/11.]
Officialdom Novels 官场小说 