Rise and Fall in Officialdom

Rise and Fall in Officialdom is an urban officialdom web novel by Zhuang Wuyu, first serialized on Zongheng Chinese Network. The book is divided into four volumes, which available introductions list as First Steps in Officialdom, The Road of the Discipline Commission, Benefiting a Region, and The Old Case of Jiangdu; the complete work runs about 2.7 million characters and over 900 chapters. Set in Jiangdu City, the story follows protagonist Xu Tianyu, who, unable to clear his girlfriend's name, leaves his hometown full of resentment and turns to politics, treating his career as the only channel for seeking justice and pursuing promotion. Starting from a grassroots post, he repeatedly weighs pros and cons in party committee meetings, institutional reform, poverty alleviation, and cadre appointments, carefully maneuvers between factions led by Liu Xiangqian and Meng Chunsheng, and gradually gains a foothold with the support of Mei Xiaoxue, Yang Bichen, and others; while serving as discipline inspection secretary in Gaoyang County, he uses a "promote first, detain for investigation later" strategy to crack corruption cases, gradually weaving a political network spanning city, county, and township levels, rising from the grassroots all the way to municipal party standing committee member. The officialdom ecology in the book is far from warm: people probe in meetings, deals lurk in banquets, and personal favors and interest exchanges entangle with each other. The author focuses on presenting the details of power operation in a small city and the process by which a low-born person is gradually changed between rules and private desires. It should be noted that this is a serialized web work; circulating versions differ in word count, chapter count, and volume titles, and no print edition from a formal publisher has been found.