The Chain of Interests

The Chain of Interests is a full-length workplace and business novel by Nao Shi Gu Deng (real name Xu Mingbo), published by Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House in April 2009; the book runs to about 262 pages. The author worked for years in a large general contracting construction enterprise and knows the workings of tendering, cost accounting, and project management in detail, which gives the novel a strong air of industry reportage. Set in the construction industry, it revolves around the personnel and business of the Jiangzhou branch. The protagonist shuttles between construction sites and meeting rooms: on one side he must contend with schedules, costs, and business targets handed down from above; on the other he must secure his own position through banquets, connections, and personal favors. Through its characters the book offers judgments such as "China's economy is a relationship economy, a crony economy—whoever has connections controls the resources," rendering the advances and retreats of a project manager along the chain of interests in concrete, cool-eyed detail. There are no perfect heroes and no cardboard villains; a group of ordinary people weigh dignity against money again and again and are pushed step by step by rules they themselves helped weave. The "chain of interests" of the title refers to the transmission structure in which money, power, and personal ties are interlocked: everyone at every link is both used and user. In a new-realist manner and a faintly humorous tone, the novel depicts banquet culture, relationship maintenance, gray deals, and crisis management—scenes one reviewer called "a helpless modern apocalypse."