The God of Office (Seizing the Cauldron)

The God of Office is a novel of officialdom by He Changzai, serialized on Qidian from March 15, 2010, and published in print in 2012 by Shantou University Press under the title Seizing the Cauldron; the online version includes a rebirth premise that was removed from the print edition. The protagonist, Xia Xiang, suffers setbacks just after graduating from university and, through a mysterious phone call from the provincial party committee, gains an opportunity to enter officialdom as a county party secretary's secretary. He is adept at reading political signals from conversations, meetings, and even a leader's glance, leveraging the rules of balance and mutual constraint to climb from the grassroots into city and provincial arenas of contest. The title's "god of office" refers to officials who reach a state of effortless mastery and turn stone into gold. The work unfolds the three levels of county, city, and provincial power through volumes such as "Storms in Ba County" and "Grand Plans in Yan City," touching on real issues such as urban village redevelopment, local debt, and industrial adjustment, as well as the networks of personal ties and exchange of interests in officialdom. The book is complete, with over one thousand seven hundred chapters online; the print edition is issued in multiple volumes or collector's sets, abridged and adjusted from the online version. The novel emphasizes its fictional nature, opening with a disclaimer about a "parallel universe." Readers may regard it as a genre novel centered on the rules of officialdom, whose depiction of power operations and human choices is the most closely watched aspect of such works.