Straying into Officialdom

Misguided Into Officialdom is a long-form officialdom novel by the web author Ke Da Ke Xiao, serialized on Qidian.com starting in May 2011. Roughly 6.05 million characters long and completed in 2014, it spans more than two thousand chapters. The protagonist, Zhu Daidong, is a graduate of the Normal University of Gunan Province. Despite excellent academic performance, he is assigned against his will to teach at the remote Shumuling Middle School in the countryside because of his girlfriend's family's opposition, and is soon afterward abandoned by his girlfriend Tang Xiaoli, leaving his life at rock bottom. A accidental fall that causes a concussion gives him hearing far beyond the ordinary—he can make out someone talking in their sleep two buildings away, and can clearly hear conspiracies being hatched in the next office while sitting at his desk. With this ability, which readers call his "divine ears," along with the exceptional capacity for liquor and solid writing skills he developed in his days of frustration, Zhu Daidong is seconded from the rural middle school to the township government, where he works as a clerk and secretary and gradually establishes a foothold in the lower levels of officialdom. He uses the information he overhears to anticipate shifts in personnel decisions, see through traps, and solve thorny problems for his superiors, while taking a pragmatic approach to attracting investment, launching enterprises, and resolving public grievances. He continues to be promoted through township, county, city, and provincial posts, eventually reaching the senior provincial and ministerial level. The novel advances through a structure of "standalone incidents plus a main storyline of promotion," offering both finely observed depictions of the personal dealings and social rituals of official life and a treatment of real-world challenges in grassroots governance such as economic development, environmental protection, and the handling of petitions and maintaining stability. On the romantic front, it adheres to a single-female-lead setup, with the protagonist always holding the line between temptation and the rules—making it one of the more representative works in the online officialdom genre.