Wending (The God of Office)

The God of Office (also known as Wending) is a long officialdom novel by He Changzai, serialized on Qidian.com from March 15, 2010, and published in collected form by Shantou University Press in 2012 under the title Wending. The book centers on Xia Xiang: after breaking up with his girlfriend, he faces his company's impending bankruptcy; distraught, he receives a phone call from the provincial party committee and discovers that Song Chaodu, a member of the provincial party committee standing committee and secretary-general, is an old classmate of his boss Li Dingshan. Xia Xiang seizes this opportunity and decides to enter officialdom on the strength of it, starting from the grassroots and, through his insight into people and his grasp of situations, gradually gaining a foothold in officialdom. The online version carries a "rebirth" premise: Xia Xiang returns to the crossroads of college graduation with twelve years of foresight and replans his life; the print edition removes the opening rebirth episode and begins instead from the realistic predicament of a breakup and unemployment. The book spans three levels of power—county, city, and province—and through volumes such as "Turbulence in Ba County" and "The Grand Plan of Yan City" depicts power balancing, economic transformation, and personal networks, interspersed with romantic entanglements involving Cao Shuli, Lian Ruohan, Xiao Jia, and others. The work long ranked at the top of its genre on the mobile reading platform; the online version totals 1,780 chapters, while the print edition was released in batches as single volumes or boxed sets.