Director of the Beijing Office 4

Director of the Beijing Office 4 is the fourth novel in Wang Xiaofang's Director of the Beijing Office series. Unlike the earlier volumes, which advance through a sequence of events, this one adopts a nested "novel-within-a-novel" structure: the writer Gu Huaiyuan wants to write a long novel about a Beijing office and travels to Beijing to gather material, hoping to probe the inner world of Ding Nengtong, director of the Dongzhou City Beijing Office. Unexpectedly, he obtains Ding Nengtong's diary. Drawing on this "heaven-revealing" diary, Gu Huaiyuan writes the novel Director of the Beijing Office—whose protagonist, Ding Zecheng, is a highly vigilant Beijing office director, yet in an environment that "forces good people into vice," he goes further and further down the road of framing his deputy, Yang Houde, until he finally plunges into the abyss. On the surface this is a story of framing and counter-framing; in fact it is a burlesque of reality: what looks like a self-inflicted tragedy is full of comedy and black humor. Ding Zecheng is infatuated with Yang Ni'er's beauty, but Yang Ni'er turns the tables and uses a beauty trap to lead him step by step into a sexual snare; through Ding Zecheng's recollections of his crimes while under shuanggui, the novel shows how weak human nature is before a powerful system. The book interweaves an introduction, three self-accounts by him and me, an appended novel, and an epilogue, using stylistic experiment, parody, and linguistic exploration to portray desire and struggle in officialdom, the business world, and affairs of the heart.