The Long Road of Officialdom

The Long Road of Officialdom is a long-form officialdom novel by Robin Xie, serialized and completed on Qidian. The book runs to more than 2.5 million characters. The story begins in the 1990s: Xue Huading, born into a vegetable-farming family on the outskirts of the city, fails the college entrance exam because of a severe weakness in English. With money scraped together by his family, he attends a self-funded junior college, studying electronics, and after graduation is unemployed, hitting walls everywhere he looks for work. By chance, he uses his solid electronics and communications skills to solve a thorny communications problem for an official, and is thereby drawn into the telecommunications industry, which was then eager to take off. From there he starts at a technical post in a county-level grassroots unit and gradually gains a foothold through concrete tasks—emergency equipment repairs, line upgrades, project approvals, and funding requests. Even as he works hard, he learns to handle personal relations and dealings with superiors and subordinates, first becoming a technical cadre and then step by step moving into the local government ranks. The novel revolves around the changes in the postal and telecommunications system during the transition from a planned economy to a market economy, involving plotlines such as the introduction of program-controlled equipment, the early days of mobile communications, flood-control emergencies, and battles over project funding, while also weaving in workplace maneuvering, corruption, anti-corruption investigations, and the protagonist's several ups and downs in love. The author states that the era is real and the events are real, while the characters and plot are fictional, aiming to use the rise of a small figure to present the operating logic of grassroots officialdom and the spirit of the times. This is a web serial work with no record of formal print publication.