中国的“官场”与“官场小说”

Abstract

Officialdom is the reality and cultural space composed by government officials, with a history of thousands of years in China. Since the Qin dynasty abolished the feudal system and implemented the authority agent system of ‘officials as teachers’, the official class formed gradually. As officials were recruited on a large scale by the imperial examination system, the official class was growing and gradually took control of social resources, and its cultural influence also overflowed its own class. Steeped in officialdom culture for a long time and advocated by the Confucian culture, Chinese people formed social values of ‘official standard’, which dominated the social mainstream consciousness. The officialdom novels, as a type with officialdom as the subject of novels, focusing on official corruption and exposing the darkness of officialdom and the alienation of power to humans, thus drew wide attention from readers. There are two officialdom literary booms in Chinese modern history with different backgrounds: ‘condemnation novels’ in the late Qing dynasty and contemporary officialdom novels from the end of the last century to the first decade of this century. The former is literary criticism on China’s backward reality made by the advanced intellectuals in the late Qing dynasty who accepted the western civilization, while the rise of the latter set it background in the 1990s when the government launched an anti-corruption campaign to get rid of social crisis. Compared to condemnation novels which merely exposed and satirized darkness, contemporary officialdom novels have many new developments in techniques of expression and humanity portrayal.