earticle

영어

This paper reinterprets Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village through an interdisciplinary perspective grounded in institutional economics, focusing on the seal of authority as a key symbol through which institutional trust, legitimacy, and desire are reconfigured. In the novel, the seal initially represents administrative authorization and public credibility, yet it gradually becomes a mechanism that legitimizes private ambition. This transformation exposes how institutional forms can persist even as their ethical foundations and trust relations collapse. Set in the context of China’s rural plasma economy during the 1990s, Dream of Ding Village depicts a system in which state policy and market logic converge to commodify both blood and social trust. Rather than approaching the plasma economy as a contingent policy failure or a moral aberration, this study conceptualizes it as a path-dependent institutional outcome. Formal authority remains intact, while distorted practices accumulate and reinforce an exploitative structure. The novel thus portrays institutional breakdown not as a sudden rupture but as a gradual process shaped by persistence, inertia, and moral erosion. The analysis examines four representative character groups?Li Sanren; Ding Yuejin and Jia Genzhu; Ding Liang and Yang Lingling; and Ding Hui?to trace distinct configurations of desire mediated by the seal of authority. Their trajectories respectively reveal attempts to restore lost authority amid the collapse of institutional trust, the consolidation of power through procedural form in place of substantive legitimacy, the formalization of emotion and intimacy via institutional approval, and the extreme privatization of authority through the monopolization of seals and documents. Although these desires take different forms?authority restoration, control, emotional validation, and accumulation?they converge in their reliance on the seal of authority as a substitute for trust. By analyzing the seal not merely as a literary motif but as a symbol of institutional structure, this paper demonstrates how Dream of Ding Village offers a literary analysis of core concerns in institutional economics, including the collapse of trust, path dependence, and the self-reinforcing persistence of dysfunctional institutions.