Tianhui Zhang

When a murder occurs in a small town in Southeast China, a local mechanic, known for his honesty, comes under suspicion. When the police target him to take the fall, he’s forced to try and exonerate himself, uncovering a number of disturbing facts, most much bigger than the initial crime.

Once the thriving capital of Imperial China, the city of Datong now lies in near ruins. Not only is it the most polluted city in the country, it is also crippled by decrepit infrastructure and even shakier economic prospects. But Mayor Geng Yanbo plans to change all that, announcing a bold, new plan to return Datong to its former glory, the cultural haven it was some 1,600 years ago. Such declarations, however, come at a devastatingly high cost. Thousands of homes are to be bulldozed, and a half-million of its residents (30 percent of Datong’s total population) will be relocated under his watch. Whether he succeeds depends entirely on his ability to calm swarms of furious workers and an increasingly perturbed ruling elite. The Chinese Mayor captures, with remarkable access, a man and, by extension, a country leaping frantically into an increasingly unstable future.

Shunhe, a former police officer now working as a taxi driver, orders food for two. At that moment, a man in black gets into his taxi, and the murder on the radio changes to a kidnapping case involving a young girl.

Gong Fenghai, an educated urban youth from Beijing and also a fervent supporter of Mao Zedong decided to heed Chairman Mao's call to go to the rural area of Yanan during the Cultural Revolution. Forty years later, 60 year-old Gong wants to return to Beijing and retire there. What greets him is a hometown that is at once familiar and yet strangely distant....