I Quit and Returned to My County, Turning a Poor County into a Metropolis

At twenty-six, earning 400,000 yuan a year in Shanghai, I slapped my resignation letter down on the general manager's desk.

The day I returned to my county hometown, my whole family gathered around to persuade me: "If you can't make it in Shanghai, come back. Your cousin's quarry needs someone to keep an eye on the equipment. Four thousand a month, with two meals included."

The year the county machinery factory went bankrupt, my dad took 8,000 yuan in exchange for giving up his seniority. His back has been bent for twenty years. Of the county's forty-seven factories, only six are still running. One hundred and seventeen thousand people have left to find work elsewhere, and the county's permanent population has fallen by 160,000 in ten years.

I stood all night in front of that rusted-shut iron gate.

The next day, I pulled the county's worst machinery factory back from the brink of bankruptcy.

A month later, orders from the province flooded into the county.

Six months later, the first wave of migrant workers started returning from Dongguan and Suzhou.

Three years later, Yunxi County had disappeared from the province's list of "shrinking counties."

Ten years later, someone asked me how a guy who just drew blueprints had turned a county town into a metropolis.

I said, "You don't build a county town by waiting around."

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.