Silent Spring Bones

An epic spanning thirty years, measured against the nation's fortunes by the strength of its characters' backs, a life-and-death journey through a maze of power in search of their original ideals.

On a snowy night in the Great Northern Wilderness in 1968, Lin Weidong, persecuted for being of “black class” background, rescues half a copy of Das Kapital from a book-burning pyre. His left ear is permanently scarred by frostbite. Shanghai native Su Jing saves an entire team at a border post by translating Russian reports, but loses the ticket stub for Spring Blossom, left behind by the first love who died for her. When someone else takes their place on the list of people allowed to return to the city, when a handwritten petition for household farming is sealed away, and when bringing in foreign capital is denounced as selling out the country, they know better than anyone: this land doesn't need saints. It needs people with strong bones who can put down roots in frozen soil.

From the cattle pens of the Cultural Revolution to construction sites in the Special Economic Zones, from the maelstrom of the dual-track price system to the front lines of the Asian financial crisis, Lin Weidong safeguards the spark of reform in the quagmire of political intrigue, while Su Jing uses the scalpel of reason to dissect the ills of the times. And their opponent, Chen Zhijian, the veteran who locked his army competition medal in a drawer, is staking his lifelong faith on a battlefield where “order comes above all else”...

When state-owned enterprise reform collides with waves of layoffs, when the fireworks celebrating Hong Kong's return illuminate a breast tumor diagnosis, and when a vine cane passed down for thirty years props up a collapsing building during the Wenchuan earthquake, everything that fails to break them will ultimately be etched into history's bones in blood, in fire, and in fields of genetically modified wheat drifting across the sky.