Now that God has given me a chance to live again, I will no longer read documents in the office - I will go to the fields and grow apples. "
In 2026, 40-year-old Ding Yi died in the hospital bed. He is the most inconspicuous clerk in the government. His resume says "I have been mediocre all my life" and his medical record says he suffered from strain. Before he died, he thought to himself: If he could do it all over again, he would never stay in the institution until he died.
Opening his eyes, he returned to the year 2000.
This year, he was a newly graduated college student party member and was assigned to Dingshan Village, Dazhuang Township, Zhuanglang County, Gansu Province, one of the driest towns in Gansu. The villagers earn 20 cents per catty for growing wheat, and all the young people go to Shenzhen to work, leaving only the old people and weeds in the fields.
Ding Yi did not write a report. With his notebook in hand, he walked through every terraced field in Dingshan and Wangjia. He found that the soil quality, sunlight, and precipitation here were almost the same as those in Jingning County next door—and the apples in Jingning were quietly rewriting the fate of the place in those years.
He decided: take Dingshan Village and grow apples.
Without funds, he borrowed saplings on credit; without technology, he asked a "soil expert" from Jingning to come across the mountain to give lectures; the villagers didn't believe it, so he first mobilized party members to take the lead in converting three acres of land. Three years later, the apples in Dingshan Village began to bear fruit, and the merchant drove his cart into this unvisited ravine for the first time.
In the next twenty years, from village party secretary to town mayor, from an industrial town to county party secretary, he laid out the blueprint of the Jingning-Zhuanglang apple area into the largest example of "turning green into gold" in Gansu agriculture. His implementation of the "party branch + cooperative" model in the fight against poverty has been written into the province's experience;
