The Silent Chimney

"The Silent Chimney" is a realist masterpiece that spans thirty years. It tells the story of Dong Ming, secretary of the Huaishui City Party Committee in Dongshan Province, from a technician at the Gaoyuan Thermal Power Plant in Mishui County to the peak of power. In 1993, 22-year-old Dong Ming returned to the old factory where his father died working with technical ideals in mind. However, he suffered repeated setbacks in the reform of state-owned enterprises and the struggle for power. He went through exile, dormancy, and rise, personally sent his mentor to prison, fought with his old enemy Zhou Weiguo for half his life, and shouldered heavy emotional debts at the sacrifice of three women: his first love Lin Xiaowei burned evidence for him twice, his secret admirer Su Hongmei forced her to die in exchange for worker resettlement, and reporter Zhao Wanqing suffered a mental breakdown due to investigating him. The novel uses the Gaoyuan factory chimney as the core image to weave a complex network of technological ideals and political reality, personal memory and collective forgetfulness, power conquest and emotional forgiveness. Dong Ming finally became the secretary of the municipal party committee, but he had an epiphany under the abandoned cooling tower: the real politician is not to conquer his opponents, but to protect those who have burned for him. The work combines the coldness of officialdom games with the warmth of workers' epics. Between the temperature difference of 380 degrees and 250 degrees, it asks whether "hero" and "victim" can be the same word, and presents the difficult process of a generation looking for dignity in the cracks of the system. Feeling unwell, please take a day off