After graduating from a prestigious university, he turns down a job offer in a big city and returns to Qingshi Township, the poorest in the county, determined to live up to his father's words: “Being an official means serving the people.”
While others sit in offices poring over reports, he insists on getting out among the fields, into the petition office, and beneath the workers' sheds. The accounts that don't add up, the words people swallow, the cracks behind polite formalities: nothing escapes his eye.
Starting out as a deputy township chief on temporary assignment, he sets out to expose, layer by layer, the network that has spent years turning poverty relief, housing redevelopment, and medical insurance into cash machines, entrenched at both county and city levels.
