Six years ago, Zhong Jianguo, deputy head of the Qingshan Township Finance Office, died at an investigation site. The case report bore four words: “Resolved in accordance with the law.” That year, his son, Zhong Sheng, was eighteen and had just received his university acceptance letter. His father’s last words to him were: “Follow the rules.”
Six years later, in the County Commission for Discipline Inspection’s archives, Zhong Sheng found his father’s old case file in a dust-covered cardboard box. A letter of accusation, seven records saying the allegations had been investigated and dismissed, and a name buried for ten years: Zhao Caiwang. Starting with a report hidden beneath a crooked jujube tree in Shitou Village, he gradually uncovered the corruption shrouding Yunxi County.
With every step of the investigation, the resistance grew. Some people battered down doors with iron bars, others applied pressure with official letters, and still others called in favors from the provincial capital. But Zhong Sheng always had people standing behind him. Li Dayou, who had waited ten years to report the case, walked into the investigation team leaning on a bamboo cane and said, “I’m here.” The old accountant, Sun Defu, hid his ledgers in a hole in the wall and, before he died, asked someone to pass on the message, “The accounts have been settled.” The contractor, Luo Dayong, handed over a notebook recording ten years of kickbacks and said, “I can’t sleep at night.” Late into the night, prosecutor Kuang Yuanqing sat at her office computer, meticulously tracing every transaction from beginning to end.
There are no golden fingers or thrilling twists in this story. There is only a young man using the simplest method of all: matching every figure and following every procedure to the letter, so he can honor his father’s dying words: “Follow the rules.” It took Zhong Sheng six years to go from the archives to the front lines of an investigation, and from junior staffer to deputy secretary of the County Commission for Discipline Inspection. He is pursuing more than the truth. He is holding on to a belief: rules are not slogans hung on a wall,
