Thirty-year-old Lin Yue is in his fifth year of working in Qiaowan Town, Yunshan County, Tongzhou City, Jiangling Province.
There is no prominent family, no good connections, and no one to pave the way for him. After five years at the grassroots level, the first thing he learned was not how to express himself, but to figure out why something couldn't be done, why a person refused to nod, and why some people dared to say a sentence while others dared not.
A sudden conflict on a key project pushed the originally humble Lin Yue into a position that no one was willing to take over. From project coordination, mass work to investment negotiations, from township agencies to county departments, from being assigned to do things to someone taking the initiative to come to him to discuss things, he gradually discovered that the so-called advancement is not just a change in position.
With each step forward, he gets more choices and faces more consequences.
Favors have distances, rules have boundaries, and interests have priorities.
What Lin Yue has to do is to learn to understand the game on this increasingly complicated road without letting himself completely become a member of the game.
