It took Chen Lifeng eight years to go from an ordinary clerk in Shiqiao Township to the provincial capital. This journey is a story in novels, but in reality it is a person's entire youth. Every step of his journey corresponds to the daily life of countless real grassroots cadres - writing materials, running projects, going to villages to live in households, responding to crises, coordinating conflicts, and promoting reforms. These things are neither earth-shattering nor spectacular, but it is these ordinary and concrete tasks that constitute the truest face of China's grassroots governance.
The reason why Chen Lifeng is able to go far is not because of his extraordinary talent, but because he always remembers two things: accurate data and warm hearts. He uses his pen as a sword to cut through falsehood and perfunctoryness, and he uses his heart as a lamp to illuminate his desires in the fields. This combination of knowledge and action allowed him to grow from a scholar who could only write materials to a leading cadre who could coordinate the overall situation. He used his own steps to measure the distance from "words" to "reality" and also measured a person's growth from "small self" to "big self".
The book is called "The True Way of Qingshan". The green hills are the background and the metaphor - those things that are silent, hard, and always standing. The right path is both direction and choice - at any fork in the road, choose to go to the right place. Chen Lifeng finally chose to postpone going to the province and finish the work at hand. This was the last choice he made in the story and the epitome of all the choices he made in his life.
