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The second volume of the novel is like a slow boat ride on a broad, dark and silent river. It uses calm and rough lines to describe the life and death, good and evil, noble and humble, loneliness and vanity, obedience and struggle, joy and harmony of the townspeople of Jiajiawan. Fear: Jia Wenwu, the deputy chief engineer of Zhongtian Coal, sat in the city of sleep, guarding his mentally retarded son and worried about it. He died on the high-voltage line due to a trance; his death made Wang Guoquan, the chairman of Zhongtian Coal, fearful and uneasy, and Jia Hong stepped forward. The pressure made it difficult for Wu Yuzhen and her children to find a way out. The small thermal power unit of Zhongtian Coal Industry was facing the fate of being shut down, which plunged him into unprecedented confusion and crisis; Chen Rongde was admitted to the hospital due to schizophrenia and committed suicide in the endless emptiness and delusion; his sister Chen Rongmiao fled Jiajiawan and tried to rediscover the meaning of life in the United States... As their fate was separated by the river of desire, Jiajiawan also fell into the embarrassment of what was right and what was wrong in the process of modernization.

"The River that Divides Life" describes in one million words the chronological history of China's social development and changes in people's lifestyles over the past thirty years from the 1980s to today's reform and opening up. The novel begins in a small town called Jiajiawan on the Loess Plateau. With the continuous exploitation of local coal resources and large amounts of foreign investment, the desires of the locals are like a river breaking free from its course. The author uses the length and "ambition" of Sholokhov's "Quiet Don" to describe the ideological fission of life, death and lust in several generations in the long river that divides human life.