Green Shuttle on the Desert Sands

On May 5, 1993, an exceptionally fierce sandstorm struck Shacheng County in Northwest China. The people there realized their homes were about to be swallowed by the desert and turn into a second Lop Nur.

Wang Tianjian refused to let his two sons, Dongzi and Goudan, keep suffering on the edge of the desert, so he took them to the city to attend school.

When Dongzi grew up, he founded a business and eventually put down roots in Sidun Town, at the very front line of the battle against the sand. There, he pioneered an “ecological industrialization through desert control” model and led his fellow villagers to prosperity. Goudan pursued his literary dreams, became a well-known online novelist, and created an “internet-based public welfare desert control” model, encouraging volunteers from across the country to plant their own saxaul trees in the desert. Thanks to the favorable policies of reform and opening up and their own hard work, the brothers changed their fate and stood shoulder to shoulder to protect their home.

This work is based on the true story of Ma Junhe, a National Model Worker in Afforestation. Using the lives of the Wang brothers as its warp and the tide of reform and opening up as its weft, it explores desert control and prosperity, the guardianship of home, conflict between fathers and sons, and the bond between brothers. It vividly interprets the development philosophy that “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets,” composing an era's ode to the transformation of desert into oasis. This is not only an epic of desert control spanning two generations, but also a vivid reflection of rural revitalization in the new era, showcasing the Chinese people's indomitable spirit of struggle and their enduring faith in protecting their home.

The work won the 11th Dunhuang Literary and Art Award of Gansu Province and the Best IP Value Award at the third Realistic Fiction Writing Contest hosted by Shanghai Qimao Chinese Network. It was selected for the second Yangtze River Online Literature List of Most Promising IPs in Jiangsu Province, featured in the China Online Literature Yearbook (2023), and its ebook was added to the collection of the Shanghai Pudong Library.