The freezing sleet fell sideways across northern Yanjing, turning the wide asphalt avenues of Zhongguancun into slick rivers of dirty gray slush.
Zhongguancun was known across the nation as the cradle of high-tech innovation. Within these glass towers, thousands of brilliant software architects, photonic-chip researchers, university lecturers, and pediatric nurses worked eighty hours a week to build the nation’s future.
Most of them were young men and women from ordinary farming families who had graduated at the very top of their university classes.
They lived on cheap instant noodles, took night buses, and pooled their modest monthly stipends to rent tiny eighteen-square-meter studio units in the aging high-rises along the science corridor. Their rooms had peeling wallpaper, damp corners, and radiators that barely hissed in winter.
Yet they never complained. They took pride in their laboratories, working through the night to help their country break through foreign technological blockades.
Yet on this bitter Tuesday morning, the sidewalk outside the Innovation Talent Apartment Complex looked like a refugee camp in the middle of a war zone.
Suitcases with broken zippers, cardboard boxes soaked with icy water, and piles of heavy technical textbooks were strewn across the frozen pavement.
Over five hundred young professionals stood huddled together under cheap plastic umbrellas, shivering violently as the northern gale tore at their thin coats.
