When he was a little boy in the 1980s, Wang Xiaojun was taught to be proud of his home town of Luliang in the northwestern Chinese province of Shanxi. It is China’s largest coal-producing region, and Luliang was a significant base for the army during World War II.
Nestled in the mountains of the dusty Loess Plateau, Luliang, a city of 3.4 million people, has had less to shout about in recent years. A series of corruption scandals in the city brought down several high profile officials shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) came to power in 2013; there are