《中国日报》高级记者、“美国小哥”Erik Nilsson（中文名：聂子瑞），来华十余年间，作为一名记者和志愿者，曾经去过中国许多贫困地区，见证了这些地区日新月异的变化。
《太阳升起——“美国小哥”见证中国扶贫奇迹》，浓缩作者多年来亲身探索中国的扶贫方案、灾后救援，以及整体发展的报道，他亲历的那些鲜活生动的故事，彰显出在全球背景下中国解决贫困问题的重要性和面临的特殊挑战。
本书从汶川地震讲起，读者可以看到，贫困和地理环境所导致的悲剧终将在救援和重建中被克服，在这片无数生命逝去的地方，人们也将重拾希望；然后作者将去往“地球第三极”青藏高原，在那里，中国克服了极端恶劣的自然条件等不利因素，给高原带来了短短几年前还不可想象的富裕；随后作者回顾了过去十多年里采访过的全国各地的扶贫项目，包括贵州乡村的虚拟现实娱乐公园、内蒙古牧民开办的鸸鹋农场等；最后，作者花了5个星期采访长江经济带沿岸数千公里的11座城市，以极限沉浸的形式来分析改革开放如何驱动了中国的扶贫奇迹。书中附有相关报道的汉英双语短视频，可让读者获得更加直观的感受。
本书分中、英两个文版，国际化的表达方式，将更加有助于国际社会了解中国和中国人民；而对于那些对书中的一些话题已经有所了解的中国读者，Nilsson的作品也提供了一个崭新的视角。
CLOSER TO HEAVEN: A Global Nomad’s Journey Through China’s Poverty Alleviation distills China Daily journalist Erik Nilsson’s firsthand explorations of the country’s poverty solutions, disaster relief and overall development over more than a decade.
It’s not your typical China book.
The American discovers unexpected dimensions of these miracles while riding ostriches, visiting leprosy villages and spending birthdays at a mass grave. Along the way, he also rides, buys, milks and is kicked by yaks, whose dung he collects while camping with nomads on the planet’s “third pole”.
He begins in Sichuan after the 2008 Wenchuan quake left nearly 90,000 dead or missing. Across 15 trips through the disaster zone, he discovers a place where poverty and geology conspired to conjure tragedy that was overcome through rescue and recovery — where life was lost and hope was found.
Nilsson then continues on to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, where China has overcome extraordinary altitudes and isolation to bring prosperity that was unthinkable only several years ago. He founds a volunteer initiative to bring light to schools on the plateau by providing solar panels, followed by computers, libraries, medicine, coal, clothes, equipment and even yaks. He goes on to provide surgeries, prosthetics and wheelchairs for children with disabilities and university scholarships for nomads living in extreme poverty.
He next investigates diverse poverty-alleviation projects during his travels through every province on the Chinese mainland, from rural virtual-reality amusement parks in Guizhou to emus raised by ethnic Mongolian nomads.
Finally, he examines the reform and opening-up that has propelled the development necessary to drive China’s poverty-alleviation miracle — through extreme immersion. He joins the “bangbang army”, rides hogs with an elderly motorcycle club and steers a pill-sized gut-drone camera with a joystick while traveling thousands of kilometers to 11 cities along the Yangtze River Economic Belt over five weeks.
Nilsson’s personal chronicle arrives as China prepares to celebrate the first of its centenary goals — to eradicate extreme poverty to ultimately build a moderately prosperous society in all respects.