I'm still thinking about this. If he flew out of Hong Kong, that's a big airport. When you go to the gate they always have the flight's destination on the board above the gate counters at international airports. Was this guy just sleep walking all the way onto the plane?
When I looked for that map on Google, the city of Taiyuan looks like a pretty cosmopolitan place. Skyscraper hotels, lots of industry, traffic and neon signs. This is hardly being dumped into some hick frontier town. This story seems a little odd to me as well.
Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.