Director Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams received the Jury Prize at the 58th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night.
His film depicts a love story among workers obeying the government's call to relocate to factories in a remote new territory in the 1960s.
A Belgian film, The Child, made by sibling filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won the Palme d'Or, the festival's top honor.
US director Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, a drama starring Bill Murray as an aging Don Juan, received second grand prize.
The best director and best actor awards went to Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke for Hidden and Tommy Lee Jones for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
(CRI May 23, 3005)