In 1978, she was dumped in the scrap yard, but carved the first mark of her revenge into a rusted gear: Every hand that had ever choked China would one day be ground into the dirt by this machine.
Official Synopsis
Lin Jing, the daughter of an overseas Chinese family, is branded a “class enemy” and sent to a southern agricultural machinery factory to clean the toilets.
On her first day, she finds her father's blood-written letter in a rain-soaked file bag: a patent lawsuit over which he had been driven to suicide by a German industrial giant.
That first night, using the gears of a scrapped sewing machine, she handcrafts a bearing with a precision of 1.8 microns, publicly crushing the arrogance of Germany's KRUPP. From then on, a new rule takes hold at the factory:
“Technical merit” outranks orders. Whoever can keep a machine running a little longer can make the bosses shut up.
She leads the workers in dismantling bureaucracy, burning Soviet revisionist manuals, and working out hydraulic formulas on an abacus. She renames the “Dongfanghong” the “Zhengqi.”
At the Canton Fair, foreign merchants mock Chinese farm machinery as “pandas fit only for display.”
She gives them a live demonstration on the spot: the Panda tears a combine harvester apart, running flawlessly over nail boards, through swamps, and up steep slopes. It takes her just ten years to rise from a female technician trampled into greasy dirt to chief engineer invited by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
And now her next goal is to make the world hear the roar of Chinese gears:
“Patents? We call them blood-debt gear patents now!”
Reader warning:
This book is packed with thrilling, cathartic moments, so buckle up. The heroine doesn't do romance. She talks torque and revenge.
