In 2020, a middle manager at a major internet company, skilled in strategic planning, team management, and resource integration, dies suddenly from overwork.
When he opens his eyes again, the smell of machine oil and rust fills his nostrils. He has become a 22-year-old, grade-three wage fitter at the Jiangcheng Agricultural Machinery Factory in 1980. His file even says, “Both parents deceased, no social connections.”
Armed with forty years of future memories and top-level business know-how, Lin Yu must first use a month’s wages to buy back the dignity of staying alive. With a file in hand, he will scrape away the era’s rust and the rough edges of fate.
He “talks big”: turn the machinery factory around in three months, earn foreign currency through exports within six, and build China’s first CNC machine within a year. Others laugh at his wild claims, but he turns them into orders and those orders into a National Science and Technology Progress Award.
He “sells dreams”: telling the women on the factory floor about performance-based equity, military commanders about digital logistics, and Silicon Valley investors about shares in “Made in China.” His promises echo forty years into the future, and everyone eventually realizes they weren’t empty dreams at all, but a feast of the future served ahead of its time.
From the fitter’s workshop to township enterprises, from Shenzhen’s stock subscription certificates to the ringing of the Nasdaq bell, Lin Yu keeps his rebirth a secret. With a practical yet far-sighted perspective, he turns every “wild claim” into a meeting point between the nation’s fortunes and his family’s future.
But as wealth and power come rolling in…
This is both a personal high-stakes gamble and an industrial epic, a clash between steel and chips, and a tug-of-war between ideals and desire.
1980. The curtain rises. Standing before a rust-spotted machine tool, Lin Yu says to his era:
“In my last life, I worked for capital. In this life, I’ll make capital work for me.”
Very good book!