Heavy Industry of a Great Power: Starting at Hongxing Shipyard

In 1979, everyone at Hongxing Shipyard was waiting to laugh as Chen Weiguo got fired. Then Chen Jianhui, deputy chief engineer at the Ship Research Institute, transmigrated into the body of this hotheaded young troublemaker. On his very first day, he used twenty-first-century thinking to repair an old Soviet machine tool that no one else dared touch. Some people said, “Guess the kid got lucky.” Then he rescued someone from beneath a machine. Everyone thought, “This Chen Weiguo kid really has some skill.” It wasn’t until he landed a foreign contract with a homemade cylindrical grinder and attracted the attention of domestic defense factories that everyone finally realized Chen Weiguo was a hidden genius! This time, the rise of China’s heavy industry begins at a small shipyard! This is a story about going from repairing machine tools to building warships. It starts with the C620 right in front of him and ends in the South China Sea.