Industrial Overlord

Industrial Overlord is Qi Cheng's (real name Gong Jianghui) first novel set in the industrial world. Serialized on Qidian.com starting in September 2011 and completed in early 2013, it runs to roughly 2.64 million Chinese characters. The story follows Lin Zhenhua, a mechanical engineering graduate student whose consciousness, after an accident, is transported back to 1979 and into the body of a young man who has just left the army and taken a job as an apprentice in a state-owned factory. Armed with the mechanical engineering knowledge of his former life, he confronts outdated equipment and backward technology in a small state-run plant, while beyond the factory walls the tide of reform and opening-up is already rising. Lin starts with concrete tasks on the shop floor, first solving technical problems others find intractable, then turning his attention to products and markets, step by step transforming the modest factory into an enterprise capable of taking on fertilizer equipment, CNC machine tools, and ever more complex machinery, gradually extending its business overseas and ultimately building a heavy-industry group spanning Eurasia. Through this arc of growth "from small to large," the novel weaves together many real issues in Chinese industry from the late 1970s to the early 21st century, such as equipment importation, technological breakthroughs, reform of state-owned enterprises, competition from foreign capital, and industrial upgrading. Drawing on his upbringing among factory families and his professional grounding in economics, the author renders workshops, blueprints, negotiating tables, and the mood of the times with solid authenticity, and readers regard the book as one of the founding works of industrial fiction in Chinese web literature.