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The machine was built specifically to produce metal components like bulkheads, landing gear, and engine parts for China’s Air Force and commercial passenger planes. Housed in a gray-and-red prefabricated hangar with a glass viewing platform on one side is the world’s biggest closed-die hydraulic press forge, a 22,000-ton steel behemoth that China hopes will allow it to technologically leapfrog the United States when it comes to engineering the next generation of military hardware. The company’s proudest achievement, however, towers 10 stories over the otherwise squat compound. It makes crankshafts for cargo ships and the blades for hydroelectric power turbines, pieces of metal so large that diesel locomotives are needed to move them on train tracks between factory workshops. No longer just a defense contractor, it makes entire steel mills and most of the parts needed to build a nuclear power plant. Even today, the thick, guttural drawl of the northern transplants and their children sticks out among the lispy pronunciation of the native Sichuanese.īut, for all its backwater charm, Erzhong is part of the backbone of China’s industrial infrastructure. In 1958, workers from China’s northeast, the country’s industrial heartland and the home of First Heavy, were relocated to Deyang in western Sichuan province to make large-caliber artillery at what was deemed a safe distance from the Soviet Union in case China’s onetime ally decided to invade. And the factory’s first generation of managers, now in their 90s, live with their children and grandchildren in a handful of villas shaded by trees growing kumquats and ball-bearing-sized huajiao, the mouth-numbing spice used in Sichuan cooking.Įrzhong - literally “second heavy,” as in China Second Heavy Machinery Group - started life as an offshoot of the Chinese Red Army. Retirees living in old company-allocated apartment buildings that skirt the campus grow vegetables on unused land at the base of the factory walls. Bicycles leave first cars are allowed to follow 15 minutes later. Around midday, the place empties out as workers go home for their 2½-hour lunch break. Old men in faded blue overalls squat while weeding the pavement in the steamy Sichuan heat, fighting a losing battle against the vines and creepers that have already taken over the older factory buildings. China National Erzhong Group’s factory campus is not what you’d expect of China’s highly touted military-industrial complex.