The Lu Family Business

**One spinning wheel, four generations, sixty-five years. From the loess plateau to the world stage, they proved with blood and sweat: Chinese enterprises can do business standing tall.** In the winter of 1978, farmer Lu Shougen traded three bags of dried sweet potatoes for a broken spinning wheel, carving the characters "Lu Ji" under the light of a kerosene lamp, but passed away before spring arrived. His eldest son, Lu Jianshe, went south to Shenzhen at seventeen, carrying bricks at construction sites, connecting wires in rainstorms, and secretly learning skills in the dark. He returned to rebuild the workshop, but it was confiscated. Amid the ruins, he vowed: to restart the Lu family's spinning wheel. Over the following decades, three generations of the Lu family pressed forward. They rode bicycles across three provinces to find cotton, ventured alone into Southeast Asia to expand territory, and developed their own chips during the darkest times of foreign technology blockades. Every time they were uprooted, they rose from the ruins. From hand-cranked spinning wheels in cave dwellings to intelligent factories, from three bags of dried sweet potatoes to a listed company, from being "choked" to full autonomy—this is not only a family's bloody struggle, but also a microcosm of Chinese manufacturing rising from standing up to becoming strong. Those who fell along the way, and those who took up the baton and kept running, used generations of backbone to support a legend of Chinese manufacturing. — Description from novelcodex.org