Lu started work in a steel factory in 1977.

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To please officials in the city of Haicheng, close to Xiyang Village, Mr Zhou abandoned a plan to build a steel factory in the southern port of Beihai, where there would be ready access to ore shipped from Australia.

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In the past, Hakuta might find himself carrying a load of stainless-steel pipes from a factory in Tokyo's suburbs to Nagoya, only to return home empty-handed.

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Eximbank loans made in 1985 for several meat-processing plants, copper-processing facilities, a turnkey chemical complex, a color-television tube plant, a glass funnel facility, a process computer used in steel manufacturing, and a tractor factory remain unpaid.

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Tata had an easier time buying Jaguar, and even Corus, the former British Steel, than opening a factory in his own country.

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He'd be squeezed against scores of other swine, hoofing a steel grate floor, while growing fatter and fatter on a factory farm.

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The steel factory tour generated no pictures, but his stops at a library and an electronics research facility in Jagang Province the day before did.

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His book is an engaging reminder that, cyber-Utopianism aside, the internet is as much a thing of flesh and steel as any industrial-age lumber mill or factory.

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