China's President Jiang Zemin's first and only real job outside politics was at the First Automobile Works (FAW) in Changchun, a model Soviet-designed factory, where he spent five formative years.
'It was a very significant experience for him,' said Yin Wen, first deputy mayor of Changchun and like Mr Jiang, a trained electrical engineer.
'He worked and lived with ordinary workers. It was very important for him to work in some grassroots units and by working in FAW, he understood factories and workers.' President Jiang, who was already 30 when he started working at the plant's coal-fired power-station, is still remembered by former colleagues.
'At the time I never imagined that he would become general secretary,' admitted Li Shizheng, now head of the plant's information office, before adding hastily: 'Of course, I always thought that he was very capable and very kind-hearted to workers and cadres. He had a just attitude and a very efficient, vigorous style of working.' Mr Jiang is the only top leader in Chinese history ever to have earned his living in a factory, although China is officially a dictatorship of the proletariat and the industrial workers are hailed in the constitution as its vanguard. Although Deng Xiaoping spent a few months working in factory in France, no other Chinese leader this century had ever held down an ordinary job.
Soon after Mr Jiang left Jiaotong University in Shanghai with an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, he was one of 1,000 workers selected to be sent for training at the prestigious Stalin Auto plant outside Moscow.
After a year adding Russian to his knowledge of English, Mr Jiang spent 12 months training at the giant carworks where he was also the party secretary in charge of the other Chinese trainees. The Stalin carworks were the greatest in the Soviet Union and conceived as the answer to Ford's Rouge plant in Detroit, where the first assembly production line was created.