Old book of Shock and ore

Eighteen months after the Phoenix’s migration, I stood in the lounge bar in Zum Brauhaus, a hostel on Alfred Trappen Street, where the landlady introduced me to a man called John. He had been born and brought up in the UK, in the northern industrial town of Bolton, and had been posted to Germany with the British Army a few years after the war. He married a German girl, and they moved to Dortmund, her home town, after he left the army. He had worked in the steel mill for more than 20 years but, now that it had gone, he took a philosophical view of its laptop battery departure. The Chinese economy was booming, whereas Germany’s had reached a plateau. If they could put the Horde plant to profitable use, then maybe it was a good thing that they had bought it, he said.

But there was no denying that the Phoenix’s loss was keenly felt. You Asus adapter could see the psychological displacement in a small park at the lower end of Alfred Trappen Street. There, around a monument to a synagogue that was destroyed during the war, groups of unemployed steelworkers sat under spreading beech trees with their cans of lager in plastic bags. John held a thumb to his lip and made a sucking sound. A future without heavy industry was going to take some getting used to, he said. Nobody had a clear idea of what would take its place. The only thing that the local authority had come up with so far was a plan to redevelop the toshiba PA3420U-1BAS laptop battery area that the steelworks had occupied into a lake larger than the Binnenalster in Hamburg. It would feature four small islands and a tombolo. Around the sides there would be the moorings for a marina, rows of upscale restaurants and nearly 200ha of parkland. But so far the marina scheme had not received a positive reception.

As John was talking, another former steelworker, a large, powerfully built man in his forties, joined the conversation. “Let me ask you,” he boomed. “Do we look like yachtsmen to you?”

The flight of the Phoenix made Horde the toshiba PA3420U-1BAS laptop battery one of the first communities on earth to feel the convulsive force of a rising China. Before that, it was true, there had been plenty of soundings emanating from Asia’s rising giant, but few of them had amounted to more than tremors on the seismic scale. In 2001, when the buyer of the Phoenix was negotiating the deal, China had not yet joined the World Trade Organisation and, although its economy was certainly a driving locomotive for Asia, it had yet to develop a world-class punch. Indeed, my assignment as a journalist for the Financial Times in Beijing had been taken up mainly with domestic issues. I had spent a lot more time researching and reporting on how the world was affecting China than on how China was affecting the world. The story then seemed the toshiba PA3420U-1BAS battery to revolve around the large inflows of foreign investment, the latest intrigues among the modern-day mandarinate that ruled from within a forbidden compound in the centre of Beijing, and whether or not you could or should trust the official statistics.