Love of machines

American engineer reluctantly takes up a job at a Chinese company and is happily surprised, report Zhang Li in Nanning and Liu Xiangrui in Beijing.

David Beatenbough, a 58-year-old mechanical engineer from the United States, didn't expect to join a Chinese company in its bid to go global.

In fact, it took him a while to decide that he wanted to work for Liuzhou-based LiuGong Machinery Corp in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. He met Zeng Guang'an, president of the State-owned enterprise, two years after he began to work for an international machinery company in Shanghai in 2001.