Li Gang, a pioneer of China's automotive industry and former chairman of The China Automobile Industry Corporation, has passed away

The surging news reporter learned from the relevant departments of China Automobile that Comrade Li Gang, the former chairman of China Automobile Industry Corporation (vice ministerial level), died in Beijing on the morning of February 9, 2022 at the age of 96 due to ineffective medical treatment.

According to the article "Li Gang, the Pioneer of China's Automobile Industry" published on the official website of the Tsinghua University Alumni Association, Li Gang, who entered the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Southwest United University in 1944 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1948, served as the deputy director of the technical factory and the fourth director of the First Automobile Manufacturing Plant (hereinafter referred to as "FAW"), and in the 1980s he served as the general manager and chairman of the Board of Directors of China Automobile Industry Corporation, making historic contributions to the incubation, birth and development of China's automobile industry. In 2015, Li Gang won the first Rao Bin Award of China Automotive Industry.

In 1952, Li Gang, who worked at the Tianjin Automobile Factory, received an order from the Automobile Preparation Group of the Ministry of Heavy Industry of Beijing and began to associate with FAW. From 1952 to 1954, he participated in the FAW working group sent to Moscow by the Ministry of Heavy Industry, and participated in the approval of the overall design of the Soviet Union on behalf of the Chinese government on behalf of the Chinese government, responsible for supervising and tracking the design of the Soviet side, ensuring the progress of FAW's construction and the liaison and communication between the two countries. On July 11, 1953, Meng Shaonong brought back to Changchun the total schedule of design delivery prepared by the Soviet side as the basis for arranging the construction of the factory, and gave Li Gang the task of the representative of the chief orderer of the FAW project in Suzhou. In November 1954, Rao Bin went to the Soviet Union for a reminder and inspection, and at the end of that year, Li Gang ended his two-year life in Moscow.

After returning to China, Li Gang reported to the Automobile Bureau of the First Machine Department, was promoted to engineer, transferred to FAW, and then assigned to the Engine Workshop Technology Section, and was put into the construction of the vigorous site three links and one level, equipment installation and production commissioning. In July 1956, after intense installation, cleaning, trial operation and trial production of parts, the first batch of Jiefang brand engines completed production, witnessing the breakthrough and leap of China's automobile industry from scratch.

Only two years after the Jiefang brand truck was put into production, the central government issued a task to FAW to design and manufacture domestic high-end cars, and Hongqi Automobile officially started research and development work. At the beginning of the construction of China's automobile industry, in the difficult conditions of lack of talents, lack of technology, and lack of materials, Li Gang led young technicians to carry forward the fine tradition of hard struggle, did not pay attention to status, did not talk about treatment, did not talk about material enjoyment, and hoped to contribute to the country, and devoted themselves to technical research day and night.

During the manufacture of the first Hongqi car, Li Gang worked in the engine workshop, and when the engine was first made, there were problems such as holding the cylinder, pulling the cylinder, breaking the piston ring, vibrating the whole machine, the oil pump could not hit the oil, and the hydraulic tappet "snapped" and so on. To this end, the whole factory organized hundreds of quality commandos, 30-year-old Li Gang with a group of college students who have just graduated from college for a few years to form a hydraulic tappet commando team, focusing on solving the hydraulic tappet in the engine high-speed operation life of the short technical problems, they while studying the relevant literature, analyzing foreign samples, while proposing a program to do tests, trying dozens of different materials, and finally selected alloy cast iron, in the quenching process to do 42 tests, before determining the quenching time and quenching temperature, The final hydraulic tappet withstood 400 hours of bench testing. With this spirit of not being afraid of difficulties and facing difficulties, they have solved many technical problems and mastered the core technology step by step.

In 1979, Li Gang served as the executive deputy director of FAW First. In 1980, Li Gang organized the independent development of a new FAW replacement truck, that is, the "Liberation 141 Program" for the complete replacement of the whole vehicle. In 1981, FAW produced the first CA141 prototype car, and the bench and driving tests fully met the design requirements, and on December 30 of the same year, it passed the first in-plant appraisal. In January 1982, Li Gang became the director of FAW. On July 15, 1986, the second generation of liberation CA141 five-ton vehicle with the international level of the 1980s achieved vertical conversion, and this car used FAW's own parameters to reach the most advanced level in China, which was equivalent to the level of similar cars in the world, so that the Jiefang brand truck was reborn.

In May 1982, China Automobile Industry Corporation was established, and Li Gang successively served as the general manager and chairman of the board of directors of the company. The original intention of the establishment of the China Automobile Company was to reform the system, in order to solve the situation of "scattered and poor" in the automobile industry at that time, Li Gang took the backbone enterprises as the leader and established 6 associated companies, and the associated companies had to compete and cooperate with each other, straightening out the relationship between enterprises and enterprises.