Page 145 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

I ask Liu to translate the Chinese characters. “It doesn’t matter what the place
is, it matters who is in the place,” he reads, explaining that the phrase comes
from an ancient Chinese emperor.
Liu was born in the thriving industrial city of Harbin in northeastern
China, a region once under Russian rule. His father often would come
home from his job as an engineer in one of the city’s many plants and tutor
young Liu in Chinese history. That made a lasting impression. “The history
of China influenced me very much. I feel I must do something to change
society, to push society to upgrade,” he says. “I like my country very much,”
he continues, choosing the English words carefully to convey his meaning in
a language he doesn’t speak well. “I want to do something for my dream, for
my China.”
He adds that his dream is to
create a successful Chinese enter-
prise that can “face the world” and
“I want to say that this business from China
be known internationally. “I want
can work and that it works because it is from
to say that this business from China
China.”
can work and that it works because
it is from China,” he sums up. I Liu Yingkui,
haven’t had a discussion with any founder and chairman, Oriental Wisdom
entrepreneur in my 15-plus years
covering international business who
remotely compares to Liu’s philosophical bent.
Liu graduated from Northeastern University, a large institute known pri-
marily for its engineering school, in the industrial city of Shenyang in north-
eastern China. He aced the school’s bachelor’s and master’s programs in
computer science. His life-changing moment came when his class software
project won first prize in a nationwide computer science contest. That work
became the basis for Oriental Wisdom in 2000.
This isn’t rocket science. Oriental Wisdom bases its software code on a
wireless technology called BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless)
developed by the San Diego firm Qualcomm. BREW is a platform for mobile
services that range from downloading ringtones to playing games to recog-
10
nizing speech patterns. Oriental Wisdom is one of 600 companies in China
that use this technology and has been given an award for effectiveness and
innovation by Qualcomm.

Oriental Wisdom—Confucian Capitalism 119