Page 169 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

CHAPTER TWELVE

Leading Chinese scientist Jiang Fengyi has invented a cheaper, longer-lasting light that
promises to replace incandescent and fluorescent lightbulbs, with energy savings of more
than 50 percent. The next steps are to take LatticePower from the laboratory to the
assembly line and ramp up for a billion-dollar IPO.

LatticePower
Corporation—
China Lights Up the
Globe

y China Eastern Airlines
Mflight from Beijing to Nan-
chang, a third-tier city in the south-
east, takes only two hours. I’m here
on a day trip to meet with Jiang
Fengyi, a leading Chinese scientist and
the country’s hope for a gigantic tech-
nology breakthrough.
A modern-day Thomas Edison,
Jiang has 15 patents for making lights
so efficient and bright that one day
they could make the ubiquitous General Electric bulb obsolete. He spends
most days—and occasional nights—in a research laboratory in the Ivy League
setting of Nanchang University, where he teaches physics when he is not
working on his new energy-saving, long-lasting light. Jiang hopes his research
will transform the century-old lighting industry radically and raise China’s
status from a largely poor rural country to a major contributor of cutting-
edge technology. Backed by the Chinese government and $45 million from
four major international investors, Jiang’s start-up, LatticePower Corpo-
ration, promises to be to the world of lights what Microsoft and Intel were to

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