Page 173 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

specifying a billion dollar amount. He adds that he’s confident the firm will
top out with a “market valuation of $10 billion.”
I first met the scientist Jiang in November 2006 in the lobby of Beijing’s
five-star Grand Hyatt Hotel while the city was hosting an unprecedented
China-Africa trade and investment summit that made Manhattan during the
annual United Nations sessions seem calm. Jiang seemed energized, sur-
rounded by African diplomats and having hushed conversations over coffee
and tea. He spent an hour sharing his story of humble origins and his plans
for commercializing his breakthrough and patented research.

China’ s great hope

Jiang grew up during the Cultural Revolution to the east of Nanchang in the
small fishing village of Yugan, where his parents were farmers and his father
was a town leader. As part of an education grounded in science, he first studied
physics in middle school. He graduated in 1984 at the age of 21 with a degree
in physics from Jilin University, a leading national university in the north-
eastern Chinese city Changchun that is known for its physics college. Jiang
returned to his native region and taught physics for three years at the Jiangxi
Polytechnic University, now part of Nanchang University, where today the pro-
fessor works on matching up the complex crystal structures of atoms. In 1989,
he received a master’s degree from the research-focused Changchun Physics
Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At Changchun, one of eleven
branches of the prestigious academy, Jiang’s graduate adviser recognized his
skills at hands-on research in the lab, a talent that led 17 years later to the for-
mation of LatticePower, which is named after a basic physics principle.
After graduation, Jiang returned to Nanchang “to be with my local
people.” There he nixed any thought he’d had as a boy of pursuing a career as
a doctor and instead dug into his research. Jiang downplays any notion that he
was inspired by China’s first Nobel Prize-winning physicists Chen Ning Yang
and Tsung-Dao Lee. “When I was young, I had no knowledge of them,” he
says. Instead, his motivation came from his professors’ encouragement, but he
pointedly adds that his “persistence and energy came from myself.”
“My goal was low key, to take it step by step,” Jiang says. “I had no huge
ambition for a technology innovation or for LatticePower to become a world-
class company.”

LatticePower Corporation—China Lights Up the Globe 147