Page 174 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

Jiang took time out only to get married and raise a family and to play an
occasional game of Xiangqi, or Chinese chess, a fast-moving tactical board
game that exercises the brain the way Western chess does. To facilitate about
a dozen governmental grants and support for his research, the Jiangxi
Changda Photoelectric Technology Co. was formed with Jiang as general
manager and Nanchang University
as the majority owner. In February
2006, LatticePower was estab-
“I had no huge ambition for a technology lished, and today it has an approxi-
innovation or for LatticePower to become a mately 30-member research and
world-class company.” development team, all born and
educated in China. Six of the re-
Jiang Fengyi,
searchers are Jiang’s Ph.D. students,
president, LatticePower Corporation
and the rest come from leading
Chinese science universities. Jiang
says his team is moving faster than
comparable labs in Germany and Japan that he has visited. He is not sure
about the United States. Three years ago he applied for a visa to the United
States but was rejected, he says.
Jiang asks me if I would like to see a demonstration of his light-emitting
diodes. There in the lobby, his colleague and vice president Wang Min, who
is in charge of governmental relationships, administration, and logistics
support, picks up an aluminum-encased suitcase. He snaps open the clasps
and opens it, and I see bright white letters in the thousands spelling out the
company’s name.
Jiang smiles proudly at my amazement at the show of lights. He leans
over and with his intelligent-looking brown eyes asks me if I’d like a close
look at the tiny lights. Opening a clear plastic sandwich bag, he takes out a
clear jelly-bean-shaped object: a single LED. He holds up the fruits of his
research, and I snap a quick photo before he hides it, not wanting to give
away too much intellectual property in public.
Buying into the hypothesis that this is world-class disruptive technology,
I ask Jiang if he wants to be famous. He instantly begs off. “Not really.” Well,
wouldn’t it be great to turn LatticePower into a moneymaking publicly traded
enterprise? He beams. “Yes, but not for myself, but for the good of society.”
I see that Jiang, aside from being a master scientist, is well schooled in the

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