Page 21 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

The gains are driven in part by the Chinese government’s latest five-year
plan and President Hu Jintao’s pledge to make high-tech innovation the cor-
nerstone of economic growth and social development and the main source of
wealth in the twenty-first century. Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an informal
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adviser to the Chinese government says, “Technology is being looked at as
an economic driver and a force to develop a harmonious society that can deal
with the growing imbalances of rich and poor and other social ills such as pol-
lution and perhaps even corruption.”
Creativity behind the Great Wall was suppressed by the Cultural Revo-
lution and authoritarian Communist Party rule, yet the Chinese have long had
innate inventive talent. They gave the world paper, gunpowder, the calculator
(i.e., the abacus), and the compass, not to mention Chinese medicine, Con-
fucian philosophy, and finely woven silk cloth.

Chinese whiz kids

Liu Yingkui, who goes by the name “King,” is one of the new innovators in
today’s China. Over drinks in a Beijing bar, King excitedly tells me in broken
English that his company, Oriental Wisdom, makes advanced software for
customer sales management. It works on mobile phones, not personal com-
puters, as more common in the United States. At his obscure office in the
HaiDian high-tech and university district of Beijing, Jeff Chen demonstrates an
Internet browser called Maxthon that has Microsoft scurrying to adapt some of
its features for Internet Explorer. Near the gates of Tsinghua University,
Charles Wang introduces me to PingCo, one of the world’s first free instant mes-
saging services for mobile phones. On the campus of Nanchang University in
southeastern China, Professor Jiang Fengyi, founder of LatticePower
Corporation, shows me how he is cranking out lights that promise to replace
the standard General Electric bulbs. Over a Chinese box lunch at his
Shanghai high-rise headquarters, Shi Zhengrong, chairman and CEO of NYSE-
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listed Suntech Power Holdings, tells me that he holds 11 patents for producing
lower-cost solar panels with silicon. I later visit Suntech’s plant in smoggy indus-
trialized Wuxi that is making electricity from sunlight. Six-year-old Suntech is
on track to double 2007 revenues to $1.2 billion and become the world’s third
largest solar energy producer. Today Shi is the seventh richest person in China
and the 432nd in the world with a self-made fortune of $2.2 billion. 15

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