Li [Name]

From Zhenning County, Anshun City, Guizhou Province; graduated from Chongqing Institute of Civil Engineering and Architecture; founder of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

In 2018, he was named on the “List of 100 Outstanding Private Entrepreneurs Over 40 Years of Reform and Opening-up,” jointly compiled by the Central United Front Work Department and the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. He was also recognized as an “Economic News Figure of China” for 2019 and was included in Forbes magazine’s “Business Person of the Year—Global Business Leader” list in 2019.

He has been honored on lists including “100 Most Influential People in the World” by TIME, “100 Outstanding Private Entrepreneurs of the 40 Years of Reform and Opening-up,” “50 Most Influential Business Leaders in China,” and “Asia’s 100 Most Powerful Business Figures.”

In September 1991, Huawei rented the third floor of an industrial building in Haoye Village, Bao'an County, Shenzhen, as the site for developing stored-program telephone exchanges. More than fifty young employees followed Ren Zhengfei to this dilapidated factory building, embarking on an entrepreneurial journey fraught with challenges and uncertainty. They divided the entire floor into four work sections—single-board assembly, power supply, comprehensive testing, and preparation—plus a warehouse and a kitchen. Under the scorching heat of the machinery, workers toiled day and night, drenched in sweat as they designed and fabricated circuit boards, assembled switchboards, soldered circuits, wrote software, and conducted debugging, made revisions, then debugged again and again. In such an environment, Ren Zhengfei almost every day went to the site to inspect production and development progress, held meetings to discuss the difficulties encountered, and coordinated tasks to address all kinds of issues. During meal times, Ren Zhengfei and company leaders would join everyone at street-side food stalls for a communal dinner...