Reborn at the Pinnacle of Technology: Shen Jinbing's Heaven-Defying Journey

As the blinding light of a nuclear explosion faded, Shen Jinbing plunged back to 1989 with a fragment of a future chip. In an era when color TVs were scarce, he vowed, “We’ll build the pieces of China’s technological puzzle ourselves!”

At a village-run factory, he was mocked for sketching a VCD circuit on a cigarette packet. Yet he built the first domestically developed VCD player, at a cost 60 percent lower than Sony’s.

In the pager era, he reverse-engineered imported chips to develop a domestic baseband. On the mobile phone battlefield, he tapped out an independent operating system on a calculator, helping domestic phones surge from 3 percent to 67 percent of the Huaqiangbei market.

When work on lithography machines hit a bottleneck and a Dutch manufacturer broke its contract, he led his team in calibrating the equipment by hand, keeping lens errors within 0.001 microns and building the “Huaxia Core” 7-nanometer lithography machine.

From then on, his mark was on everything from Beidou chips to electric vehicle algorithms. This isn’t a cheat, but a scientist’s heroic effort to use technology to forge a backbone for the nation.