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2005 "Magnificent Ten" Highlights Innovation, Social Responsibility

Deng received the award based on Vimicro’s development of a computer chip capable of enabling medium- and low-end computers to do calculations at the same speed as super-large computers.

As he received the award, he said, “The honour does not belong to me personally…it epitomizes the on-going effort by a whole generation of Chinese to strive for scientific and technological innovations.”

The CCTV awards event has been held annually since 2000; awards are given to ten people who have made significant contributions to China’s economic development during the previous year.

Wang Xiaoya, hostess of the CCTV “Economy 30 Minutes Programme,” who presided over the awards ceremony, said, “As a rule, all those chosen for the honour must be must be innovative in one way or another. For the selection of the 2005 Magnificent Ten, however, we put the emphasis on innovative achievements.” She said some have also been chosen based on the performance of their social responsibilities, their influence in China or abroad, and based on what they have done to promote the development of their own or related industries.”

       The “China Starlight Chip,” developed by Vimicro, is China’s first with its own proprietary intellectual property rights. Now available in a complete series, Vimicro products are sold in 16 countries including the United States, Japan, Britain and France. It has won a 60 percent share of the global computer image-input market, according to Deng. Shortly after the China Starlight Chip won the State Scientific Achievements Award in 2005, the highest of its kind offered by the central government, it became known as the “China Heart”—with the Chinese characters for “chip” and “heart” being homonyms. On November 15, 2005, Vimicro was listed on NASDAQ stock exchange in the United States.

       Deng was born in 1968 in Nanjing, the capital of East China’s Jiangsu Province. He graduated from the China Science and Technology University in 1991 and completed his doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States in 1996. Three years later, he returned to China, resolved to begin a career by taking advantage of the country’s rapidly growing economy. Vimicro now has several dozen experts similar to Deng, men and women who have returned from the United States with doctoral degrees.

“Innovation is the soul of a nation,” Wang commented. “In China, I believe, the most innovative are those who are well-versed in high-tech, while willing to serve the country.”

Prodded by Wang and the audience, the Vimicro board chairman sang the pop song “My Chinese Heart,” to great applause.

       The winners of the 2005 Magnificent Ten Award were chosen from among several hundred candidates recommended by “people of all walks of life” on the CCTV Web site. A 100-member panel was set up in August for the selection process. It was composed of 35 economic newspaper and magazine editors, 20 economists, 20 industrialists and 25 Chinese and foreign VIPs. Under standing rules for the awards, no Party or government official may be involved in the selection process, and, to ensure fairness, the names of the panel members were made known to the public only after the awards ceremony was held.

       Also chosen on the strength of his company’s innovations was Yin Tongyao, board chairman and general manager of Chery Automobile Company Limited, which is based in Wuhu, Anhui Province in East China. From what Yin called a “humble start” fuelled by five private investors in 1997, Chery is now producing 400,000 vehicles a year. According to the Ministry of Commerce, China exported a record 9,600 complete vehicles in the first six months of 2005. Of these, 3,357—more than one-third—were Chery vehicles. Also in 2005, in a groundbreaking event for Chinese automotive industry, Chery began producing China’s first high-performance Euro IV engines in cooperation with AVL List of Austria. In April, Yin was named a “national model worker” by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

       On August 5, 2005, Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine in the world, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Li Yanhong, Baidu’s board chairman and CEO, said, “This caused no small a sensation in the world, indicating that China’s Internet industry is now ready to compete in the global market. To win in global competition, we know we have to be innovative.”

       Li, a native of Yangquan, Shanxi Province, in North China, started Baidu in 1999 after he returned from New York State University in the United States with a master’s degree.

“I believe the world needed a search engine like Baidu because Chinese is becoming increasingly important, maybe as important as English, in the coming decades,” he said during the ceremony in Golden Hall. “But, to help my compatriots improve their lot motivated me to go in for the search engine.”

       On March 19, 2005, Li—now one of the richest persons in China, with personal assets exceeding 1 billion yuan (about US$123.94 million) in value—visited a poor couple in Beijing who had just opened a massage parlour. Both the husband and wife were blind, and they had been jobless until they became qualified massagers with help of Baidu. The couple has a daughter, a sixth-grader at a primary school.

“She had used Baidu to search for instructions on massaging to help her parents learn the techniques, largely through self-teaching,” Li said. “While moved by what the couple and their daughter had done, I was never so happy, knowing that my brainchild, Baidu, can play a role in the building of a ‘harmonious society.’ ”

He was referring to the latest call of China’s top authorities for a “fair” society in which all citizens can benefit from the “achievements of reform and opening policies.”

       Unlike the privately owned Vimicro and Baidu, the Yili Group Company, based in Huhhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is a large State-owned enterprise, the largest producer and supplier of milk and milk products in the country. Pan Gang, its board chairman and president, was honoured, in part, for being “innovative” in promoting the company’s business. In 2005, the Yili Group became the first in China’s food industry to become a sponsor for the 2008 Olympic Games. It will be the sole supplier of milk and milk products for Olympians from all over the world during the Games.

“While boosting our corporate image and promoting our products, the move (to sponsor the Games) places even heavier responsibilities on our shoulders,” Pan said. “Our products will have to meet the highest international quality standards, good enough to withstand the most stringent scrutiny not only by the Chinese authorities but also that of the International Olympic Committee.”

       Providing commentary, Wang said the social responsibilities of industrial or commercial companies mean much more than providing quality products and services.

“The formulation ‘social responsibility’ refers to a whole range of values and ethical standards that have to be followed by the management of a company,” she said. On December 1, 2005, Yili was commended by the Chinese press for “excellent corporate citizen behaviour,” along with Coca Cola (China), BP (China), Ford (China) and HP (China). “Corporate citizen behaviour,” Wang explained, “covers the protection of staff rights and interests, environmental protection, involvement in social welfare programmes, the protection of consumer rights and interests, and the companies’ relations with their business partners.”

       Over the past three years, Yili has donated more than 100 million yuan (US$12.4 million) to charity and disaster-relief programmes.

As he received his award, Wei Jiafu, president of the China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (COSCO), the country’s international shipping and modern logistics giant, announced at the Beijing Hotel gathering that in 2005, the COSCO Charity Fund was set up with 100 million yuan. Winners of the Magnificent Ten Award have usually been chosen based mainly on the economic performances of the candidates’ companies. There was, however, a significant change in the selection of the 2005 Magnificent Ten, as due attention was paid to the performance of companies in attending to their social responsibilities. There was a reason for it. According to China’s official press, only about 1 percent of Chinese enterprises have contributed, in one way or another, to charitable or social welfare programmes.

       Attention to “social responsibilities,” however, does not mean that “economic performance” was to be neglected in the selection of the 2005 Magnificent Ten.

“In 2005, COSCO generated 20 billion yuan (about US$2.5 billion) in after-tax profits, nearly 17 percent more than in the previous year,” Wei told the gathering. “To put it graphically, our 2005 profits averaged 15 yuan (US$1.86) for each member of the Chinese population.”

       Fu Chengyu, general manager of China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), was honoured for a bold, yet abortive, US$18.5 billion bid in 2005 to buy the American oil giant Unocal. He was the driving force behind the bid, which met with strong opposition from American politicians who were nervous—unjustifiably—about “China’s threat” to their country’s energy security. Though the bid failed, the CNOOC general manager, a fluent English speaker with a degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Southern California in the United States, was named by the US TIME magazine as one of the 14 “most influential men in the world” for the year. A personal profile in the magazine describes him as a man “with sufficient boldness to open a new era,” an era that will see “China’s aggressive global economic plans” becoming “increasingly irresistible.”

       During a visit on April 8, 2005, President Hu Jintao urged Weicha Power to “work hard and become globally important.” Speaking at the Beijing Hotel ceremony, Tan Xuguang, its board chairman and CEO, pledged to “come up to the expectations” of the Chinese leadership and people. “I want to tell you just one thing, that is, we have just built the country’s first large-capacity, high-speed diesel engine with proprietary intellectual property rights,” he said. “The engine is indispensable for China’s auto industry, for the manufacture of heavy duty trucks, to be precise.”

       On December 11, 2005, Tang was commended, along with 24 others, as a “most influential industrial leader” by the Economic Daily, China’s most important economic newspaper. “The ‘Magnificent 25,’ ” said Wang, “are influential because what they have done has spurred the development of their own and related industries. Weicha Power has made an invaluable contribution to the development of China’s automobile industry by supplying it with quality engines.”

       Also honoured with 2005 Magnificent Ten awards were Zhou Houjian, board chairman of Hisense, a domestic appliances producer in Qingdao, Shandong Province, East China; Liang Wengen, board chairman of Sany Group Company in Changsha, Hunan Province, Central China; and Wang Jianlin, board chairman of the Wanda Group in Dalian, Liaoning Province, Northeast China. They were chosen for their “economic performances” and their success in putting modern corporate systems into practice.

       Along with the Magnificent Ten, a “public good” award has been given each year since 2000. The 2005 honour was given to Liao Xiaoyi, director of the Global Village of Beijing (GVB), a non-governmental organization devoted to environmental protection and the building of a resource conservation-minded society.

Liao said, “The more rapidly the Chinese economy develops, the greater should be the public’s attention to environmental protection. Resource conservation is pivotal to environmental protection. Resource conservation means cutting the consumption of resources wherever and whenever possible.”

       In collaboration with other non-governmental organizations, the GVB campaigned for a nationwide drive to cut the use of air conditioners by keeping indoor temperatures at not higher than 26 degrees Celsius in the summer and at no higher than 18 C during the winter. The campaign began in Beijing and in just a few days, spread to all parts of China. It received positive responses from the government and the people. In Beijing and numerous other places, government offices were the first to put into practice the so-called “18-26 indoor temperature standard.”

       Liao received warm applause when she proposed a range of other measures for energy conservation, and she expressed her belief that some of the measures can be easily taken.

“Use bicycles and [public] transport as far as possible,” she urged the audience. “Switch off your computers after work. Buy smaller and more environmentally friendly cars. Climb the stairs instead of using lifts…this saves the consumption electricity but also does a lot of good for your health.”