For Pei Shiyou, this year's Lunar New year's Eve was among the few he ha spent with his extended family.
“It's one of the benefits of starting a business in my hometown,” said Pei, who was born and raised in Hefei, Anhui province, and will soon turn 60. His wish for the Year of the Dog is to see smart glass— the product his team has been developing since 2016—go into production.
Starting a business with a creative research team and receiving government support have given him a strong sense of pride, a feeling he says he often lacked during his 25 years working in the United States, he said.
He was among Chinas first students to travel to the US for postgraduate stud. After that, he landed his first job at Amoco Corp and later moved to California eventually becoming head of product research and development at KLA-Tencor, a global capital equipment company in Silicon Valley. Yet Pei said he still felt unfulfilled and unsatisfied.
“It seemed there was an invisible ceiling for me when I pursued my career in the US. I felt like it was unlikely for me to achieve any higher sense of achievement or recognition.”
He returned to China in 2017, and nine years later established a smart-glass company in Hefei with two other US-trained engineers.
The company's product is suitable for low-temperature, flexible smart-film manufacturing and is able to self-adjust its level of transparency based on temperature changes and sunlight conditions, according to Pei, who said it has the potential to reduce the need for air conditioning and make curtains abandoned.
Between 2007 and 2016, Pei lived and worked in several Chinese cities. “What attracts me to Hefei is that it is easy to gather tech talents here due to the city's rapid development in recent years, and also because it has several universities,” he said. Support from the local government has been one of the best attractions that convinced Pei to locate his company in the eastern Chinese city.
In January last year, Hefei was approved as the site of a national-level science center, the second of its kind after an earlier one was built in Shanghai. The center, now under construction, will focus on areas including information technology, energy and health.
