李开复:开始一个不同的世界

Hello and welcome to another edition of Frontline the weekly feature program brought to you by China Radio International. I'm Yao Yongmei.

Li Kaifu is a name familiar to those working in the country's information technology industry. One of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet sector, Li helped to found Google China, a subsidiary of Google, the world's largest Internet search engine. His blog is widely followed in China and he runs a popular website to help young Chinese people achieve careers in IT.

This September, the founding president of Google China resigned from his position to start a new venture called "innovation works". This is the fifth time Li made a major career change. What is his "innovation works" all about? And what goal is he pursuing behind the constant change of careers?

Let's follow Yang Lei to take a closer look at Li Kaifu, a business executive, and a researcher.

Li kaifu was born in Taiwan in 1961. As the son of a legislator father and a teacher mother, Li said he was raised in an open-minded family and he was taught to be innovative from childhood:

"I remembered that our neighbor once told us that he had more than one hundred fish in his pond. I didn't believe him. I asked my sisters to come along with me to have a look. We counted together, but the pond was deep and the fish swam so quickly that we lost count. Suddenly, an idea occurred, why didn't we drain the pond, so the fish would be all lying there for us to count. We did that. And we found that there were only 50 fish altogether. So we proved that our neighbor was bragging."

Li Kaifu said when the neighbor came to complain, his mother had to apologize for him. But he did see a soft smile on his mother's face, since he demonstrated how innovative he was being a kid of seven. At the age of eleven, Li Kaifu left Taiwan to study in the United States. Li said although this was a decision made by his parents for him, he was consulted and his parents presented him with the pros and cons of going abroad to study at an early age:

"My parents asked for my opinion whether I wanted to go. They said if I didn't feel like leaving home, then just forget about it. But they encouraged me to go."

In 1973, Li left for the United States and attended high school in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In 1979, he was admitted into the prestigious Columbia University in New York, majoring in political science. But Li Kaifu said he soon realized that politics was not his cup of tea.

"I was lucky that Columbia University allows students to change major in their first and second years. When I studied political science, I always scored a B minus or C. As soon as I shifted to computer science, all I got was A grades or even A pluses. I have both a gift and passion for computers."

After graduating from Columbia at the top of his class in 1983. Li Kaifu went on to pursue his Ph.D in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Because of his pioneering work in the areas of speech recognition and artificial intelligence, Dr. Li was asked to stay at the university as the youngest associate professor at the age of 26. Carnegie Mellon also promised him tenure in four or five years time. When a lot of people envied him and forecast a promising career ahead of him as a young scholar, Li said he was not sure that spending the rest of his life teaching was what he wanted.

"I found most of my research was a waste of time, as nobody put the research results into real life. The world wasn't a little different because of what I've done. At that time, I happened to know a vice president of Apple Computer. He persuaded me to join Apple. He asked me, 'kaifu, do you want to spend the rest of your life writing useless papers, or do you want to do something to change the world?"

Li Kaifu said he was touched by the question and made the decision to give himself a try in the broader world. Li said he was also thankful to his tutor at Carneige Mellon, who respected his decision:

"It's not an easy thing for me to say 'I had to quit' to my tutor, who had been very kind and helpful during my years at Carnegie Mellon. But he's been supportive and inspiring, as he always was."

After two years as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, Li joined Apple Computer in 1990 as a research and development executive. This was the first career change in Li Kaifu's life. Was Apple as sweet as it sounded? Stay tuned, "frontline" will be right back after this.