The man who started it all

While Zhongguancun is a household name in China and acclaimed globally, few know about the founder of China's Silicon Valley, Chen Chunxian.

The nuclear physicist-turned-entrepreneur, who died in 2004, returned from one of the country's first friendship exchanges with the United States with a conviction his homeland should transform technology into profits.

He believed this was the way to emulate the US' advancements.

His Stateside visit came after studying in universities of the Soviet Union, where his outstanding academic performance won him audience with the likes of Josef Stalin.

After returning to China, the Sichuan province native, who established the country's first nuclear fusion research base in Anhui province, worked at the Academy of Science's physics institute from 1959, when it was in Zhongguancun.

Zhongguangcun was a village of 76 households and 276 residents until the academy opened there in 1952, becoming a magnet for scientists.

This, and the proximity to Chen's workplace, is the reason China's technological epicenter is located where it is.

In 1980, he brought in 14 scientists to found the Advanced Research Association - so named because only government-owned entities could then be called companies.

His sole sponsor, the Beijing Association of Science and Technology, lent him 200 yuan ($15.65) and opened a bank account for the enterprise.

Chen started going door-to-door, offering to repair electronic equipment.

The first deal he made was to fix a small factory's electronic outlets.

Chen's company failed to earn a profit and soon went belly up.

But Chen and his model of profiting from technology was validated when the late Chinese leader Hu Yaobang, mentioned him in a national statement in 1983, the year he founded Huaxia Guigu IT service company. This sparked an explosion of startups in Zhongguancun.

Chen died at age 70 in a shabby apartment, without healthcare but with more than an inkling about the flourishing electronics entrepreneurship he had pioneered.

Although his personal business failed, his dream for the country became reality. It has produced such tech giants as Lenovo, one of the world's leading sellers of personal computers, and incubated one of the nation's biggest e-commerce sites, 360buy.com.

One of his final quotes was, "Zhongguancun has bred scientists of equal caliber to the US' Silicon Valley."