A scientist who spent his childhood without electricity and a farm boy who taught himself English in two months have won
China‘s highest science honour, as per Chinese media reports. President Xi Jinping handed
Chen Liquan and
Ben De their State Pre-eminent Science and Technology Award for 2025 at a ceremony inside Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Wednesday.
Chen built the country’s first lithium battery. Ben gave Chinese fighter jets the radar vision to spot enemy aircraft from far beyond the pilot’s own eyesight.
The double honour lands at a moment when Beijing wants to be self-sufficient in both everyday technology and defence hardware. Xi used the ceremony to tell scientists that the country’s upcoming five-year plan will be a make-or-break window for turning China into a genuine tech powerhouse. One laureate spent his career powering electric cars. The other spent his powering fighter jets. Between them, they sum up exactly the kind of self-reliance Xi was talking about.
Light At The End Of The Exam Hall
Chen Liquan was born in 1940 in a hilly corner of Nanchong in Sichuan province, in a home lit only by oil lamps. He didn’t see an electric bulb switched on until the day he sat his high-school entrance exam. That single moment stuck with him. He decided then that he wanted to spend his life working with power, so that light and convenience wouldn’t be a rare event for other children the way it had been for him.
He went on to study physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, graduating in 1964, and joined the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
A Chance Conversation In Germany
The real turning point came in 1976, when Chen was sent to the Max Planck Institute in Germany as a visiting researcher. A German scientist mentioned to him, almost in passing, that a material called lithium nitride had unusual properties. As Chen later recalled him saying, “In the future, it could be used to make batteries and even cars.”
That line changed the direction of Chen’s career. China was, at the time, in the middle of an oil crisis that had exposed how dangerously dependent the country was on imported energy. Chen decided lithium batteries were the strategic bet worth making. He formally gave up his existing research into crystal materials and asked to switch fields entirely, into an area, solid-state ionics, that barely existed in China at the time.
Building A Battery Industry From Nothing
Chen returned to China in 1978 with no equipment, no trained staff and no local expertise to draw on. He and his team worked such long hours that they finished a project scheduled to take a year in just five months. Two years later, in 1980, he opened the country’s first solid-state ionics laboratory. Solid-state ionics and lithium battery research went on to feature in three separate five-year national research plans, a sign of how seriously the government eventually took the field he had opened up almost single-handedly.
By 1998, his team had built China’s first pilot production line for lithium-ion batteries using entirely home-grown technology, equipment and raw material, the breakthrough that let the country move from lab research to mass manufacturing. He was also the first scientist anywhere to propose a workable design for nano-silicon anode material, a component now produced at a scale of ten thousand tonnes a year. Several of the patents his team developed broke monopolies that foreign companies had held on key battery components.
Chen didn’t just build technology, he built an industry around it, pushing universities and companies to work together, a shift that helped battery giant CATL, now the world’s largest EV battery maker, get off the ground. By 2014, China had become the world’s biggest producer of lithium batteries. In 2023, a solid-state battery system his team had spent years developing went into mass-produced vehicles, making China the first country to put solid-state batteries on the road commercially.
The Farm Boy Who Taught Himself English In Eight Weeks
Ben De’s story starts a long way from a physics lab. Born in 1938 to a farming family in Jilin province in China’s northeast, he was accepted into the electrical engineering department at Harbin Institute of Technology at just 19. After graduating, he was posted to a research institute in Nanjing that would go on to become the birthplace of China’s entire radar industry.
In the mid-1960s, with Cold War tensions running high, China badly needed its own long-range radar system to watch for incoming missiles. Ben joined the programme with nothing to work from, no textbooks, no prior Chinese research, nothing. So he taught himself English from scratch, purely so he could read foreign technical papers, and reportedly managed it in about two months.
The radar system he helped build, known by the code name 7010, was a genuinely massive undertaking, thousands of equipment Cabinets connected by more than a thousand kilometres of cable. Ben and a colleague made seven separate expeditions into remote mountain terrain to get it built, each trip lasting more than six months. When it was finished, China became only the third country in the world to master large-scale phased-array radar.
Giving Fighter Jets Their “Eyes”
His next challenge was even tougher: building a radar that could let Chinese fighter jets detect and track enemy aircraft flying below them, a capability that only a handful of countries had cracked by the 1980s. Starting in 1979, Ben ran more than a hundred research projects and worked through nearly a hundred separate technical roadblocks.
As per Chinese mouthpiece Global Times, he also insisted on flying on every single test flight in person, to check the data himself. That decision nearly cost him his life twice, once during an engine failure, once during a landing-gear malfunction. Asked about it later, he brushed the danger aside: “I never thought about being afraid.” Once airborne, he said, all that mattered to him were the test readings.
In 1989, China’s first home-built airborne pulse-Doppler radar cleared its final evaluation, making the country one of only a few in the world with the technology. Chinese fighter pilots finally had what engineers liked to call “eagle eyes” — the ability to spot a target long before the target could spot them.
Both Are Still Working at 80
Neither scientist has slowed down. Ben was elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2001 and has since moved into space-based surveillance radar and microwave photonics, areas he continues to guide younger researchers through. Chen, now 86, remains focused on pushing solid-state battery technology further, still chasing the same problem that first caught his attention in a German lab nearly fifty years ago, how to store more power, more safely, in something small enough to fit in your hand.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login