Gao Jifan sits at his desk in front of a blown-up panorama of the Milky Way – a suitably arresting backdrop for a man trying to reach new frontiers. “My vision is to use new ideas in technology to improve people’s lives,” says the chief executive and founder of Trina Solar, the world’s fifth-biggest maker of solar cells.
The cheery 47-year-old – speaking in his office in Changzhou, 170km west of Shanghai – is among the industrial pace setters in China, comfortably the world’s fastest-growing manufacturing nation.
China overtook the US as the world’s biggest goods producer by output last year, reclaiming the global supremacy it lost in the 19th century. But it still has to dispel the image of being a low-cost workshop where quality is inferior and the best ideas are copied – or stolen – from the west.