The 36-year-old engineer Liao Xi starts work at 7 a.m. every weekday. He's been developing super-thin stainless-steel foils for more than six years at Taiyuan Iron & Steel Company, or TISCO, in north China's Shanxi Province. On May 12, 2020, President Xi Jinping visited the facility to observe production and took a look at the 0.02-millimeter-thick stainless-steel foil.

"It's one-fourth the thickness of an A4 page. But it's very strong and can easily roll up," Liao said. "President Xi came to visit at about 10:00 a.m. He picked up a piece and folded it gently. He said it looks like tin-foil paper and tempered steel has been made so soft that it can wind around a finger."

Shanxi is a major coal producing province in China and has been undergoing an economic transformation. During his visit here, President Xi Jinping said he was glad to see how both high and new technology were thriving in the province, and that TISCO has been achieving continuous progress, transformation and upgrading. 

Super-thin stain-less steel foil is widely used in many high-end industries.

In the past, no one in China was able to produce it, so the country relied solely on imports. Many countries banned exports of it to China.

In the two years after 2016, Liao and his team experienced about 700 failures to produce the paper-like stainless steel foil. Almost every day they were suffering failure.

Recalling President Xi's visit, Liao was still a bit excited. "When President Xi picked up a piece of the stainless-steel foil, I really wanted to tell him it was developed by us, and we've put blood and sweat into it. It looks simple but hundreds of people have spent so much time and energy on developing it," he said.

Liao and his team successfully developed the super-thin stainless-steel foil in 2018, which has truly tackled bottlenecks in many industry chains.

With this new material, the number of times the screen of a foldable phone could fold has increased to 200,000 to 300,000 from 40,000 to 50,000.

President Xi pointed out that products and technology are the fundamentals for an enterprise and expected TISCO to scale new heights unremittingly and bravely in the field of stainless steel. "His words are the biggest acknowledgement for us grass-roots technology developers," Liao said.

Three months after President Xi's visit, Liao and his team persisted with technological innovation and developed even thinner stainless-steel foil, which is 0.015 millimeter thick, a new world record.

Liao revealed, "It's thinner by five micrometers and can enhance the battery capacity by 17-percent. No other country now can make it. Our high-value products now account for over 80 percent."

Recently, Liao and his young team have been working to develop a new type of stainless-steel foil. 

"Breakthroughs in new materials come from hard work bit by bit," he said. "If I could successfully develop this new material during the holiday, it would be the happiest thing for me."