Rooster Year in Review: Faces of China's sci-tech

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Last year on China's lunar calendar, the Year of Rooster has witnessed the achievements of some of the greatest scientists and innovators in the country.

We have collected 10 of them in Sunday's review. And now we are shifting from achievements to the people behind them.

Pan Jianwei: Unhackable communication

CGTN has covered extensively China's quantum network, which is totally safe from hacking because it utilizes basic physics laws to operate.

Pan Jianwei is the leading contributor to the project. He learned the laws from his teacher, Austrian quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger.

Pan Jianwei. /Web Photo

In October 2017, the two scientists talked through the network they built.

Wang Zeshan and Hou Yunde: The highest honor

Hou Yunde (L) and Wang Zeshan. /Web Photo

Wang and Hou won China's top science award of 2017, each receiving 500 million yuan (about 781,000 US dollars) presented by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Wang, nicknamed "king of gunpowder," is an engineering academician who boosted the shooting range of China's artillery by 20 percent.

Hou is a virologist who sees viruses as the arch-enemy and fights them through research. Other virologists like to call him the "father of China's Interferon."

Xu Ying: My system is better than the GPS

Xu Ying is the youngest in this year's list. She is a major developer of China's Beidou satellite navigation system.

She does not like people calling Beidou "the Chinese GPS" because she thinks her project is better.

At her age of 34, Xu won great reputation online for her passion in advocating science. Her photos circulated a lot among Chinese netizens, who called her "the Beidou goddess."

Xu Ying. /Web Photo‍

Remember Nan Rendong: The man behind world's largest telescope

China in 2016 built the world's largest telescope FAST – the five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope. It's as large as 30 football fields and able to "see" as far as 13.7 billion light years from the Earth through radio wave detection.

Nan was the creator of the whole project, and has spent most of his career building the telescope.

Nan is included in the list mainly for remembrance; he passed away in September 2017.

Nan Rendong. /Web Photo

There are so many more people who made great contributions to China's sci-tech but we can't list all. They include the Chen brothers who crafted the world's first deep-learning chip "Cambricon", which powers the AI camera in Huawei smartphones. Also, Su Quanke laid out a solid plan to build the bridge that links Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao.

Stay tuned to CGTN to find more and more excellent Chinese innovators that change the country and even the world.