In 1984, the academy’s president, Zhou Guangzhao, pushed the academy’s institutes to set up companies and commercialize research. Mr. Liu was among the first to leap on the idea.

“That’s was when my life’s second phase took off,” he said. “At a time when the Chinese economy was still largely planned, I learned how to build up my own company, to transform technology into products and to stay competitive with foreign firms. I studied management theories and applied them. I found meaning in life from doing these.”

Mr. Liu motions to an aide for a small remote control and at the touch of a button the beige fabric covering the windows glides up, letting the late afternoon light spill into the room. He rises, motioning toward a white construction wall and a row of trees below.

“My apartment was over where those trees are,” he says, pointing. “No new houses had been built since the Cultural Revolution, and so people just crammed into the buildings as the population grew. Three other colleagues and I, scientists ten years older than me, lived a 12-sq-meter room the size of a bicycle shed. I can’t even call it a house because the walls were just a single layer of brick and couldn’t keep us warm.”

He sits back down and crosses his legs, revealing a glimpse of long underwear above his ankle; The weather outside is mild and the temperature in the building a steady 70 degrees, yet old habits die hard.

The little house became a home after he married and his colleagues moved out. Eventually seven people lived in the 12-square-meter room, including his children and parents-in-law. He chuckled as he told about one time when someone jostled a clothesline strung across the room and a pair of socks dropped into the soup cooking for dinner.

He has moved just four times since those days, “all in this neighborhood,” he says.

He pauses to drink some tea and the room fills with the hushed sea-like sound of traffic outside, punctuated by muffled clanking from a construction site.

Mr. Liu and his colleagues began by selling imported computers to the local market - he often tells of wearing an old business suit that had belonged to his father for his first meeting with representatives from IBM. Before long, the fledgling company was manufacturing motherboards and soon introduced its first homegrown product, the Han card, which allowed PC users to work in Chinese characters.

The company eventually started making its own PCs, becoming the country’s largest computer manufacturer, and in 2005 it bought IBM’s troubled personal computer business. The purchase catapulted Lenovo into third place in the world, behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell of the U.S. and Acer of Taiwan. (It slipped to fourth place after Acer bought the U.S.’s Gateway in 2007.)

That’s when Mr. Liu stepped down as the company’s chairman, turning the keyboard over to a protégé, Yang Yuanqing. The company hired an American as president with hopes of building China’s first major global brand.

It didn’t turn out that way: the president, William J. Amelio, poured money into marketing - he spent hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns tied to the 2008 Beijing Olympics - but there was little product innovation to back up the hype. The PC industry was becoming a commodity business, with margins thinning as manufacturers competed on price.

Then the global economy started its swan dive and Lenovo’s sales plummeted 20 percent in the final quarter of last year. Its profit fell 48 percent. Mr. Liu was called back to stabilize the company.

Mr. Liu had been spending most of his time on Legend Holdings’ real estate and investment businesses, both of which he readily admits are more profitable than making PCs (Legend Holdings’ real estate company, Raycom Real Estate Development Co., built the tower that houses Lenovo’s headquarters and is developing the rest of the former institute’s grounds).

“I never decided to be just a businessman who runs a PC company,” Mr. Liu said. “I want to be a businessman who runs a large and profit-making company.”