By Isqil najim
At 88, most men have long since put down their tools and settled into quiet retirement. Not Ben De.
On Wednesday, the veteran radar scientist stood before China’s President, Xi Jinping, in Beijing to receive the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award, the highest scientific honour the country can bestow, capping off a career that spans more than six decades and helped transform China from a nation with almost no radar capability into one that stands among the world’s leaders in the field.
His story is one many young people, in China and beyond, would do well to study closely.
Born into a farming family in northeast China’s Jilin Province, Ben’s early life gave little indication of the scientific breakthroughs that lay ahead. He gained admission into the Harbin Institute of Technology in 1957, a decision that would set him on the path to becoming, in the words of Chinese state media, the founder of China’s airborne pulse Doppler radar technology and a major pioneer of phased array radar systems.
In 1965, with China facing a tense international climate and an urgent need to defend against ballistic missile threats, Ben joined the country’s phased array radar research programme.
There was no roadmap to follow. No reference materials, no prior experience within the country to draw on. So he taught himself English from scratch, simply so he could read foreign technical papers. Within two months of intense self study, he was already working through English language research documents, a feat that speaks to the kind of discipline the project demanded.
The programme he worked on, code named 7010, was staggering in scale: thousands of transmit receive modules, more than 1,000 kilometres of control cables, and thousands of equipment cabinets, all forming one long range phased array early warning radar system. To get the job done, Ben and fellow scientist Zhang Guangyi made seven separate trips deep into the mountains, each lasting more than half a year away from home and family.
More than a decade of that kind of sacrifice paid off. China’s first large scale long range phased array early warning radar was successfully developed, making the country only the third in the world to master the technology at the time.
But Ben was far from finished. As aerial warfare evolved through the 1970s, a new challenge emerged: fighter jets needed the ability to detect and engage targets both above and below them at long range, a capability made possible only by airborne pulse Doppler radar. In 1979, Ben took on this challenge directly, leading a team through more than 100 research projects and working through nearly 100 technical bottlenecks along the way.
He did not direct the work from behind a desk. Ben insisted on boarding every test flight himself to verify the accuracy of the data being collected, a decision that nearly cost him his life on two occasions, once during an engine failure and again during a landing gear malfunction.
“I never thought about being afraid. Once I was on board, all I cared about were the test parameters,” Ben later told Science and Technology Daily, reflecting on those dangerous years.
By 1989, China’s first domestically developed airborne pulse Doppler radar, built entirely with the country’s own intellectual property, passed official evaluation. It gave Chinese fighter jets the long range detection ability, often described as their “eyes,” needed for modern air combat, and placed China among a small group of nations that had mastered the technology.
Ben was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2001, but his contributions did not stop there. In more recent years, he has turned his focus to space based surveillance radar, publishing work that laid the theoretical groundwork for China’s research in the area, while also guiding younger scientists working in frontier fields such as microwave photonics.
Sharing the stage with Ben at Wednesday’s award ceremony was Chen Liquan, 86, a researcher at the Institute of Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, honoured for building China’s first solid state ionics laboratory and pioneering the country’s lithium battery industry from the ground up. The two men, both born into ordinary farming families decades ago, represent what patient, long term investment in science can produce for a nation over a lifetime.
For young scientists and engineers watching from Nigeria and across Africa, where the push for homegrown technological solutions remains a work in progress, Ben De’s journey offers a useful lesson. Breakthroughs of national importance rarely come from shortcuts.
They come from scientists willing to teach themselves what no one around them knows, to spend months away from comfort in pursuit of a solution, and to stay committed to a single field of work across an entire lifetime.