Mr. Bai Jianjun was born in a mountain village deep in the Qinling Mountains of Shaanxi, China. The terraced fields and streams there taught him the simplest truth: everything has its own logic. As a child, he loved squatting at the village entrance to watch blacksmiths repair plowshares and carpenters assemble benches, fiddling with screws and nuts he picked up, even taking apart and reassembling the old alarm clock at home over and over just to understand the secret of gear meshing—this inborn curiosity became the foundation for his future endeavors. At eighteen, the mountains could no longer hold back his desire to see the outside world. With half a year’s savings, he boarded a long-distance bus to Beijing. As the loess slopes outside the window blurred, he knew his life was turning a new page.

The first decade in Beijing was a journey of grit: he worked as a security guard, noting the flickering patterns of streetlights during night patrols and developing a simple troubleshooting method; he became a restaurant chef, optimizing vegetable-cutting processes in the sweltering kitchen and quietly improving efficiency by 20%; later, he turned to sales, learning to listen to customers complain that “the rising column gets stuck after six months”—those furrowed brows stuck in his mind like nails. In 2016, seeing the growing demand for rising columns amid urban security upgrades, he founded “Qixinlong” (Hebei Qixinlong Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd.), sticking to the same principle: no frills, just perfecting the hydraulic system and load-bearing structure to ensure the columns rise steadily and lower smoothly. Today, Qixinlong’s rising columns guard the entrances of office buildings and industrial parks, but Bai Jianjun remains the mountain kid who likes to squat down and examine product details. “Good products don’t need hype,” he says. “If they don’t sway in the wind or break with use, people will trust them.”