When Liu Chuanzhi is asked to pose for the photographer, the founder and chairman of Lenovo becomes impatient. The 66-year-old stiffens as an aide jumps forward to smooth his hair ruffled by the evening breeze on the hotel balcony. Back inside, he shoos the photographer out, pulls off his red tie and sits down at the dinner table.

It was Mr Liu’s inability to stand on the sidelines that forced him to intervene 18 months ago after Lenovo, shaken by the financial crisis, had racked up a $97m loss in the fourth quarter of 2008. At an age when others retire, Mr Liu returned to the helm of the PC maker he founded 26 years ago, now the fourth-largest in the world.

As the waiters tiptoe around him in the wood-panelled private dining room at the Park Hyatt hotel in Beijing’s central business district, Mr Liu explains that his passion for the business stems from the fact that, due to China’s stormy history, he so nearly missed the chance to become an entrepreneur.

“What I’m especially grateful for is that I still got the opportunity late in life to be an entrepreneur,” he says. “I was 40 years old. People who were a little older than me didn’t have the chance.”

Born in the southern Chinese town of Zhenjiang, the eldest of four children of one of China’s most prominent patent lawyers, Mr Liu graduated from a military-backed engineering college in 1966. After just two years in his first job at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government research institution, Mr Liu was forced to leave his research post and do manual labour in the countryside – like millions of other educated young Chinese. This was the start of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a murderous political campaign that turned China’s citizens on each other, displacing millions and killing many more.

In 1970, Mr Liu was allowed to return to Beijing where he worked as an engineer-administrator at CAS. Eight years later, after Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist party started to implement market-oriented reforms. However, it wasn’t until 1984 that Mr Liu’s big chance came when Zhou Guangzhao, CAS president, called on the academy’s employees to commercialise their research. Mr Liu and 10 other researchers at CAS’s Computing Technology Institute started a company, which was to become Lenovo, based on their design of a card that could process computer commands in Chinese characters.

As with most other Chinese companies, the organisation technically was owned by the state, in this case through the CAS, in spite of being given only Rmb200,000 in the form of a loan. From then on, the founders raised all funds themselves.

“Why would we work so hard for that? Because the people of my generation, we were suppressed like crazy in class struggle,” says Mr Liu. “Finally we could start doing some real work.”

However, the ambiguous ownership structure soon proved a huge impediment. “In the early ’90s, we met with so many troubles. There were political risks, commercial risks, a lot of pressure,” says Mr Liu.

After eight years of lobbying the CAS, he finally managed to give 35 per cent of the company’s shares to the employees, which he says, “really changed the feeling”.

The tough battles in what was still mainly a planned economy made Mr Liu, by his own admission, an authoritarian and short-tempered boss though he insists he is now much more relaxed.

Today, public shareholders own 55 per cent of Lenovo, private equity investors have a 2.8 per cent stake and Legend Holdings, its unlisted parent which is in turn 35 per cent owned by CAS, holds 41 per cent.