Liu Chuanzhi is the founder and chairman of Lenovo. Liu was trained as an engineer at a military college and later went on to work at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Like many young people during the Cultural Revolution, Liu was denounced and sent to the countryside where he worked as a laborer on a rice farm. Liu claims Hewlett-Packard as a key source of inspiration. In an interview with "The Economist" he stated that "Our earliest and best teacher was Hewlett-Packard." For more than ten years, Lenovo was Hewlett-Packard's distributor in China. In reference to Lenovo's later acquisition of IBM's personal computer unit Liu said, "I remember the first time I took part in a meeting of IBM agents. I was wearing an old business suit of my father's and I sat in the back row. Even in my dreams, I never imagined that one day we could buy the IBM PC business. It was unthinkable. Impossible."