We’re in a Hyundai Sonata with seats covered in spotless white cloth; two P.R. guys, Americans, are fidgeting in the backseat as Beijing National Stadium, nicknamed the bird’s nest, looms over us. The centerpiece of the city’s 2008 Summer Olympics looks like a condo for a giant pterodactyl, but the P.R. guys are in no mood for sightseeing—they’re getting more nervous as each minute passes. We’re on our way to meet Bill Amelio, the U.S.-bred C.E.O. of Lenovo, China’s biggest technology company, and we’re running late. Amelio cultivates an image of being an impatient, no-nonsense boss. In less than two years, he has whipped Lenovo into shape, or at least that’s what a 625 percent profit increase this past fiscal year indicates. As Andrew Hu, who runs China operations for the software company Red Hat, says of Amelio, “His style is simple. He’ll tell you, ‘I have five minutes, and if I like what you’re saying, I’ll give you another 20.’ I know what kind of driver he is in traffic.”

So ...making Amelio wait is probably a bad thing.

Our Chinese driver, trying to squeeze up to a tollbooth, plays chicken with Volkswagens, Citroëns, buses, cement trucks, and slender Chinese-made microvans that would get nothing but black dots in a Consumer Reports rollover test. We could walk faster.

We nudge past the toll station­, a ­salute to China’s abundance of labor. At least 20 workers in orange vests stand around doing nothing but looking at the cars. We gain a bit of speed as we pass another reminder of the nation’s unfathomable mass of humanity: construction cranes assembling nearly identical 40-plus-story apartment buildings and hotels from here to as far as the eye can see—which is not all that far, thanks to Beijing’s persistent white smog.

Turning off the highway, we mix with bicycles, cars, and scooters, passing a watermelon stand (Beijing has excellent watermelon) and a building with a large sign that reads, in English, wool spinning city. We’re 10 minutes late, going on 15.

We swerve around a bus sporting an advertisement that translates as “Change your habits. Wash your private areas.” The Hyundai turns into a cluster of buildings that could be a clone of a Silicon Valley corporate park, if American employees rode to work on their grandfathers’ bikes. We’re now nearly half an hour late. One of the P.R. guys frantically text-messages our position to headquarters.

Finally, the car pulls up to Lenovo’s front door, and we pile out like commandos. Go, go, go! We scurry through the glass-and-steel lobby, past a fountain, across an oasislike campus of grass and more fountains, go up in the elevator and into an open space of low cubicles, around a corner, into a tidy conference room set aside for the interview—and Amelio’s not there.

“He’s in traffic,” a petite young woman apologizes. “There was an accident.”

China desperately wants the world to respect its economic prowess. It wants respect for its brains and class, the kind you’d give Bill Gates or Frank Sinatra—or, for that matter, the ancient Chinese, who invented paper, gunpowder, and spaghetti. Right now, China is respected mainly for its massive size and cheap manufacturing, which feels vulgar, like the deference paid to Mike Tyson in a barroom. And recently, cheap manufacturing has actually cost the country lots of respect, on account of China’s selling the world tainted toothpaste, toys with lead paint, and pet food that kills pets.

So China needs a corporate hero—a global breakout brand. Sony did it for post-World War II Japan. Samsung led the way for South Korea two decades ago. Nokia put Finland on the map.

China is betting big that Lenovo can make the great leap forward. The computer maker will be a top-level sponsor of and the sole hardware technology supplier to the Olympic Games that are coming to China in August 2008. Between now and then, Amelio and his team will plow hundreds of millions of dollars into making sure the Beijing Olympics are Lenovo’s golden moment. So much has to go right for the company for this to happen—hot new products, smart branding, a U.S. retail presence that doesn’t yet exist, and two weeks of Olympic events that come off without a technological hitch.