 Thanks to his effort, the research and application of optical communication in China has made a great progress in the recent 30 years.He was named an honorary professor at many top-tier universities in China (including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Northern Jiaotong University, Fudan University, Nankai University, Tianjin University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Qufu Normal University), elected as the very first foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and member of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and was granted honorary doctoral degrees by National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan and his mother school the University of the Witwatersrand.Li has said that developing components and devices must involve good understanding of systems applications and systems economics.