Some high schools take field trips to zoos, museums, or national parks. My high school in Taiwan took us to a semiconductor fab. Our first stop is a display case, showcasing the evolution of the silicon wafer, from two to four to six and, finally, eight inches.
Our new eight-inch fabs are the most precise and advanced in the world, the tour guide boasted. Someday we’ll have twelve-inch wafers. By that time, he winked, maybe some of you will be working for us.
He paused, allowing us to admire the shimmering silicon wafers, often referred to as ‘Taiwan’s Gold,’ a pun on the Chinese sound jin – a homophone both for gold and wafer. The wafers stood as an unabashed testament to the promises of technological progress, symbols of Taiwan’s economic past, present, and future.
(4)I attended the National Experimental High School located in the Hsin-chu Science and Industrial Science Park. Its name is no joke, we were literally a government experiment, an attempt to reverse the massive brain drain that dominated the intellectual, social, and political landscape of postwar Taiwan.
(5)From the 1960s until the 1980s, flocks of highly educated, talented Taiwanese students emigrated to the United States. The majority of those students were college graduates in the fields of science and technology, with degrees in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, physics, and chemistry, who went on to further studies in America as the opportunity for graduate degrees in Taiwan were scarce.
Very few of them returned after they got their degrees – 88% of Taiwanese students who migrated to the U.S. stayed there, because they got jobs either in universities or at tech companies like HP and Texas Instruments.
Hoping to fight these trends, the government of Taiwan aggressively recruited Taiwanese talent with major tax breaks, incentives, and government funding. Modeled after the Stanford Research Park, the Hsinchu Science and Industrial Park, founded in 1980, was part of the government’s broader strategy. The government got its first major coup when it lured Morris Chang, who worked as a vice president with Texas Instruments, to return to Taiwan.
(8)Chang’s strategy for Taiwan was a simple yet big gamble, rely on razor-thin margins to gain market share. He bet that Taiwan, with its strong foundation in plastics manufacturing, had a comparative advantage in cheap production. Foxconn, for one, got its start in the 1970s making plastic TV knobs, before adding electronics. Leave design to the Americans, he argued. We’ll focus on producing the stuff that they want.
With investments from the Taiwanese government, Chang launched Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the first dedicated semiconductor foundry. Chang’s gamble proved to be a success, TSMC very quickly became the largest semiconductor plant in the world. Today, it has cornered close to 49% of the contract chip manufacturing market.
The government’s investment in the high-tech industry proved a success. Drawing on Chang’s model, Taiwan quickly became a major player – if not the dominant player – in the global semiconductor industry. This influence continues today, among the top 10 semiconductor foundries in the world, three are Taiwanese, and a fourth is based in China but was originally a TSMC production.
(11)As a result of these changes, the brain drain was reversed. Scores of Taiwanese, who only a decade earlier would not have dreamed of returning to Taiwan, were inspired by optimism over an improving political and economic landscape to return home. Americans may not recall that Taiwan remained under martial law through 1986.
My father belonged to this broader movement. Even though he had gotten tenure as a physics professor at Columbia University, he heard the call to return home to help build a more solid academic research environment. That same impulse brought back most of the parents of my friends. Many of them had cushy jobs at places like HP and Bell Labs before they returned to Taiwan.
The physical layout of the Park itself reflected the government’s attempt to cater to a Taiwanese populace that had grown accustomed to American life. Taiwan, an island, occupies an area slightly larger than Maryland, but has the second-highest population density in the world – Bangladesh is No. 1. Taiwanese live mostly in cities filled with labyrinthine streets, overcrowded with people, motorcycles, and bicycles. In contrast, the Park was the closest thing to a planned, suburban landscape that Taiwan could offer – and as antiseptic as the clean rooms of the lab.