40) Chinese Semiconductors under the Cultural Revolution
A scene of a semiconductor factory in Shanghai visited during my 1980 tour
I visited the People’s Republic of China about 20 times since the first visit
in 1965 before the Cultural Revolution, and the photo above is a semiconductor
factory in Shanghai that I visited in 1980. Domestic production machines were
handling the assembly of transistor which was the main product.
China's semiconductor industry was radically pursued as a mass movement called
the "electronic competition war" during the Cultural Revolution,
but actually, it was not necessarily effective. One of the participants was
the Xicheng District Semiconductor Device Factory in Beijing, which I visited
in the 1970s. In this factory, 60 housewives gathered to make household chimneys
or spinning machines originally. It turned into a semiconductor factory during
the expansion of the electronics industry, and they worked on the production
of silicon single crystals, devices such as transistors and diodes and others
one after another. The employees were only housewives with little scientific
knowledge, and they were ridiculed by others, saying that "Making transistors
in such ways is like having ducks flying in the sky". From what I heard,
they attended classes of the nearby Tsinghua University before starting the
daily work in order to learn basic knowledge of semiconductors.
However, whether it should be said that this was just intentions without substance,
these actions did not bring about effective results. The Chinese semiconductor
industry finally showed a substantial development with IC in their major products
in the so called “8-5 period”, that is after 1991 when the 5th 8-year plan
was started. More exactly, it was after getting better effect of the joint
venture with foreign companies.
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