The Change Mariner

China's Silicon Valley Emerges

San Jose Mercury News:

Intel's plant is the largest investment in the zone, a former patch of farmland where more than 5,000 multinationals have set up shop.

But just down the road, China's own Silicon Valley is emerging. In a vast high-tech park, gleaming glass-and-concrete buildings are sprouting up along boulevards lined with freshly planted trees. China's leading domestic chip company, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., is churning out chips from its campus, where it operates bilingual schools, a shopping center, apartments and a church for employees.

SMIC and other Chinese ventures in this park are striving to someday challenge U.S. companies as tech leaders of the future.

These two zones show both the promise and the challenge that China represents for Silicon Valley. U.S. tech companies are rapidly expanding their partnerships with China. They are eyeing the nation's huge domestic market and tapping its cheap labor for skilled manufacturing, and increasingly, the brainpower for creating tech innovations. At the same time, the American tech companies are looking warily at an emerging rival.

People in China "are capable of doing any engineering job, any software job, any managerial job that people in the United States are capable of doing,'' said Craig Barrett, Intel's chief executive.

Posted by Bob King at March 15, 2004 08:36 AM | TrackBack
Related Categories: Industry - Semiconductor | Quadrant - Economic | Theme - 'Offshoring Technology Work'

Capitalist China : Strategies for a Revolutionized Economy
John Wiley & Sons

Amazon Price: $31.45

China and the Global Economy: National Champions, Industrial Policy, and the Big Business Revolution
Palgrave Macmillan

Amazon Price: $43.46

Integrating China into the Global Economy
The Brookings Institution

Amazon Price: $19.95