Shadows of Tiananmen
Here
I need to rewind to May 1989 when I was still working at Asian Computer
Monthly. The news about the brain drain fell to the back page as students
in Beijing took to the streets. They were inspired in part, some said, by a
visit from Mikhail Gorbachev and perhaps in part to shake off the same social
dysfunctions that killed every Western joint venture as well as their prospects
for a prosperous future.
It was all eyes on China for weeks. Someone with links to the U.S. embassy in Hong Kong later told me a couple of her friends went missing during that time and their social crowd felt confirmed in their suspicions they were spooks.
The tensions rose as we saw pictures of Zhao Ziyang in tears pleading with students in their tents pitched in Tiananmen Square that they must go home. Then one night in early June, the horrific massacre began.
At noon the first day after we watched the nightmare unfold on CNN, companies in Hong Kong released staff for a day of mourning. We all streamed like zombies into the streets. Kids with carts gave away to everyone who passed black armbands and T-shirts freshly printed with Chinese slogans decrying the Communists. The stunned crowd snaked through the streets and turned into a protest that wound past the local office of the China Daily, the mainland’s unofficial embassy, where someone erected a replica of the Goddess of Liberty that the youth in Tiananmen Square had created. We flowed like a river into Victoria Park where thousands were chanting, afraid and crying.
When I left the office that morning, Kun, our handsome, hard-working and street-savvy messenger – the guy everyone relied on to get stuff done, the young man women in the office adored -- looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Today, I am ashamed to be Chinese.”
It broke my heart. I had come to love this place, its way of life and its people. I tried to comfort Kun with some lame words about the fundamental goodness of the Chinese people and the evil of a few heartless bastards in the Communist Party.
Following the crowd through town, I was proud of the protesters, proud this community cared so much about something more than what folks said Hong Kong was all about, making a buck. I cried for them and with them. I briefly felt like I was walking through a moment of history in a place ten thousand miles from Kalamazoo, but a place that was just as much my home now.
The
next day at work I faxed newspaper reports of the massacre to every fax number
in China I had in my Rolodex. Let them know the truth, I thought, making my own
small high-tech protest.
Did it do any good? I doubt it. No one who received my faxes dared reply. Before long, life went back to what we called normal. We forgot what was done, what was lost and what it meant. We forgot the man in the street who put his body in front of oncoming tanks. We went back to launching new products, writing tech news and making money.
Years later, many Hong Kongers welcomed the handover to China though they were practical enough to make sure they had British or American passports in their pockets just in case. They were happy enough to see the British colonists leave and give their peers in the motherland a shot at running the show. In the pomp and circumstance, they forgot what some of those people had done or they hoped the people who replaced them would be guided by better angels, a faith history has showed was a sad illusion.
So, it was one morning in Beijing, a couple years later, Alan and I left our hotel with rented bicycles and rode around Tiananmen Square. At one point, Alan started singing in his best impression of a rock star, “I went down to Tiananmen Square, to see…” It felt like his spontaneous take on Neil Young’s “Ohio,” a big ‘fuck you’ to China’s ruling elite. I was proud of him.
Well-dressed people who I imagined were plainclothes police – or maybe just traumatized citizens – flapped their arms at us flaccidly as if to say it was not safe to express such emotions here. Others just watched slack jawed or looked on in bewilderment at the strange Americans. Our little protest only lasted a few minutes and was not enough to disturb anyone in power.
Our big EWN reporting trip to China turned up no tech jewels. It was too early, we concluded. Maybe someday.
China was a true tech hinterland then, mainly made up of clueless state-run enterprises propped up by government subsidies eager to impress their visitors from the U.S. with demos that didn’t work or sometimes didn’t even make sense as anything more than exhibits in a funky electronics museum.
Even getting from place to place on the mainland’s streets was frustrating. Despite a confirmed address and Alan’s excellent Mandarin (he even had fun rolling his r’s like a true Beijing native in ways that made the cab drivers laugh), we couldn’t find a well-known high tech park where one sprawling joint venture was host to one barely functioning chip fab. There were no accurate maps. Often even street signs were missing or inaccurate.
Our cab driver stopped for directions multiple times, getting into arguments with locals about the best route or even the name of the street we were on.
Shanghai circa 1990 was an uncontrolled sprawl of energy, lots of bikes and pedestrians and a few cars, crowding streets that snaked in every direction, leading—it seemed—nowhere. So, it was easy to be skeptical and not see the huge changes that would come over the next twenty years, cities seemingly built from scratch and connected by high-speed rail, enabling the likes of Foxconn, Lenovo and many others to establishing world-class factories and companies.
I couldn’t see it that night in Shanghai when Alan and I looked out on the swampland across from the Bund, but opportunity would arrive about 15 years later. By 2010, China would be bristling with Foxconn, Pegatron and other factories running 24/7 making iPhones, iPads, laptops and other gadgets. Conditions were harsh, as several Western exposes reported, but less severe than life in the China countryside. Those factories became the poster children of globalization, and they helped fuel the giant country’s rise. In hindsight, it was the big tech story of Asia.
In Taiwan, we got a dim view of other jewels in the making.
The PR folks at Taiwan’s national research labs in Hsinchu loved EE Times and Alan. They granted us a whirlwind of meetings with mainly junior execs on every hot tech topic of the day, culminating with an audience with Morris Chang, who would become the CEO of a fledgling TSMC.
Chang’s office was huge as a ballroom, befitting his position as the unofficial leader of the nation’s nascent tech industry. We were ushed in with as much whispered reverence as if we were meeting with the Buddha. Chang did not disappoint. The vast room was scented with the smoke from his pipe. It generated a fragrant cloud from which he let out occasional pronouncements on the direction of technology that Rob, Alan and I dutifully noted in our steno pads, recording them in triplicate.
I didn’t have the faintest idea what most of it meant, but I was hoping Rob did. And Rob fueled my optimism, asking by far the best questions.
I knew Chang was the most prominent of many Taiwanese semiconductor execs that the island nation lured away from cozy corporate jobs in the U.S. and Europe with all the patriotism and cash they could muster. He steered TSMC to being the world leader in making advanced chips. Along the way he became revered as a kind of modern-day Confucious. Later, TSMC’s staff would refer to him in hushed tones as “the Chairman,” not even daring to use his name.
Much later, I found out that Rob had a personal connection to Chang.
“My Dad and Chang carpooled at Texas Instruments in Dallas. He came to our house a few times, and knew my mother, too. I must have been five years old. Chang had a reputation as a tough guy at TI. Later he was in charge of quality, and I interviewed him for a story before I joined EWN.”
I was still getting to understand the industry, but it was clear something good was going to come out of all the flurry of activity around the town of Hsinchu, largely confined in those days to the walls of the government’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) that had been modeled on AT&T Bell Labs. But I couldn’t have guessed we were talking to the man who would lead TSMC, a company that started its life as an ITRI research fab, to become the pre-eminent maker of the world’s most leading-edge chips, beating even giant Intel to the game of finding profits – and big profits at that -- in the race to make ever smaller, faster chips. Nor could I have imagined his company would become a prized jewel in China/US geopolitics.
The special reports we eventually compiled from our trip had lots of mainly uninteresting pictures and in-the-weeds details, but few real insights, despite Rob’s no-doubt diligent efforts back in New York editing our stories, working through jet lag with Henkel looking over his shoulder.
Back breaking special reports like ours rarely lifted the trades from their brief lives in corporate lobbies on their way from the mailroom to the trash. Despite a couple years of hard work, we failed to break any big stories that got us noticed. We didn’t get the traction with global readers that would attract enough ad sales to pay for a full staff of our own. Eventually the parent company, CMP, decided to fold World News, transferring a handful of the bureau reporters like Alan and I to EE Times.
Next: I Get a Mentor
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