From The Salon.com via China Digital News
The boom in the Chinese microchip industry has Americans worrying about lost jobs and national security. We should be praising it as a model of how globalization is supposed to work.
Aug. 3, 2005 | In 2004, more than 40 tech companies staged public offerings of their stock on Wall Street. Ten were domestic Chinese firms. A microchip company led the way; in one of the largest initial public offerings of the year, China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. raised $1.8 billion.
If chip industry experts across the globe weren't already obsessed with China, SMIC's IPO riveted the attention of the remaining holdouts. Five years ago, China hardly had a chip industry to speak of. Each year since then, led by SMIC, production has exploded. Today, China makes about 8 percent of the world's chips; by 2010, that number may be up to 20 percent.
From nowhere to world domination has been the story of China and globalization for the past decade. Textiles, toys, televisions and cellphones -- one global industry after another has succumbed to Chinese competition. Why should chips be any different?
Because the chip industry can be an example where globalization works right.
