Headline January 23, 2017/ ''' SILICON ''VALLEY'' [EAST} '''

''' SILICON ''VALLEY'' [EAST} '''

NEVER THOUGHT OF TAIWAN as a technology superpower?  Start reading the labels in the back of your PC.

*From the circuit boards, CD-ROM drive and monitor to the mouse, keyboard and case*, the odds are that most came from Taiwan or the Chinese factories of Taiwanese firms.

If your computer is a laptop, it was probably entirely made in Taiwan' the ''Dell'' or  ''Compaq'' labels were stuck on by employees of little known companies such as Asustek, Mitac, FTC  and Compal.

*Making computers for other people may not be glamorous, but it has shown Taiwan its future*.

Just few years ago, Taiwan became the world's leading producer of notebook computers, ahead of both America and Japan.

''Silicon Island'' may be a marketing slogan,  but in just noway, it is  far from the truth.

Most countries would kill for such a big share of one of the world's strongest and fastest-growing industries; indeed there is hardly a developing country in the region that has not tried to emulate high-tech Taiwan.

But it is a hard model for governments to copy, mostly because it owes little to ambitious to five-year plans and brilliant technocrats.

Compared with the hugely expensive government led high-tech efforts of Japan and South Korea, Taiwan's bottom-up success has surprised even its government planners.

To enable every student on the World Students Society to understand and to get to the baseline on Taiwan and Technology, we bring forth the following model story to illuminate and inspire.     

Taiwan owes most of its success to two factors: The first is its close link with America, particularly through the thousands of young people that go each year to study at American universities and end up working in Silicon Valley.

The second is the commercialization of the PC in the early 1980s, which divided the industry into big brand-name companies that concentrated mostly on marketing and sales, and horde of no name component suppliers, who could supply generic parts, even completely assembled machines, at low prices.

It was the Taiwanese already in Silicon Valley who spotted the commoditisation trend first, and recognised that their home country was a good place set up all those no-names.

Their efforts set off an explosion of entrepreneurship activity that has made this island across the Pacific into Silicon Valley's hinterland, an essential extension of America's high-tech industry.

In all fairness to Mr Huang and his colleagues, we begin at the very beginning, say around late 1990s:

In his temporary office in a building still covered with bamboo scaffolding. Wen-Hsiung Huang is having another tough day:

The workmen have found ancient bodies while digging; and the archaeologists will have to come in to inspect them; in the meantime the trenches have filled with rain water.

Moreover, the local farmers want compensation for their electromagnetic damage their cops may suffer from the  high-voltage power that lines have been struggling above them.

Building a replica Silicon Valley from scratch in a sugar cane plantation in Taiwan's rural south is not easy. It was never easy.

Mr Huang is serious. He aims to recreate the suburban Northern California essence of Palo Alto, complex with townhouses and American-style schools, alongside all the semiconductor factories, software start-ups. venture capitalists and cappuccino counters that make the real Silicon Valleyhum  

It might seem a silly idea if Taiwan had not done not it once already 

The Hsinchu Science Park near Taipei in the north is the core of the world's third-largest high-tech industry, accounting for a third of Taiwan's manufacturing exports and a huge share of the world's computer productions.

Now Hsinchu has run out of space,  -a victim of its own success, and Taiwan's government technocrats, at the time of the story, led by Mr. Huang, are building a second park near the southern city of Tainan.

But having said all that, it is just so fair to say that Taiwan's government has played a role,too, although it desrves more praise for recognising its limitations.

Mr. Kwoh-Ting Li, a former minister now considered the father of Taiwan's high-tech industry, travelled regularly to America in the 1970s and early 1980s, seeking the advice of Taiwanese-Americans in industry and academia-

*And luring back some of the best to practise what they preached*.

The Honour and Serving of  *Technology's Base Line on Taiwan* continues  and continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing forward. And see you on the following one.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the ecosystem 2011:

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Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless