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.

| To page top | To Part 2 index |

“Mr. Shimura’s Essays with Historic Photos”    Semiconductor History Museum of Japan
Society of Semiconductor Industry Specialists (SSIS), General Incorporated Association
Shiota Bldg 202, 6-27-10 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo Japan, 160-0022, Tel:81-3-6457-3245 Fax:81-3-6457-3246 E-mail:info@ssis.or.jp Url:http://www.ssis.or.jp
All the contents including the texts and the photos herein published are neither allowed to be reproduced, nor copied without permission of SSIS.
Copyright (C) 2016, SSIS All Rights Reserved