industry, downplaying its importance and cutting its ties with foreign technology. Most of China’s scientists resented the chairman for ruining their research—and their lives—by sending them to live on peasant farms to study proletarian politics rather than semiconductor engineering. One leading Chinese expert in optics who was sent to the countryside survived rural reeducation on a diet of rough grains, boiled cabbage, and an occasional grilled snake, as he waited for Mao’s radicalism to subside. While China’s small cadre of semiconductor engineers were hoeing China’s
