Asia’s electronics revolution had completely passed by mainland China. Silicon Valley chip firms employed thousands of workers, often ethnic Chinese, in plants from Hong Kong to Taiwan, Penang to Singapore. But the People’s Republic had spent the 1960s denouncing capitalists while its neighbors were trying desperately to attract them. A study in 1979 found that China had hardly any commercially viable semiconductor production and only fifteen hundred computers in the entire country. Mao Zedong died the year after Bardeen’s visit to China. The old dictator was
