Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular “debugging” by their engineers.

They set aside their free-market beliefs the moment Japanese competition mounted, claiming the competition was unfair.

One popular Soviet joke from the 1980s recounted a Kremlin official who declared proudly, “Comrade, we have built the world’s biggest microprocessor!”

Newspaper Guangming Ribao set the tone, calling on readers in 1985 to abandon “the formula of ‘the first machine imported, the second machine imported, and the third machine imported’ ” and replace it with “ ‘the first machine imported, the second made in China, and the third machine exported.’ ” This “Made in China” obsession was hardwired into the Communist Party’s worldview, but the country was hopelessly behind in semiconductor technology—something that neither Mao’s mass mobilization nor Deng’s diktat could easily change.