Ties That Bind - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

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Ties That Bind
Taiwan’s First Generation of Engineers
Learns to Improvise
Ta-Lin Hsu’s family fled to Taiwan in 1949, at the time of the
Communist takeover on the mainland. He recalls coming to the
U.S. in the 1960s as part of a wave of Taiwanese engineering
and science students encouraged to emigrate for graduate
study after completing their military service. He had received his
undergraduate degree in physics from National Taiwan University,
a masters degree in electrophysics from the Polytechnic
Institute of Brooklyn and finally, in 1970, a Ph.D. in electrical
engineering from Berkeley.
Taiwanese students were drawn to the Bay Area for the
weather and the local Chinatowns in San Francisco, Oakland,
San Jose and Sacramento where language would be less of a
problem. Entry into graduate schools was relatively easy: U.S.
students had little interest in engineering or science, yet demand
in those fields was high. Many Taiwanese students received
financial aid from the universities and support from their
government back home.
After completing graduate school, however—often with honors—Chinese
students had few options. Corporate jobs were
typically entry level, with a glass ceiling barring serious advancement.
Returning to the university to teach was an option,
but not a preferred one. The best chance to apply their knowledge
was in the research labs of IBM, Xerox, General Motors,
the Bell System or Kodak. Dr. Hsu himself went to work for IBM.
Part of his research there involved technology that would turn
up years later in the Apple iPod. He returned to Taiwan frequently,
attending conferences of the Industrial Technology
Research Institute (ITRI) and the Electronics Research and
Service Organization (ERSO).
Taiwan’s Minister of Economic Affairs, K.T. Li, had been
charged with moving Taiwanese manufacturing upmarket into
high-technology. It was a challenge: most existing Taiwanese
manufacturing enterprises were small, low-skilled family-run
operations. Li established Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial
Park, initially as an electronics export processing zone, in 1980.
But participation was slow to develop. One problem was