Computer Assembly Failed In
 Silicon Valley…And Won't Return 

My ventures into news reporting were first based in New York and then San Francisco, and became more focused at the U.C. Berkeley journalism school at U.C. Berkeley. The proximity to Silicon Valley in the Palo Alto region - a short drive from the Bay Area - enabled close-up journalism without the slick media hoopla and political kowtowing that prevailed in the mainstream magazines and newspaper coverage in the big cities. A host of troubling issues that entangled the computer industry were being voiced by disgruntled employees, underpaid Asian workers, environmentalists and home owners and also a few in-house engineering whizes alarmed about upper-management’s focus on investor-targeted publicity to the neglect of recurrent computer crashes and poisoning of the aquifer.

The two major concerns largely overlooked or suppressed by the mainstream press were: first, consumer complaints about the propensity of computers to crash, resulting in total loss of unrecoverable data; and second, among environmentally-aware utilities experts alarming reports of toxic chemical-contaminated waste-water from the chip-cleansing process, dumped into local sewer systems, harming local farms and, worse, leakage into the regional aquifer - thereby poisoning drinking water. Another issue was the inequity of pay levels for immigrant workers, especially Filipinos and Mexicans, many of them women - toiling under unrealistic production quotas. In their quest for competitive pricing and investor interest, rival tech executives refused to confront the gathering clouds of tougher regulation of environmental standards and the negative impact of computer crashes on consumers, especially techies and  media reporters. As in a race-car movie, the only priority for rival tech managers was getting ahead of the pack - but this was not the Indy 500. 

Meanwhile, nearly everyone I knew in the Bay Area had experienced computer crashes that occurred without any hint of warning. For instance, there was a data wipe-out at my volunteer project to aid Vietnamese “boat people” - our abandoned allies - to immigrate during terrible repression by the victorious communists after the U.S. forces fled Saigon aboard helicopters. One of our dedicated volunteers - a graduate student from Japan who exchanged work hours for computer time - was nearing completion of her final thesis when our brand-new Apple II computer suddenly ceased operating with loss of all files. In tears, she had to request the dean of her program for delay of graduation due to a computer malfunction. Add up all the horrific stories and there had to have been billions of dollars in losses from “routine” crashes. Basically only larger businesses and major corporations that could afford law-suits against the irresponsible computer companies, with many of those offenders took the easy way out by declaring bankruptcy. The much touted 1980s ended in disappointment over all the media hype about a computer revolution supposedly changing how we live and do business - hah! 

Phone calls to major brands for interview requests routinely went unanswered, whereas tech execs were eager to spew out buzz-words at conferences and hype to the establishment news media. As dark clouds gathered over the public’s losses for their profiteering, the cult-like managers ignored anything resembling bad news and therefore the bottom fell out with consumer lawsuits against defective products, prompting alarmed investment houses to tighten the noose and then ditch Silicon Valley from their investment portfolios. 

The list of failed U.S. tech brands included: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, Burroughs, Commodore, Compaq, Control Data, DEC, Gateway, Gremlin, Univac, Zenith and a slew of lesser-known defunct innovators  - never to be mentioned nowadays out of embarrassment. Those ghosts of an over-aggressive and under-performing new industry reflected the American addiction for fast profits - yet another California Gold Rush - rather than humble service to customers aka loyal users. BTW, the genius inventor of that Apple II bombshell - in more ways than one - was the Woz. 

The last survivors standing high-tailed it, transferring much of their production to China. The  included Michael Dell and Bill Gates, who like banditos on the run started to shift production out of the USA to China. By contrast, stubborn losers sinking under unfathomable debt, sold off their patents, copyrights and trade secrets to whoever in the world might pay in depleted cash, including Chinese entrepreneurs. It’s a wild guess: how many times were those patents sold to suckers or traded on the Internet black market. 

Be certain that other tech centers also suffered the same sinking feeling - as I discovered about Nokia’s panicked black market sales of defective fones, which were smuggled into England and Dubai - during the early Gulf War era when I was peddling Amoi’s 24-carat gold-coated - functioning - phone across the Persian Gulf region. Never heard of Amoi? It’s a boutique tech designer/producer favored by women based in the pleasant seaside town of Xiamen, China. When life’s that good - with wives of oil sheiks begging for a phone with a little extra cash in hand - there’s no need to compete like a madman or be a publicity seeker. Pretending to be a gentleman pays handsomely - my middle name Clark was inspired by Rhett Butler. Desperation and hype are for all-too ambitious losers. 

Tech Flight to China

Fortunately, for worldwide users and financially hard-pressed Americans most of all, the computer industry was transferred - actually saved from self-destruction - out of Silicon Valley in northern California to three major production and research centers in China: Shenzhen, Xiamen and big bad Beijing. In those outposts of the Red Dragon, aesthetically perfect computers are rigorously inspected, assembled and packed for delivery worldwide. The frantic last-gasp tech transfer from the USA to China  - like diamond dealers rushing out of burning building for a midnight deposit in a bank vault  - was an exit strategy for only a handful of survivors of the Silicon Valley crash.

Any thought of turning back the clock in the computer game is an idle exercise in wishful thinking and self-flagellation. For Trump, an aversion to China as seen during  his reluctant presidential visit to China during his first term - and that was dampened by the memory of a golf course/property development gone sour with a crafty Chinese real-estate agent (whose massive real-estate empire collapsed a couple of years ago triggering a financial scare in China and the crook’s arrest.) Get over it, Don - turn the page onto brighter prospects! Even for someone as tough-minded as the Don, human memory is basically a garbage can of traumas, failures, disappointment and regrets - so just leave it all behind and flush. The human imagination as opposed to memory is a wide-screen theater of hope, wishes and wet dreams - so be happy looking forward to endless success - no matter how dismal the reality. 

Unexpectedly, I was an unlikely observer and participant over the past quarter century of that transfer of production and design leadership from troubled Silicon Valley, Seattle and central Massachusetts to China’s three then-aspiring computer-assembly hubs - Beijing’s Haidian tech district, Shenzhen bordering Hong Kong and the lesser known but key port city of Xiamen. That fascinating transfer of world-leading computer design and assembly was not a hostile takeover but a voluntary and indeed necessary evolution that transformed “clunky” made-in-USA computers that routinely “crashed” into light-weight laptops with an impressive record of stability and a rep for being crash-free. Thus, Michael Dell and Bill Gates (and later Apple’s leadership) gambled on China as the steadiest platform for producing reliable laptops at an affordable price - based on low-to-moderate production costs and product reliability. 

The rigorous and often unrealistic demands for dependability and styling by consumers in the USA and Europe - which were met at an affordable retail price has accounted for the past half-century’s rise of China to become the world’s major producer of consumer tech available at every box store around the world, starting with three instantly recognized brands: Microsoft, Dell and Lenovo (formerly IBM). The Chinese teams of tech managers, designers and most of all their “grunt” inspection teams in ultra-clean factories deserve praise and recognition and not a lot of gruff for making the “impossible” effort and also for holding down the wholesale price that makes computer ownership available to every child in the world as well as to consumers, designers, engineers, journalists, porn freaks and Tik Tok fans. That’s the high and low of it - the 21st century social scale. I do not know where papal cardinals fit it - or Mormons for that matter - since I’m not up to speed on current religion. Jesus is right by me, though he was not a techie.

Back to the USA? RU kidding?

As a strong advocate of a “Made in America” revival, I am on the other hand a realist about certain advantages of globalization and tech transfer to achieve efficiency and cost-reduction for your average consumer. What’s needed in the international economy is a balanced view and open attitude - and not delusional envy and wishful thinking. The USA invented and introduced compact computers to a wider public but failed to take the necessary steps to guarantee operational stability aka can prevent crashes - and so the Chinese engineers and their meticulous and observant factory inspectors had to assume control over production - a challenge handed over to their care by a frustrated and increasingly unprofitable American computer industry or at least what little remained of it. 

What should raise concerns among American taxpayers, educators and industrialists is that a costly campaign to return computer production to the USA will in all likelihood end in complete failure at massive expense to taxpayers and any corporations involved in such folly. Upwards of double-digit billions of dollars from the federal budget aka the Treasury is being lobbied for a competition fund that has little if any possibility of market success. That dream of going back to the 1980s is sheer folly and a waste of taxpayer money to revive a ghost.Was there anything good about the ’80s with its bouffant hair-dos and sun tans other than “Baywatch”?

Microsoft and Dell split their offshore operations between Xiamen and Dell. The homegrown tech producers in China include: Acer, Biren (aka NVIDIA), Legend/Lenovo, which took over IBM’s laptop division, Founder, Huawei, ZTE, TP Link and a host of smaller players.There’s also my former associates at Amoi, which produces stylishly charming devices grabbed up by fashionable women. The rogue in the list is Wan Runnan, the precocious founder of Stone word-processors, who ardently backed the Tienanmen protestors and has since been in overseas exile due to his being near the top of the “wanted” list of the secret police. On the other side of coin - respectability - the CEO of AI chip leader NVIDIA is domiciled in USA, Jensen Huang, who got his training in Silicon Valley’s AMD to become one of three American partners in that artificial intelligence project and along the way became a U.S. citizen. So for those with long-view patience, the tech sector is by nature international, moving toward brain power - the USA is still in the game. 

To summarize: China’s rise to computer-production dominance was not a hostile takeover but a market correction due to the cost of crashes, data losses and purchase of new computers - basic problems that dogged the American tech sector. Nowadays, youngsters competing in computer games and Tik Tok fans are not dogged by repeated crashes that might bring down parental wrath. Reliability of operation is the main reason for the Chinese ascent as producers of the world’s most sought-after electronic devices.

The Zen Art of QC

So what’s been China’s secret to success? Quality Control. Thorough-going inspection of computer chips down to the tiniest detail. This little known fact was disclosed to me by my colleagues at Amoi. It was a rare privilege to be trusted enough to roam freely inside their massive assembly plants in Shenzhen and Xiamen. I found the inspection stations to be fascinating. Why? Because in my younger days I had worked as a welder inside several American factories and steel mills - and had never seen anything as orderly, clean and efficient as that those Chinese assembly plant, especially the quality-control inspection station. 

On one of my more extensive tours, there were about 200 QC inspectors on the day shift - young men and women gloved and dressed in spotless pressed uniforms and baseball-type caps with hair-nets underneath. All were wearing clean sneakers that had been sanitized on cleansing mats next to the doorways. Their inspection teams numbered six to a dozen sitting behind roller tables - cheerful and yet cautious - examining the multitude of components and parts that go into a computer. 

The greatest amount of detailed inspection was focused on computer chips - examined and triple-checked under special microscopes, micro-electronic scanners and plain old magnifying glasses. One of the foremen - a woman actually - disclosed to me that between half and 60 percent of computer chips suffer minor and sometimes major defects (the latter cracks) and are therefore relegated into the maws of a bulldozer to be buried. “Unlike certain manufacturers (without pointing to American companies), we do not allow any questionable parts much less a defective chip to be installed into our computers.”  That - beyond military discipline - is the secret to success. 

What about the cost of tossing out a chip? Her reply: “It costs us a lot but that’s part of the price of doing a reputable business.” Realizing that I’ve never heard anything close to her insistence inside an American manufacturing plant - a summer job at a Del Monte ketchup plant was the closest I’d ever seen. I admitted to her: Only the late-night shift let a rotten tomato slip past their sleeping heads. She laughed - knowingly - since Xiamen was back then a rural town. With due praise, I whispered: “So reliability is Number One.” She did not smile but just faintly nodded, since my comment was redundant. Total quality is simply taken for granted in China’s computer sector - in contrast to the shoddy work, neglect of problems, labor disgruntlement and a fast-buck mentality that prevailed in Silicon Valley.

Shoddy workmanship and neglect of flaws were why in the latter days of the American computer industry, the workforce tended to consist increasingly of Asian immigrants - mainly Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians and a few Chinese newcomers. As an SF-based crusading journalist and former labor union member, I publicized some of their grievances against Silicon Valley computer plants before those facilities were shut down due to persistent product failure. When it came to laying the foundations for brute-force infrastructure, American workers did a great job when laying railroad track, raising skyscrapers and welding together huge ships. But the delicacy required to install tiny parts in an electronic device is something not really in the American toolbox. And the sad truth is that ever-rising pay levels makes it impossible to hire armies of quality-control inspectors. 

These cultural factors explain China’s overwhelming success at production of electronics products including smart-phones and wide-screen TVs. No amount of federal funding and political coaxing is going to seriously challenge those meticulous Peking University and Tsinghua, Asia’s second most prestigious university after Hong Kong U. 

Last Days of California Dreaming

Just prior to graduating from the journalism program at U.C. Berkeley - interrupted during my last month of studies by the Loma Prieta earthquake - I covered the massive destruction in San Francisco aboard my Toyota 4Runner truck (the very first imported to the USA. The Bay Bridge was knocked out so I crossed the waters farther south, when I got a phone call from a Japanese freelancer who I earlier hosted during the closure of a nuclear plant in Sacramento. A reporting team from Asahi newspaper was heading to the SF quake disaster and needed a guide with a vehicle. My reply was that besides a truck I also had the only California Highway Patrol pass among the entire reporter pool - because I’m an ambulance chaser. “What time do they arrive?”

Meanwhile I was watching the collapse of a burning two-story house in the Marina district, while firemen were pulling a rope to extract a Moroccan architect, who was drafted into crawling under the flames to rescue a screaming Chinese woman and her young daughter. Within 12 feet of clasping her hand, the roof caved in. OK, horrifying tragedy, great story. After a night of listening to panicked and depressed residents, who shared food and beverages, and wrapped blankets over traumatized home owners, I boarded my truck to pick up the visiting reporters at the airport. Over coffee at an SFO counter, I advised them to order a big breakfast because the city was a goner. 

I rushed down the lightly trafficked streets to an overhead highway that had collapsed. A policeman looked at my pass and waved me through on the road to the collapsed overhead highway. The crowd of reporters locked out was oozing with envy. I spotted some black youths emerging from the rubble and waved them over: Hey broz, get over here!. The visiting journalists, who had a mini-can, were stunned hearing their all-night effort to pull dazed drivers - all of them white - out of their crumpled cars then being crushed by tons of concrete and steel.. That done, the reporters asked: Do you know how to get the videotape shipped to Tokyo? “Yeah, DHS or one of the other shipping companies or you can beg JAL to put it priority baggage.” It few by Nippon Air and reached Tokyo in time for a television evening special report. Efficiency amid Apocalypse - since everything else was crazy, why not?

My appearance in that spectacle got public attention in Japan as some sort of unlikely hero (which I definitely not, just your average media vulture). Soon, I got a phone call from the editor of The Japan Times, who needed a tough-minded journalist aboard his team. That tale of fame and glory came to an abrupt end a few short years later due to my role in implicating high-level government officials in the Tokyo Subway Gassing, which made me persona non grata. Then. by chance again, I got an overseas phone call that my experience was needed to help start a new journalism school in Hong Kong. From one sinking ship on fire - again - I was jumping onto the next bonfire.

As fate would have it, I arrived in time for the USAF B-2 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The unprovoked attack - other than secret Chinese electronics eavesdropping support for the Yugoslavs - triggered angry student protests in Beijing, with youths in reciprocation tossing rocks at the U.S. embassy windows, while inside the American ambassador was hastily burning classified reports in a fireplace

So I trolled the Internet all night for any clue and by early morning at last stumbled on a NATO briefing site only to find a map of no-strike zones, the largest of them completely cordoning off the region around the Chinese embassy. So I got off my findings to the local press and fell asleep. I was awakened at noon by phones ringing, one of them from Murdock’s Sky TV. So after that brush with fame, I needed peace and quiet, went to the faculty lounge where the British professors who adored PM Tony Blair, Clinton’s partner in crime, accused me of treason. My rebuttal: That puts me in good company with George Washington, eh - which backed them off. 

As a consequence, my scoop resulted in a top-level White House advisor to fly to Hong Kong and deliver the admission is a near pitch-back hall of a Hong Kong technical university. That put an end to the student protest, enabled the ambassador to stay in a 5-star hotel. And I traveled to Beijing at the invitation of the Guang Ming Daily press to visit the desks of the young Chinese couple who died in the bombing, a sobering moment indeed, especially the snapshots at ancient historic sites in Yugoslavia, which soon thereafter divided by the UN into ethnic zones. Indeed, war is a province of Hell. 

Flying Tigers rise again

Luckily, I could hide out from public acclaim at an upcoming tech fair sponsored by Richard Li, one of two sons of the region’s top real estate moguls. BTW, Richard and older brother Victor own the two huge ports at either end of the Panama Canal, thereby stepping into the limelight again. At the city’s first tech event, I was introduced to , a whiz from IBM headquarter who was starting up a tech center at the university. One of his students mentioned that the prof’s father was an ace with the Flying Tigers, the rogue pilots who devastated the Japanese Imperial air force over WWII China. Due to controversies, office politics, envy and feminism inside IBM, I’ve avoided disclosing that honest genius’s identity since. 

That evening I took my mind off the irritation of instant fame by melding into the mindless crowd in Lang Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s boozing district, where I picked up a young woman dying from multiple cancer to cheer her up by heading for a dance hall. She gyrated like a wild cat. As she left for home, I realized that I was becoming a charity worker for lost causes. I headed back down to the bars to listen to Brit music. 

A phone call from the IBM man had me return, reluctantly, to the faculty lounge where a waiter showed me past the Brit gauntlet to a side room. While turning screw to cork, the prof got straight to the point: “Would it be possible for you to travel with me to Beijing on the day after tomorrow?” My invariable freelance response borrowed from an old cowboy TV show went something like: Yup,  Have Gun, Will Travel. IBM headquarters in New York state was in dire need to sell its money-losing computer wing to a cash-flushed foreign partner respectful of their technology and the brand’s pioneering role. In short, a bail out was in the works. 

Hong Kong Airport is a futuristic marvel, the last act of a departing British Empire, whereas the Beijing terminus (before its modern new terminal) was drab, but the taxi drivers outside were an excited and eager bunch, moving passengers at full throttle along the tree-lined Capital Highway. The IBM prof was obviously uncertain, indeed doubtful as a tech expert and not a businessman. 

“Don’t worry,” I said with a calm voice. “If the deal collapses, there are other start-ups in big bad Beijing.” I, too, presumed it was going to be a tough sell. Legend Computer was a company that I had always confused with the defunct Stone. Inside the empty silent foyer, a receptionist led us to a nondescirpt waiting room.

After a brief sit on folding chairs, the corporate chief strolled in to shake hands with the professor, adding boisterously: “Your father was a hero of the Chinese people. It is an honor that IBM has contacted our humble operation. Welcome!”

Legend (a thing of the past was renamed Legend-IBM and then due to consumer confusion plus objections from useless overpaid execs back in the USA, changed to “Lenovo”, which translates from French as “The New”. China gained a windfall with the takeover of the tech division but America did not exactly lose on the deal - it was simply a business trade beneficial to both parties in an intensely competitive and unfair international market. Survival after all is better than bankruptcy aka business suicide and investor debt..

I took my leave, being unnecessary to closure of the deal, and with nothing left to achieve at that early afternoon hour, I strolled along the wide sidewalk toward the Zhongguancun Tower, a shopping center for low-end tech components. Piled with junk sold by bored salesmen shivering from the indoors chill, I picked up a data stick and browsed the offerings - from piles of cords to kits of components. In that prehistoric era, hackers assembled random parts to cobble together workable computers. I bought a pair of gloves because the evening temperatures in the northern capital were still a bit chilly, especially on a row boat. Then it was time to leave the chilly Haidian district for fairer shores in the heart of Beijing. 

Haven for American tech

Those experiences - in brief - recall that the collapse of the American tech sector was a self-inflicted disaster based on failure to address the horrendous flaw of computer crashes. That migration of surviving companies - Dell and Microsoft, and later subdivisions of Apple - were essential for not only business survival but also global brand management aka placement and popularity at big box stores worldwide. 

Can or should the USA attempt a comeback to its former world-leading position? Absolutely not, or risk yet another collapse due to high wages and the all-important cultural factor of pattern recognition, which is deficient due to the simplistic English alphabet. The analogy is Africans competing in the Winter Olympics or Parisians trying to outpace Ethiopian long-distance runners. So what can American excel at? Content.

By chance, on one of my sojourns in Beijing, I was invited by a Beijing University whiz to the unveiling of an amusing diversion based on short appearances on the Internet. I was appalled by dumbed-down concept, but when asked by the group’s development team, my honest reply was: “Although it won’t replace the  news channels or internet controversies, this amusing concept could end up attracting millions of young people in the USA, Europe, Japan and everywhere else.” Yeah, the no-brainer generation. The fellows were elated by that spot-on if brutally dishonest assessment. Their product was destined to be a flop, at least in my mind. That unveiling was for short-length clips, tentatively called Tik Tok. 

The Never-ending Adventure

So if the USA is not going to recover its former leadership in computer production - Thank God for small favors - what does the tech future hold? The better question is: What fields of endeavor are going to lift the USA to its former glory as during the early Space Race or introduction of color TV? 

The spirit of inventiveness runs in the veins of Americans - if they can only extricate their attention from mass consumerism. It’s the adventurers, the dreamers and risk-takers who lead the way to new horizons, imagine novel inventions and conjured up brilliant concepts. Given that proven fact, my observation is that NASA has failed its original purpose, which was to expand the horizons of the American mind - as put in the Star Trek intro - to go to where no man has ever gone ... you know the rest - way out there! 

For the past half-century, however, we’ve used the Moon as a cop-out excuse to evade our more significant mission to the Red Planet, a likely habitat for Life before the stuff of life rained down on a nasty volcanic Earth. What’s needed to survive on Mars and establish a civilizational base there probably consists of  novel devices and instruments yet to be invented or modified - including ionic sludge-vaporizing toilets - starting yesterday. Plug-in computers will be replaced by mobile signals transmitters - beams and waves - aka improved radio and our thought processes will have to adapt more than Kirk or Scottie. Only by pushing ahead - instead of looking back - will new technologies and inventions be envisioned, designed, developed and perfected for the next phase of human civilization. Look ahead, not back to an outdated past of the Apple II. The Future is where we’ve always been heading, and somehow that driving vision will generate the necessary technologies aka novel tech that we cannot yet imagine. So start the countdown!

With those sorts of Star Trek thoughts in mind, I boarded an underground train to head to older parts of Beijing. Gratefully relieved of responsibility, I decided to head to the old hutong (alley) to drop in on Travis’s small bar for a martini, book a room at a guesthouse, catch up on dinner at one of many exotic-menu cafes and sleep off the dull feeling and get up in the early morning to rent a bicycle to stretch my legs along the canals of big beautiful Beijing. Instead of my usual routine, however, I ended up on the roof-top of an ancient building that sheltered a Greek barbecue restaurant to drink Macedonian wine - the cure-all for Alexander the Great - in the gathering darkness over the swaying tree tops watching the cheery crowd strolling the alley and marveling at the lit-up old Tibetan temple at the end of road. It was a perfect day - when IBM’s lost computer division found its ideal home in this ancient center of civilization despite the cackling of America's techno-patriots. The planet revolves around to circle the sun, and so must we - stay on the move toward ever-new vistas.