09-05-2025
The US Economy Will Pay the Price for Trump's Attacks on Universities
When Chinese scientists forged their first integrated circuit in 1965, the country's fledgling chip industry was only about five years behind the US. Just a decade later, however, China's chip sector had fallen far behind Silicon Valley — and behind its Asian neighbors, as Chris Miller noted in his 2022 book Chip Wars. By the mid-1970s, Intel had invented microprocessors, Japan was dominating the global memory market, and the chip industry was pulling peasants out of the fields in South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. Yet out of every 1,000 semiconductors produced in China, 'only one is up to standard,' a Communist Party official complained at the time.
What had happened in that intervening decade was the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong effectively declared war on China's educated elites. The Communist Party chairman argued that expertise was a source of privilege that undermined socialist equality. Thousands of scientists and experts were sent to work as farmers in destitute villages; many others were simply killed.
