China’s long march for the soul of the nation’s digital future faces an ever-shifting end point

Chinese semiconductor companies are up against a formidable Intel-Microsoft alliance that has ring fenced an eco-system and peripheral sub-sectors of hardware producers, chip designers, software and app developers

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A researcher planting a semiconductor on an interface board during a research work to design and develop a semiconductor product at Tsinghua Unigroup research centre in Beijing on February 29, 2016. Photo: Reuters

Published: 8:00am, 26 May 2018Updated: 8:37am, 26 May 2018

In China’s quest for the soul of the nation’s digital technology, Ni Guangnan and Cheng Xu are two of the foot soldiers of a two-decade march to develop an indigenous semiconductor processor and operating system – a journey where the end point is ever-shifting.

Ni, the 79-year-old academic at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, led the 1999 team that developed China’s very first home-built chip. Cheng, director of the Peking University’s Microprocessor Research and Development Centre (MPRC) led the team that produced the architecture for the UniCore 16 embedded microprocessor the same year, the first building blocks of a functioning computer.

However, these engineering feats never did achieve their intended commercial adoptions, leaving Ni and Cheng to continue toiling in relative obscurity.

Now, the duo are back in the spotlight, after the US Department of Commerce in April banned the export of American technology components and operating systems to ZTE, one of China’s biggest makers of telecommunications hardware and smartphones, for breaching the settlement terms in a violation of Iran and North Korea trade sanctions.

The question on everybody’s mind – from internet chat to remarks by top Chinese leaders – after the ZTE ban is: Why hasn’t the world’s second-largest economy, with seemingly unlimited financial resources and talent at the nation’s disposal, been unable to find the soul (which rhymes with the Chinese word for chips) of its digital technology?