It's two o'clock in the afternoon. Bobo Wang, president of Microtek International Co., is holding a business meeting at his company. In his pocket is an airplane ticket for a four o'clock flight to London that same afternoon.
School's out. Seven-year-old Lin Hsiao-mei goes to the supermarket for her favorite candy, Mint Humbugs. "I want to charge it," she tells the cashier. On a form showing the date, item, and family account number she writes her name in three lopsided characters.
It's evening rush hour. Chang Ssu-jung goes into the 7-Eleven store. Head lettuce, Cheese Whiz, Lipton tea . . . she picks them out one by one. "Not bad," she thinks to herself, "The manager got everything I asked him to order last month."
This is not a Chinatown in the U.S., and it's not a foreigners' enclave in Taipei. The location is Hsinchu, in what has been called "Taiwan's Silicon Valley": Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park.
"Our life style is not like Taipei, not like Hsinchu, and not exactly like the U.S. either," Bobo Wang says.
So just what kind of a place is it?
Construction of the industrial park began in December 1976. Aimed at stimulating high-technology industries, the park was envisioned as an important step in the ROC's economic development. "High technology is a world economic trend," Ho Yi-tz'u, director of the park's administration bureau at the time, once pointed out to a group of foreign reporters. "Our country's industries must adapt to the electronic and information age or they're lost."
For high-technology industries, capital means trained personnel. According to the Executive Yuan, of the 79,000-some students who have left Taiwan over the past twenty years to pursue further studies abroad, only 11,000 have returned. Luring these talented, experienced people back home is a goal that the government has been actively working for.
The Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park is designed to attract these people and to serve as a cradle for the development of the nation's high-technology industries. Limited to high-technology companies, the park offers businesses preferential treatment, such as government investment, unlimited foreign participation, and financial, tax, and capital advantages.
Maintaining trade secrets is vital to high-technology industries, and so the park enforces tight security. People entering and leaving are checked for identification, and the park forms something of an independent living space separated from Hsinchu proper, with its own residences, activity center, athletic field, swimming pool, library, school, and so forth.
The park's school is called "The Experimental High School," but in fact consists of grades all the way from kindergarten up. To accommodate the children of returning personnel, the school features American-style teaching methods and bilingual education.
"Attracting technical talent back home involves more than simply creating job opportunities," Ho Yi-tz'u said. "We've got to give them the whole package--quality of living included."
As a result, the park presents an appearance very different from that of Hsinchu proper: it has broad streets lined with shade trees, red-brick houses surrounded by lush green lawns, sidewalks lit by streetlamps. . . . "Where else on Taiwan can you find anyplace like it?" asks Christine Fu, Wang's wife, who works at the Industrial Technology Research Institute.
When Wang came to the park six years ago to set up his own company after having lived in the U.S. for many years, the park had just been opened and seemed rather dull, lacking the activity center, restaurants, and other facilities it has now.
Wang, his wife, and two children are quite happy now. They live in a two-storey, split-level house less than a ten minutes' drive from work. "Over the past six years, we must have saved several thousand hours in commuting time alone," Wang remarks, contrasting their life now with that in the U.S. He says he uses the extra time to build up his company or to work out in a nearby gym.
Hard work and hard play are typical of park residents. After-work activities are numerous and varied, and residents say that the place has a "college" feel.
In fact, the average educational level at the park may well be the highest in the country. Forty percent of the work force have college diplomas, and six percent graduate degrees. Of the 59 businesses currently located in the park, 35 are owned by returned overseas scholars.
Because so many have similar back-grounds, residents have a strong sense of togetherness. "We're as close as a single family," Christine Fu says. "We joke that we're going to turn into a 'people's commune' pretty soon!"
Growing up with lots of green space to play in, the children enjoy something city kids miss. And they are baptized in state-of-the-art technology at an early age. "Nearly every family has a computer," said one engineer at a local communications company, pointing out that his one-year-old baby has already begun playing with the keys on his.
A self-sufficient little world unto itself, the science park is quite separate from the rest of Hsinchu. "Why go to Hsinchu?" one park resident said. "It's just two minutes from here to the freeway and then another forty to Taipei. 'Psychologically' Taipei is much closer."
Hsinchu may have little to offer park residents, but if the people there were willing to venture outside their gates a bit more, it would surely be a help toward spurring development in the community of which they are a part.
[Picture Caption]
The quality of life in the Park is first-rate.
The confidential nature of high-tech industries makes security a top priority. This is a lost property notice.
Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park was established to foster high-technology industries.
The confidential nature of high-tech industries makes security a top priority. This is a lost property notice.
Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park was established to foster high-technology industries.
