On February 20, President Lee and more than 400 officials and elected representatives at the central government level filled the main assembly hall in the presidential building to listen to an "outsider" from the private sector--Acer's chairman of the board, Stan Shih--report on the prospects of the ROC's high-technology industries. It was the February session of the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Assembly, which has met once a month for the past year.

"President Lee has sought out people in high technology ever since assuming office," says Chang Jui-ting, chief of protocol in the Office of the President. The president views the development of the ROC's technological industries with considerable importance and has often asked academic experts to lecture on the subject, Mr. Chang adds. Stan Shih, as the chairman of the nation's largest computer company, was the first figure from the business world to be invited.

Whether it was thanks to the presidential audience his report received or to the appealing allure of his call to "set up Taiwan as a high-tech island and make it the fourth largest computer manufacturing country in the world," the phrases "high-tech island" and "Silicon Island" were soon bandied about in the media, and the ideas have caught the fancy of government officials as well as industry manufacturers. Minister of Economic Affairs Chen Li-an mentioned on April 10, for example, that the ROC is striving toward rising new industries that are knowledge intensive in the hopes of achieving its goal of making Taiwan into a high-tech island at an early date.

Judged from the reaction of public opinion, the words of government officials, and the eager support of the computer industry, Taiwan's economy would seem to be harboring unprecedented ambitions.

According to 1988 statistics, the ROC's information industry has grown more than a hundredfold during the past ten years. Its annual production value of US$5.4 billion, or 3.2 percent of the world's total, ranks sixth in the world, behind those of the United States, Japan, West Germany, Great Britain, and France. In the global market for computer products, the ROC is number one in screens, number two in terminals, number three in PCs, and a leading supplier of add-on cards, keyboards, housings, and other computer peripherals.

"If you ranked computer products on a scale of zero to a hundred in terms of sophistication, then we now make only the bottom 30 percent," Stan Shih points out. Taiwan has just begun producing work stations and minicomputers, and it still doesn't handle mainframes or software. "But for the products we do make, we occupy 15 to 30 percent of the world market."

Taiwan's computer industry may have grown like a snowball, but it's been a rather loose snowball till now, as makers never managed to combine forces on the world market. That is one reason observers are concerned that the ROC may come out on the short end of the stick compared with South Korea.

In response, longtime industry leader Acer Corp. decided earlier this year to work together with six other makers in forming a joint trading company for high-tech products. In addition to handling export business, the firm will cooperate with a U.S. chain supplier to win back profits that are now gobbled up by middlemen.

Besides developing high-grade products, the industry is also setting up an association to promote work stations, in coordination with the Industrial Technology Research Institute. "We hope that the association can turn Taiwan's strengths into strengths that can be utilized by everyone," says Chintay Shih, who is executive vice president of the institute and in charge of planning for the association.

By developing work stations and minicom-puters the ROC's computer industry hopes to surpass those of Britain and France and become the fourth largest in the world.

"We're sixth now, a little behind Britain and France," says Li Kwoh-ting, minister of state in the Executive Yuan. Pointing to last year's industry growth rates of eight percent for Britain, six percent for France, and 35 percent for the ROC, he laughs and adds: "If it goes on like this, how can we not catch them? I think that in four years' time we have a chance to catch up with West Germany too."

But he also believes that our reliance on imports of major components such as IC memory chips is a bottleneck for long-term development. Acer, for one, is now actively seeking a large foreign partner to cooperate with in manufacturing components.

But whether it's manufacturing new products or expanding production capacity, both require additional factory space. The Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park is already full up, real estate values have soared over the past two years, and many makers have started to worry that the problem of land will become a stumbling block in the industry's development.

For just this reason, Stan Shih suggested in his presidential report that the government set up four new high-tech industrial parks in northern, central, southern, and eastern Taiwan that would be integrated with neighboring universities, research organizations, and satellite high-tech industrial parks to transform Taiwan into a high-tech island.

Economic Minister Chen also views this problem with considerable concern and has indicated that the government is in the process of planning three new high-tech industrial districts.

For Taiwan, in fact, the problems that need money to solve are not the main ones. The biggest headache for the information industry right now is the long-term cultivation of qualified personnel.

Compared with the situation in the other members of Asia's four little dragons, the ROC's information industry is loaded with trained personnel, but the manpower shortage in the information industry is a worldwide phenomenon, and the ROC is no exception.

In response to the shortage on the home front, many Chinese have been hired back from the other side of the Pacific or have returned on their own to set up businesses. Forbes magazine reported on this "brain drain in reverse" in its April 17th issue.

"We used to think that the U.S. was lucky to sit back and enjoy all the people we had given them; but now we have to thank them instead for training so many people and giving them work experience," Shih has said.

As to how many of our computer personnel there are in the United States, Forbes pointed out that one in every five engineers in Silicon Valley now is Chinese.

"That's the key to our future, because the high-grade products that we still can't make here are being made in the U.S. by Chinese," Shih points out.

Based on the performance of Chinese people on either side of the Pacific, we might be able to twist a popular current expression to say: Our "high-tech island" future is no longer just a dream.

[Picture Caption]

With the wisdom and hard work of its citizens, the ROC has already become the sixth largest information manufacturing country in the world.

The Technology Building located in the Information Science Technology Exhibition Center in Taipei draws crowds of visitors for a look at the information life of the future.

Not Willing to let small and medium businesses get too far ahead, large enterprises are also entering the ranks of the information industry. Such as Formosa Plastics, now making raw materials for computer keyboards.

As roots are planted for the total informatization of society, the future "Silicon Island" is no pipe dream.

With the wisdom and hard work of its citizens, the ROC has already become the sixth largest information manufacturing country in the world.

The Technology Building located in the Information Science Technology Exhibition Center in Taipei draws crowds of visitors for a look at the information life of the future.

Not Willing to let small and medium businesses get too far ahead, large enterprises are also entering the ranks of the information industry. Such as Formosa Plastics, now making raw materials for computer keyboards.

Not Willing to let small and medium businesses get too far ahead, large enterprises are also entering the ranks of the information industry. Such as Formosa Plastics, now making raw materials for computer keyboards.

As roots are planted for the total informatization of society, the future "Silicon Island" is no pipe dream.

As roots are planted for the total informatization of society, the future "Silicon Island" is no pipe dream.