Growing up in 1980s China, I vividly remember the smokes, bodies, and ruins on the TV screen, accompanied by unfamiliar phrases like “Gaza Strip” (加沙地带）and “West Bank” (约旦河西岸), uttered in Chinese by the hosts of CCTV’s famously boring evening news program.  After I came to the U.S., the similar scenes from Palestine continued to drive news cycles. However, this superficial familiarity did not mean I knew much about the conflict.  Why would I care? The dreadful stories from that land seemed to be getting old, and the people involved appeared hopelessly trapped in the past, while the world moved on.  October 7th and its aftermath changed me. Like many others, I struggled to make sense of the horror of that day, the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the widening chasm that suddenly threatened to engulf America. I have never seen so many protests on college campuses, including the one where I teach. More strikingly, the vast majority of protesters seemed to support the side that, from my understanding, had started the war in the worst way imaginable.

Perhaps they knew something I did not. Maybe my lack of historical knowledge clouded my judgment. In any case, I am determined to understand better. I decided to start with the history of the Jews, the chosen people who have claimed Palestine in the name of God.

“The Invention of the Jewish People,” written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian from the University of Tel Aviv, was the first book I stumbled on.  As usual, the book caught my attention because of its controversies. After finishing the book, however, I realized that the title might be unnecessarily provocative. “The Invention of the Modern Israeli State” would be more accurate, although inventing “the Jewish people” sounds much more exciting.

The book addresses a fundamental question: are Jews a people or a religion? To me, this was the most confusing aspect about the Jewish identity. I had always assumed Jews were simply believers of Judaism. Precisely because of their faith, Jews have been cursed, persecuted, and slaughtered for thousands of years by pagan Romans, Arabic Muslims, European Christians, and Nazis. This ancient hatred was so intense and enduring that an entire vocabulary of words was created to describe it: antisemitism, pogrom, Holocaust, ghettos, and genocide.

However, the mainstream view among Israelis today, according to Sand, is that Jews is also an ethnic group whose ancestry goes back to the apocryphal accounts in the Bible. To understand this claim, let me briefly recount Jewish history in its first millennium.

The legend has it that Abraham is the biological progenitor of all Jews.  God revealed the Truth to Abraham and made a covenant with him, promising that his descendants will become a great nation and be given the land of Canaan, which is today’s Palestine.   Abraham’s descendants were briefly enslaved by Egyptians but led by Moses back to the Hold Land, which they eventually conquered. By 1000 BCE, the Kingdom of Irael emerged, ruled sequentially by three legendary kings, Saul (the grandfather), David (the father) and Soloman (the son).   The kingdom reached its peak under Soloman, who built the First Temple, as well as grand palaces where he famously housed an enormous harem.  The death of Soloman in 930 BCE plunged Israel into a chaos from which it would not fully recover until perhaps modern times.  The nation was divided into Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Israel fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 720 BCE, and Judah subsequently fell to Babylon in 586 BCE.

The conquest of Judah by Babylon was the first traumatic event—it destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, sending the first wave of Jews into exile in Babylon and Egypt. Many Jews would later return to the Holy Land and build the Second Temple with the help of the First Persian Empire, which by then had dominated the land between the Mediterranean and India. However, the Jewish nation would continue to exist as a vassal state—controlled first by the Persians and then by the Greeks—until 165 BCE, when the Hasmonean Kingdom gained independence following a revolt against the Greeks.

Then it was the Romans’ turn to ravage Palestine.  The Hasmonean Kingdom fell to Pompey’s legions in 63 BCE. The following two hundred years were marked by tremendous upheaval in Palestine, including the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.  The conflict culminated in Bar Kokhab revolt (132 – 136 CE), during which Romans effectively decimated Judea and wiped out most of its Jewish population.   Jews began to leave Palestine in droves and would not return in great numbers until the 20^th century.  Over the next two thousand years, the Jewish diaspora would spread out across the world, sometimes on their terms, but more often driven by relentless persecutions.

Crucially, the claim that Jews are an ethnic group implies that, no matter where they live now and how they have migrated through the ages, Jews have managed to maintain the purity of their ethnicity. The Jewish diaspora is seen as a nation in exile, unfairly deprived of its land promised by God, and thus has the right to return to it.  As Sand put it,

“National mythology determined that the Jews—banished, deported or fugitive emigrants—were driven into a long and dolorous exile, causing them to wander over lands and seas to the far corners of the earth until the advent of Zionism prompted them to turn around and return en masse to their orphaned homeland. This homeland had never belonged to the Arab conquerors, hence the claim of the people without a land to the land without a people.”

This image of a Jewish nation in exile, however, was a modern invention that only began to take shape in the second half of the 19^th century.  According to Sand, up to that point, Jews still primarily identified themselves through their shared religion rather than a common ethnic lineage.   Yet, Bible would soon be “transferred from the shelf of theological tracts to the history section”, becoming an ethnic marker that indicates “a common origin for individuals of very different backgrounds and secular cultures yet all still hated for their religion”.  Armed with the Holy Book, now interpreted as a historical document, Jewish intellectuals in Germany, such as Heinrich Graetz and Heinrich von Treitschke, began to frame the history of Judaism “as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace”.

Sand’s theory is built upon three pillars.

First, Sand maintains that there was never a mass forced deportation of Jews from their homeland after the fall of the kingdom.  Instead, their emigration took place gradually over several centuries, due largely to the expropriation of Jewish land, first by Emperor Hadrian (one of the “Five Good Emperors” of Rome) following the Bar Kokhab revolt, and then by the new conquerors under the banner of Muhammad in the seventh century.  Moreover, Judaism teaches that the exile from the Holy Land serves as a form of redemption, and the return must await the End of Days, when the Messiah will arrive to resurrect the dead and offer salvation. Therefore, there was no “voluntary return” either, for that would be considered an attempt to “hasten the end and rebel against God’s spirit”.   As a result, Jews began migrating to Palestine in significant numbers, as Sand notes, “only when the American borders closed in the 1920s, and again after the horrendous Nazi massacres”.

Second, Sand argues that Judaism has not always been an exclusive religion of a chosen people. On the contrary, ancient Judaism was “as keen to propagate itself as Christianity and Islam would be in the future.” In fact, without significant proselytizing efforts that lasted more than 300 years, starting from the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom, the Jewish population could not have reached its current scale. The later exclusivity was more or less forced upon Judaism by Christianity’s more successful marketing strategy, as well as the edicts of Christianized Roman emperors, which forbade, among other things, the circumcision of males who were not born Jews, including slaves. Of course, this early period of mass conversion to Judaism –– whose memory has been deliberately eradicated by Zionists, according to Sand –– directly contradicts the notion of a pure ethnic lineage tracing back to Abraham and his sons.

The third and perhaps most controversial pillar is the so-called Khazar Hypothesis. According to this theory, a large part of Ashkenazi Jews—who lived mostly in Central and Eastern Europe before World War II, with a great many perishing in the death camps constructed by Hitler—were not migrants from Western Europe, especially Germany, but rather descendants of the Khazars,  a Turkic people who established a powerful empire in the region between the Caspian and Black Seas during the 7th to 10th centuries.  The existence of a Khazar Kingdom that converted to Judaism sometime between the 8th and 9th centuries has been accepted by many.  For example, another book I read recently, “A Short History of the Jewish People,” corroborates this. However, there seems to be no consensus on what happened to the Jews living in that kingdom after it was conquered by the Mongols.  Here is what Sand writes:

“The Mongols did not understand the needs of land cultivation in the vast territories they captured, and did not sufficiently care for the farming needs of the subjugated populations. During the conquest, the irrigation systems that branched from the wide rivers—systems that had sustained the cultivation of rice and vineyards—were demolished, causing the flight of masses of people and depopulating the prairies for hundreds of years. Among the emigrants were many Jewish Khazars who, together with their neighbors, advanced into the western Ukraine and hence to Polish and Lithuanian territories”.

To be sure, Sand lacks any substantial archaeological evidence to support his conjecture about a mass westward migration of Jewish Khazars. In fact, many scholars even doubt that a mass conversion of the Khazars to Judaism ever took place. However, he is right to ask why an interesting and plausible historical theory has been vilified in Israel as heretical, scandalous, disgraceful, and anti-Semitic since 1970s.

Whether or not Sand has all the facts correct—his book has faced pushback from fellow historians—his debunking of the modern concept of the “Jewish People” appears well-reasoned and persuasive, at least to a layman like me. The question is, why did Sand take it upon himself to debunk his own people? As a historian, he fully understood that the reconstruction of Jewish identity was part of the European nationalist movements of the time.

Nationalists have always looked to a glorified past to validate their distinct historical existence.

The Nazis imagined a mythical Germanic past where Aryans were portrayed as a superior, pure race destined to lead the world.

The Meiji Restoration in Japan revived Japan’s first emperor, Jimmu—who was purportedly a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu—to affirm the existence of a divine and unbroken imperial line.

As a kid, I was taught that all Chinese are 炎黄子孙, i.e., the direct descendants of the Yan Emperor (炎帝) and the Yellow Emperor (黄帝), who are said to have ruled China around 2700-2600 BCE. While I always understood these legends were to be taken with a grain of salt, I never doubted for a moment—until after living in the U.S. for some years—that the Chinese are an ethnic group with lineage tracing back to a glorious ancient people led by those legendary figures. Nor did I question the notion that the Chinese have a “sacred and inviolable right” to every inch of the “Chinese land”, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Taiwan, even though these provinces were relatively recent conquests by the Manchurian, a nomadic people disparaged as foreign invaders as recently as in the early 1900s.

Jewish nationalists were no different: they found their narrative in Moses’  commandments  and Solomon’s mighty kingdom, despite the lack of evidence to prove they ever existed.

As Karl Deutsch quipped,

“A Nation … is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.”

If deceptive self-aggrandizement is a standard practice among nation-states, why only calling BS on Jews?

Sand explains his rationale toward the end of the book. He argues that the Jewish identity, invented to justify and bolster the young state of Israel, is at odds with democracy, which requires that all people residing in a country be its sovereign. Since Israel is legally defined as a Jewish state, non-Jews living in the country are treated as undesirable aliens and are, to various degrees, segregated, excluded, and discriminated against. As a result, Israel remains an incomplete democracy or a low-grade democracy. In Sand’s view, this status quo is not only less than ideal but ultimately unsustainable, since

the myth of the Jewish ethnos as a self-isolating historical body that always barred, and must therefore go on barring, outsiders from joining it is harmful to the State of Israel, and may cause it to disintegrate from within.

Therefore, Sand calls for the “creation of a democratic binational state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River” as the ideal solution to the century-long Israel-Palestine conflict.   Be Ideal as it may, Sand’s one-state solution is a non-starter for either side of the conflict nowadays.  Indeed, even he concedes that such a solution, which would likely condemn Jewish Israelis to a permanent minority status in their own state, might be asking too much.   Given their historical experiences over the past two thousand years, it is understandable that Jews are wary of being a minority, especially in a country where the majority adheres to a different faith and may consider itself permanently at war with non-believers and apostates. That leaves us with the two-state solution, which remains viable but barely so.

In all likelihood, the endless cycles of violence and truce will continue, as Israelis and Palestinians remain locked in a perpetual life-and-death struggle over a piece of real estate that they could have shared in peace and prosperity. Sand mentioned that many Palestinians may, in fact, be descendants of Jews who voluntarily converted to Islam after the Arab conquest. If that is true, I cannot think of a more poignant example of the perverse power of religion, which has turned the same people against each other in such a tragic and horrific manner.

Marco Nie, Wilmette, IL

A Theory of Moral Sentiments is Adam Smith’s first book. Compared to Wealth of Nations, his magnum opus, this book was less well-known.  Steve Dubner discussed it extensively in a Freakonomics series, which argued that Smith has been misread by modern economists like Milton Friedman, and that the real Adam Smith was in fact an “affable moral philosopher”, rather than “the patron saint of cutthroat capitalism”. The podcast piqued my interest in Adam Smith and his theory of moral sentiments. The book was not an easy read for me, as it took some time to adjust to the 18th-century writing style.   However, I think the time was well spent.

Central to Smith’s theory is the proposition that the perception of right and wrong comes from sense and feeling rather than reason.  Human happiness, according to Smith, chiefly “arises from the consciousness of being beloved”.  Because we desire to be loved by our brethren— taken to mean relatives, friends, neighbors, and countrymen—we seek their approval and avoid their disapprobation. It is through this pursuit of love and happiness humans acquire sympathy, the ability to share and approve the feelings or interests of another person.  However, to truly sympathize with another’s feelings—to empathize with them (although Smith never used this term)—we must first overcome our own selfishness.

To make this crucial point, Smith proposes a thought experiment, which imagines how “a man of humanity in Europe” would react to the news that a huge earthquake has suddenly destroyed China and all its people. He would, Smith wrote,

“express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general.”

However, after “all this fine philosophy was over”, the man would return to his regular life as if nothing had happened. Indeed, an accident of trivial scale—compared to that catastrophe in China—befallen on him, say the loss of a little finger, would cause him to lose more sleep than what he would over “the destruction of that immense multitude”. If this is so, Smith asks, would this person be willing to sacrifice the lives of all those Chinese to prevent that “paltry misfortune to himself”?   Smith claims humankind has never produced a villain that could be capable of entertaining such a horrific thought. On this point I disagree with him, though his faith in humanity is understandable. After all, Smith has never witnessed the world wars, heard of Holocaust, or met the infamous dictators of the 20^th century.

Smith claims what prevents most people from placing their own interests above the greater interests of others is an impartial spectator that grows and resides within them.  The impartial spectator is “the great judge and arbiter of our conduct”, who teaches us that

“we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love”.

Thus, to become a moral person is to forge and train this impartial spectator, and to be guided by him.  There is a subtle but crucial difference between a moral person and a virtuous one: the former merely follows the impartial spectator’s rules, whereas the latter adopts and embodies his moral sentiments. In some sense, the virtuous person becomes a proxy of the spectator, unified with him in both spirit and conduct, thereby entering a state of spiritual freedom, at which the bounds of moral constraints are no longer felt.

Impartiality is central to many theories of morality. For example, John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” serves as an instrument of impartiality in his theory of justice. Smith’s impartial spectator also resembles what a Confucianist would call “inner sage” (内圣), or the “innate moral knowledge” (良知) in Wang Yangming’s Theory of Mind （心学）.  The unifying state achieved by a virtuous person, I believe, is “知行合一” in the Theory of Mind, and the process through which to arrive at that state is called “致良知”.  Like Smith, Wang also emphasizes sympathy as the approach to morality.  In Instruction for Practical Living (传习录)， he writes,

“世之君子惟务致其良知，则自能公是非，同好恶，视人犹己，视国犹家，而以天地万物为一体。”

Thus, with the help of the impartial spectator (良知), the virtuous person (君子) can be just (公是非) and have empathy (同好恶，视人犹己).

Smith believes moral norms first emerge to forbid actions that inflict pains on a person, such as endangering their life and body, depriving their possessions and property, and violating their rights to basic liberty.  This is because humans are disposed to sympathize with sorrow more strongly than with joy.  Moral norms are extremely important, as they form the laws of justice, without which human society cannot survive.  Yet, the sense of justice only enables people to behave with minimum propriety and decency.  To Smith, it is a mere “negative virtue” that does no real positive good.

Throughout much of the book, Smith explains the transition from adhering to basic moral norms to cultivating positive virtues. The mechanism is still sympathizing, and the secret is to overcome the less desirable aspects of human nature.

What makes us jealous of the success or good fortune of another person?  Again, the reason is that humans are generally more focused on avoiding pain than seeking happiness. As a result, it is more difficult for us to will the good of our brethren—i.e., to truly love them—than to avoid harm to their person and property.  The sentiment of envy is strongest when the person is regarded as an upstart.  As Smith notes,

“The man who, by some sudden revolution of fortune, is lifted up all at once into a condition of life, greatly above what he had formerly lived in, may be assured that the congratulations of his best friends are not all of them perfectly sincere.”

However, thanks to the impartial spectator, we are also ashamed of our own envy, and “often pretend, and sometimes really wish to sympathize with the joy of others”.  A man who fought and won this battle with our sentiment of envy is capable of that magnanimous act of willing the good of our brethren, loving them as much as we love ourselves. He may also learn to maintain prudence and humility no matter what stellar successes he has just achieved and how much he thinks he is entitled to boast about them.  Sympathy reminds him that, by overly displaying joy in his achievements, he could arouse among his brethren envy and jealousy, and the shame and self-pity that come with it.  Therefore, he always “endeavors, as much as he can, to smother his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his new circumstances naturally inspire him.”

Smith was not utilitarian, despite being revered as the father of economics—which is built on the notion of utility-maximizing homo economicus—and invested as a god of capitalism.   As the book makes abundantly clear, Smith did not endorse, much less celebrate, cold-blooded self-interest. His famous “invisible hand” explains why society can work well despite, not because of its members being utterly self-interested.  Surprisingly, he made the same point in this book, which was first published in 1759, seventeen years before the Wealth of Nations. He writes that the rich,

“though they mean only their own conveniency… are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”

If Smith believes that self-interest can be guided toward positive outcomes by the invisible hand, he clearly opposes such consequentialism in matters of morality. He was deeply troubled by the fact that “the world judges by the event, and not by the design”, which he called “the great discouragement of virtue” throughout the ages. Smith conceded that, in the realm of justice, punishment should be proportional to the consequences of our actions, rather than our intentions. However, he forcefully argues that the opposite should apply when assessing our own character and conduct.

In this regard, Smith is nearly a moral idealist. He believes we should strive for “exact propriety and perfection” rather than settle for the lower level “which is commonly attained” by most people. Smith argues that focusing on the inferior standard is what led many historical figures to become arrogant, presumptuous, and extravagantly self-admiring.  Self-admiration may be necessary for their success, as it drives the great men to pursue ventures that a more cautious mind would never consider.  “When crowned with success”, however, this presumption “has often betrayed them into a vanity that approached almost insanity and folly”, and “precipitated them into many rash and sometimes ruinous adventures”.  Somehow, Elon Musk’s face crossed my mind when I read the above passage.

Since to be loved by others generally means to receive their attention and praise, a great deal of human energy has been consumed by the struggle to stand out and be recognized.  Smith refers to this desire for attention and praise as “vanity”.  Although vanity is not inherently a vice, it becomes problematic when it is directed towards the wrong objects. Therefore, writes Smith,

“the great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects”.

Because a man sees wealth and power attract attention and submission, he is often compelled to pursue them. Similarly, observing that fame and glory earn respect and praise, he aspires to be famous and honored. Consequently, he mistakenly equates these pursuits with achieving love and happiness. Smith tells us that

“nature has endowed a man, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of.”

Wealth, power, fame, and glory all signal approval from others, but not necessarily “what ought to be approved of”. To Smith, pursuing praise and pursuing what is praiseworthy are distinctly different. The former often leads us to chase misguided objects of vanity, while the latter inspires a genuine love of virtue.   A virtuous man derives little pleasure from praise where it is not due; instead, he often feels the greatest satisfaction in doing what is praiseworthy, even though “no praise is ever to be bestowed upon it”. Thus, “to be that thing which deserves approbation” is “an object of the highest” to him. If succeeded in this endeavor, he no longer needs approval from others.  He would become assured of “the perfect propriety of every part of his own conduct” and be content with his self-approbation, which, according to Smith, is virtue itself, the only thing which he can and should care about.

Smith’s emphasis on praise-worthiness rather than praise, and on self-approbation rather than approval by others, appears to be rooted in Stoicism.  Smith writes that the Stoics believes

 “human life…ought to be regarded but as a mere two-penny stake. …Our only anxious concern ought to be, not about the stake, but about the proper method of playing. If we placed our happiness in winning the stake, we placed it in what depended upon causes beyond our power, and out of our direction. We necessarily exposed ourselves to perpetual fear and uneasiness, and frequently to grievous and mortifying disappointments. If we placed it in playing well, in playing fairly, in playing wisely and skillfully; in the propriety of our own conduct in short; we placed it in what, by proper discipline, education, and attention, might be altogether in our own power, and under our own direction. Our happiness was perfectly secure, and beyond the reach of fortune.”

In a nutshell, to shield our happiness from the whims of fortune, we should remain as indifferent as possible to praise, recognition, and all the superficial allurements of vanity. This philosophy aligns with a precept I learned many years ago from a Chinese author: 但行好事，莫问前程 (Focus on doing the right thing, rather than on achieving the perfect outcome).  It also echoes my favorite quote from Daniel McFadden’s Nobel Prize autobiography (the emphasis is mine):

“My parents taught me that to lead a virtuous life, I should be modest, take my satisfaction from work done well, and avoid being drawn into competition for status and rewards.”

This idea is precisely what I have been trying to tell any of my doctoral students who would listen: To truly enjoy academia, you must find joy in the research itself, independent of any external rewards it might bring, whether that’s funding, awards, or even the opportunity to change the world.

Marco Nie

April 14, 2024, Evanston, IL.

Chris Miller masterfully told the story of the spectacular rise of the semiconductor industry (the “chip”) and its ever-growing entanglement with geopolitics (the “war”).  It’s a fascinating narrative, filled with ups and downs, twists and turns, heroes and villains, and a cast of victors and losers — well worth reading for its own sake .  It is a must read if you want to understand the current U.S.-China relationship and the slow-moving crisis hanging over the Taiwan Strait.  Semiconductors have become central to the U.S-China relationship, with one side aggressively playing catch-up, and the other striving to maintain its waning lead.  Taiwan has the misfortune to be caught in the middle of this seemingly inevitable epic-clash, not so much because it offers a beacon of hope for “the free world”, as because it houses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the sole fabricator of the world’s most sophisticated chips.

As I read about the legends of semiconductors unfolding in the book, I came to realize my own ignorance about an industry that has profoundly transformed humanity.

I did not know Williman Shockley who, along with two other scientists at Bell Labs, discovered semiconductors and invented transistors. He also started a company called Shockley Semiconductors Laboratory that counted Gordon Moore (yes, that’s the Moore after which Moore’s law is named) and Robert Noyce among its first hires. The pair would rebel against Shockley later and go on to become the giants of the burgeoning industry. They first founded Fairchild Semiconductor that supplied the computing power to land men on the moon in the 1960s, and then Integrated Electronic, or Intel – a household name in today’s tech world.

I had never heard of Texas Instruments (TI) before I read the book.  But among TI’s earlier employees are Jack Kilby, who won a Nobel prize in physics in 2000 for inventing the integrated circuit (集成电路), Jay Lathrop, who created the first photolithograph (光刻) scanner, and Morris Chang, an immigrant from Mainland China and the founder of TSMC.

Nor could I distinguish between memory chips and logic chips, PC chips and smartphone chips, or deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.  What has struck me the most, however, is the incredible difficulty to keep up with Moore’s law, which posits that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years. Indeed, the cutting-edge chips have become so complex that TSMC is the only manufacturer in the world capable of fabricating them at scale.  TSMC does this with “ultra-pure silicon wafers and specialized gases from Japan” and machinery that “can etch, deposit, and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick”. Supplied by only five companies, these tools themselves took decades and an astronomical amount of money to develop, and their core technologies are closely guarded trade secrets.  Take the development of the EUV lithography for example. The project was launched in the early 1990s thanks to a $300-million investment from Intel.  However, it wasn’t until nearly 30 years and billions of dollars in spending later that the Dutch manufacturer ASML finally introduced EUV scanners to the market in 2018, at a price of 100 million apiece for an expected lifetime of four years. For a layman like me, it is mind-boggling to read just how the scanner produces enough EUV light needed for fabrication:

The best approach was to shoot a tiny ball of tin measuring thirty-millionths of a meter wide moving through a vacuum at a speed of around two hundred miles per hour. The tin is then struck twice with a laser, the first pulse to warm it up, the second to blast it into a plasma with a temperature around half a million degrees, many times hotter than the surface of the sun. This process of blasting tin is then repeated fifty thousand times per second to produce EUV light in the quantities necessary to fabricate chips.

It does sound like a miracle, as Miller put it, that something this delicate not only works, but “does so reliably enough to produce chips” that can make lots of money.

This sums up the history of chips. What about war?  The book describes three chip wars that took place between the U.S. and her rivals in different eras.

The war with the Soviet Union, fought mostly in the first half of the cold war, was won with relative ease. The USSR treated its semiconductor industry as a weapons program, similar to its treatment of nuclear and space technology.  In hindsight, this strategy was a huge mistake, as the immensely profitable civilian applications of semiconductors turned out to be such a strong driving force for innovations that no level of government spending could hope to rival.  Faced with the lack of progress, the Russians tried to copy the U.S. technology through espionage. Yet, this did not work either.  For one, even the most skilled spies cannot steal all the technical know-how involved in complex production processes. More crucially, the “copycat” mindset inevitably condemned Russians to a perpetual game of catch-up, rather than allowing them to lead the way.

Japan was a much greater threat.  Thanks to favorable technology transfer and trade policies that the U.S. willingly offered in exchange for the Japanese support of America’s global order, Japan’s semiconductor industry evolved from a niche player specializing in consumer electronics in the 1960s and 1970s to a formidable powerhouse in the 1980s. By 1985, Japan had begun to outspend the U.S. in capital investment for semiconductors, and by the end of that decade, it had become the dominant supplier of the world’s Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM) chips (90% market share) and lithography equipment (70%). Trade disputes soon ensued.  The skirmish started with the U.S. accusing Japan of espionage, double-dealing, and dumping.  It escalated to the point where the U.S. openly threatened tariffs, ultimately compelling Japan to impose quotas on its exports of DRAM chips to the U.S. in 1986.  This did not help Silicon Valley recover their lost ground, however.  Eventually, nearly all American companies, including Intel, were driven out of the DRAM and lithography markets.

Carried away by their astonishing success, the Japanese began to dream about, in the words of Sony Founder Akio Morita, overcoming the United States economically and becoming “number one in the world”.  The U.S. was understandably frightened by the pent-up nationalism revealed in The Japan That Can Say No—which Morita co-authored—and the gloomy prospect of relying on a foreign country to maintain the most important edge of her military. In response, the U.S. launched a campaign to curtail Japan’s dominance in chip-making industry.  The core strategy involves mobilizing South Korea (Samsung), Taiwan (TSMC), and to a lesser extent, Mainland China, to erode Japan’s competitive advantages by enabling cut-throat competition against her companies.  It worked like magic.  In 1998 Japan’s share in the DRAM market fell to 20% from a near monopoly less than a decade ago, while South Korea dethroned Japan to become the largest producer of memory chips. Not only did Japanese firms suffer tremendous share loss in the DRAM market, but they also missed the emerging opportunities in the nascent PC market.  In what Miller dubbed as one of the greatest comebacks in industry history, Intel, under Andy Grove’s leadership, reinvented itself as the king of microprocessors for PCs.  For what seemed like an eternity in this fast-paced industry, Intel was literally the icon of the PC industry, as the blue trademark of its processors emerged as the most recognizable feature on most PC sold globally. Indeed, I remember the first PC I ever owned— which my five college roommates and I purchased in 1995 using pooled funds—simply as a 486, because it was powered by Intel’s 486 microprocessor.  According to Miller, that very computer chip was the first ever with over a million transistors!

This brings me to the latest, still on-going chip war with China.  On the surface, the plot of the Chinese edition bears resemblance to that of Japan: the wary incumbent hegemon, spooked by the rapid ascent of an upstart, is compelled into massive counteractions to neutralize the threat, real or imagined.   However, unlike Japan, China has never really overtaken the U.S. in any high-end technology areas of the semiconductor industry.  Not even close.  According to Miller, toward the end of the 2010s, China had less than 1% of the global chip design software tool market, about 2% of core intellectual property related to “the building blocks of transistor patterns”, 4% of silicon wafers, 1% of fabrication machinery, 5% of chip design, and 7% of fabrication concentrated in the non-cutting-edge chips.  If that is the case, has the U.S. overreacted with her heavy-handed sanctions and embargo against China’s tech sector?

Regarding this, Miller’s insights on the crackdown of Huawei were particularly enlightening. He acknowledged that the charges against Huawei, which included theft of intellectual property, ties with the Chinese military, and violation of U.S. sanctions on Iran, were “ultimately a sideshow” – basically a euphemism for made-up excuses.  The real issue was, Miller wrote,

That a company in the People’s Republic of China had marched up the technology ladder… Its annual R&D spending now rivaled American tech giants…, it was the most successful exporter [of all Chinese tech companies], giving it detailed knowledge of foreign markets. It not only produced hardware for cell towers, [but] it also designed cutting-edge smartphone chips. It had become TSMC’s second biggest customer, behind only Apple.

Therefore, the real question was: “Could the United States let a Chinese company like this succeed?” That is a rhetorical question in case you did not catch the drift. But why?

I can think of several reasons.  

First, unlike Japan, China was not a liberal democracy.  Judged by what was going on in the country since the early 2010s, China absolutely has no interest in becoming one anytime soon. To make things worse, under the current leader, China has repeatedly asserted that perhaps her system, rather than America’s, should be the model that the rest of the world admires, envies, and emulates.  Even when Morita lectured Americans about the superiority of the Japan system, it was seen in Washington as a serious provocation – and he wasn’t even talking about authoritarianism.

Second, unlike Japan, China has never pledged allegiance to the America-led world order.  In fact, in the past decade, China has decisively shifted from biding her time as a halfhearted participant of that order to openly flirting with the idea of challenging it, economically, technologically, and if necessary, militarily.

Third, China has increasingly embraced nationalism as a rallying cry for its people to coalesce around the current regime. However, the inherent logic of this political agenda requires the “unification” of the motherland, regardless of the cost. Whether this stance is a concrete national policy or merely a slogan to appease the little pinks on the internet remains to be seen. Yet it does place China on a collision course with Taiwan and the U.S.  When push comes to shove, the U.S. could find herself in a treacherous standoff with what she now regards as a “peer competitor”. The stakes are incredibly high. Retreating from the American commitment to Taiwan’s security would spell the end of the current global order, potentially plunging the world into chaos.   More importantly, losing Taiwan could hand China a golden opportunity to erode the America’s technological supremacy, which has been a cornerstone of her national security since at least World War II.

As of this writing, China has been denied access not only to high-end chip-making technology but also to the high-end chips themselves. Lacking essential tools (e.g., EUV scanners) and raw materials (e.g., pure silicon wafers), China’s semiconductor industry, as well as her tech sector in general,  is likely to fall behind. Indeed, it has already missed out on the latest gold rush in AI, particularly the triumph of large language models, partly because her access to computing power (GPUs) was severely restricted by sanctions.

Could China break this “neck-strangling” (卡脖子) situation entirely through its own initiatives? Before reading this book, I thought there must be a way, if the nation threw its entire weight behind the challenge.  I am much more pessimistic now. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the book, it’s that the creation of cutting-edge chips can no longer be achieved within the borders of a single country, not even the U.S. Moreover, the pursuit of technological innovations as a nationalistic project may not be a sound strategy for long-term success, as demonstrated by the failure of the USSR.

Could the chip war have been averted had China chosen a different path in the early 2010s?  What impact will the current conflict have on the “China Dream” and the lives of 1.4 billion Chinese? No one knows the answer.  One can only hope that the war remains confined to the realm of chips and continues to be fought by scientists and engineers with their computers, rather than soldiers with guns and missiles.

Marco Nie

Wilmette, IL

3/3/2024