In the thirties of the last century, Zhang Xilun, a student from Hebei Province, graduated from Jiaozuo Institute of Technology, China's first mining university, and was hired by a steel mill in Shanghai as a scarce talent specializing in metallurgy. After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Shanghai's industry moved westward on a large scale, and Zhang Xilun also came to Chongqing, the wartime capital, with the large army. The steel mill where he worked was incorporated into the military industrial system of the Nationalist Government and became the 21st Arsenal under the Ordnance Industry Administration.

After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War in 1945, the Ordnance Industry Administration sent a large number of personnel to the whole country to take over the ordnance factory left by the Japanese invasion of China. At this time, Zhang Xilun was already a well-known steelmaking expert in the industry, he settled down in Nanjing, married his girlfriend who had known him for many years, and in 1948, his second child was born, named Zhang Rujing.

After the end of the Huaihai Campaign, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was approaching the Yangtze River, Su Yu's Sanye Eighth Corps was already stationed across the river on the other side of Nanjing, and the 60th Arsenal began to urgently withdraw to Taiwan. Zhang Xilun, who was already the principal of the National Army, knew that he could never stay on the mainland, so he and his family took Zhang Rujing, who was still in infancy, and followed the large army that moved to the factory, and boarded a ship in Xiaguan, Nanjing, on an early morning in early 1949, and set off for Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

In addition to his own family, Zhang Xilun also took away more than 200 young metallurgical apprentices in the arsenal. Before leaving, many of the apprentices' parents begged Zhang Xilun to take care of their children. In the following decades, Zhang Xilun has been a senior senior in the arsenal, and at the same time, he has taken care of more than 200 young people like a patriarch, helping them to study and start a family.

Zhang Rujing, who was brought to Taiwan before he was a year old, grew up with excellent academic performance, and was admitted to Taiwan University all the way, and then went to the United States to study, and obtained a master's degree in engineering and a doctorate in electronics. In 1977, at the age of 29, Zhang Rujing joined the team of Jack Kilby, a Nobel laureate in physics and inventor of integrated circuits, at Texas Instruments. At Texas Instruments, Zhang Rujing started as a R&D and design engineer and has been working for 20 years.

Since the 60s, the Chinese have made their mark in the U.S. semiconductor industry, with talented engineers and brilliant entrepreneurs emerging. Dr. Shao Zifan, Zhang's immediate boss at Texas Instruments, is the world's top chip manufacturing plant construction expert. Under the support and cultivation of Shao Zifan, Zhang Rujing has grown rapidly, and has participated in the construction of 9 large-scale chip factories in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Italy and other places, becoming a recognized "factory construction master" in the industry.

Since Zhang Rujing's career focus is in the United States, Zhang Xilun and his wife Liu Peijin both moved to the United States after retirement. Like countless older generations who have withdrawn from the mainland to Taiwan, Zhang Xilun and his wife are also people with extremely strong family and country complexes, and they are always concerned about the mainland of the motherland. After Zhang Rujing's career was thriving and he became a well-known factory construction expert in the global chip industry, Zhang Xilun asked his son such a question: "When will you go to the mainland to build a factory?"

In the late 90s, my father's question was answered. In 1997, after 20 years at Texas Instruments, Zhang took early retirement. After a short trip to the mainland (more on this later), he returned to Taiwan with the support of his old friends to found World University Semiconductor, which quickly became mass-produced and profitable. During this period, Zhang Rujing had already made a detailed plan to build a chip factory on the mainland: the first and second factories of the World University were built in Taiwan, and the third to tenth factories were all placed on the mainland.

The world is unpredictable, and the rapid rise of Shida has aroused the vigilance of TSMC, the industry leader. Just when Zhang Rujing was about to make a big move, the major shareholder of the World University secretly negotiated with TSMC without Zhang Rujing's knowledge, and sold the company to TSMC for $5 billion in January 2000. Zhang Rujing only learned about this later, knowing that it would be difficult to gain a foothold in the new company after the merger, so he did not delay his efforts, resigned the day after the completion of the acquisition, and decided to go north to the mainland to start a business again.

With the reputation in the industry and the successful experience of Shida, Zhang Rujing quickly gathered a group of talents and funds, and began to choose the factory site. The chip industry in 2000 was far less hot than it is now. In Shanghai, however, they were warmly received, and the then mayor Xu Kuangdi personally took them to the hinterland of Pudong, which is full of farmland, and showed Zhang Rujing the large tract of land that Shanghai had planned to build factories for them.

In April 2001, in this place called Zhangjiang Hi-Tech, SMIC, a new factory in Zhang Rujing, was established. For a long time after that, these two names occupied a very heavy weight in China's semiconductor industry.

In 1949, Zhang Xilun withdrew from Nanjing to Kaohsiung with 200 metallurgical apprentices to establish the huge Kaohsiung 60 Arsenal, and in 2000, Zhang Rujing led 300 chip engineers from Taipei to Shanghai to establish the most advanced chip manufacturing base in the mainland.

History has completed a reincarnation between the two generations of the Zhang family, but the difficult journey of Zhang Rujing and SMIC, as well as the core acid past of China's semiconductor industry behind it, has just begun. Degree of literature