Is China Catching Up in Semiconductor Talent? Can Taiwan Still Nurture the Tech Talent It Needs?

[karin623]

Professor Yao-Wen Chang, a Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University, is a world-renowned authority in EDA. In recent years, he has frequently offered insights on cultivating tech talent in Taiwan.

Today’s education system in Taiwan suffers from a wide disconnect between lofty ideals and practical outcomes—an issue that stands in stark contrast to what’s happening across the Strait.

Around the world, there is a clear trend toward prioritizing STEM education. The U.S. understands that STEM is key to sustaining national strength.

China, for its part, has demonstrated the long-term fruits of deliberate, focused investment in STEM talent development, following a path entirely different from Taiwan’s. In China, elite institutions like Tsinghua and Peking University lead the way, with resources then cascading down to “Project 985” and “211” universities.

During the same period, Taiwan embraced a philosophy of equal distribution, attempting to spread limited higher education funding across all institutions.

Not only is this a waste of finite resources, it also funnels students who may not be well-suited for academia into university programs, when they might thrive in vocational or technical tracks instead. Yet our education budgets make no such distinctions.

China’s commitment to STEM has already yielded visible results. Take DeepSeek, for example, it didn’t just appear out of nowhere earlier this year. Its core team is made up of Zhejiang University graduates, not foreign-trained returnees.

China’s technological breakthroughs, particularly in areas like AI and deep tech, are no coincidence. They’re the product of a long-term, systemic commitment to STEM education.

Is China Catching Up in Semiconductor Talent? And Nvidia’s GPU Delay? Blame It on Heat and Expansion

Liang-rong Chen

cwnewsroom.substack.com

 

[Paul2]

Around the world, there is a clear trend toward prioritizing STEM education. The U.S. understands that STEM is key to sustaining national strength.

Mainland always had hordes of unemployed PhDs. It's not that they ever lacked them in numbers.

All socially rigid countries never had problems to pump out enormous amounts of unemployed scientists and engineers. It's very good that America doesn't.

The only problem they had is that they are never able to put them to any good use.

Taiwan has extremely good "yield" from science education, mainland — catastrophically bad.

It's better to make a ton of useful goods from 1 out of 3 engineers you make per year, than one space rocket from 1 out of 10000 (this is where PRC, USSR, India all are.)

It has all to do with basic social hierarchy of these countries, rather than any institutional differences. Many mainlanders went into science because anything else big is off limits to people without communist parents. Try to become a big man in just anything in the mainland China, and you simply get shot.

Bandits don't care about your PhD degree, and your computers, but they will care if someone outside of the elite club dares to capture a construction industry, fuel, banks, and other stuff that big boys do, they get killed.

Taiwan is blessed with a fact that you can become a rich man in an industry, or occupation other than ones protected by lack of political prominence.