<i> ‘Silicon Village’</i> : High-Tech Firms Fuel China’s Drive to Modernize

High-technology companies are popping up by the score around the universities and research centers of northwestern Beijing, creating a “Silicon Village” to fuel China’s drive to modernize.

Beijing University, Qinghua University and several state-run research academies supply the brainpower for the new enterprises that are being encouraged by the state.

“The situation is very similar to the initial stages of ‘Silicon Valley,’ ” said Tu Yan, president of Keli High Technology Corp., a pioneering computer company in Zhongguancun, the district now known as Silicon Village.

Silicon Valley, near Stanford University in Palo Alto, is a concentration of high-tech companies that many consider the cradle of the computer revolution. Its name comes from the material used to make semiconductors, a key component of computers.

Beijing’s Silicon Village is the result of a Chinese Academy of Sciences decision in 1984 to encourage the practical use of scientific research, said Liu Kon, a top official at the academy’s Bureau of High Technology Development.

The official English-language China Daily newspaper reported recently that the district has become the country’s chief supplier of electronic products, as thousands of research fellows and professors “have left their ivory towers” to develop marketable products.

Companies with names such as Computer Service Corp., Stone Electronics Accessories and Three Star Electronics now dot the district’s streets, where donkey carts still compete with legions of bicyclists.

About 100 high-tech companies operate in the area, developing and marketing computer, electronic, chemical and bio-technology products.

Most are directly under or connected to the academy, although about one-third of the businesses, primarily smaller enterprises involving only sales, are privately run.

The new companies are expected to help modernize the country as well as add high-technology goods to China’s traditional exports of agriculture products and raw materials, Liu said.

Although Chinese technology is considered several years behind the West in many fields, the new entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun hope low labor and research costs will make Chinese products attractive overseas.

The 49-year-old Tu, who worked for the Acoustics Institute as a mathematics researcher before taking the reins at Keli, earns the equivalent of only about $40 a month.

The advanced equipment and higher research funds available at the companies attracts scientists, particularly new graduates, Tu said.

Keli, set up in 1982 by the academy’s Acoustics Institute, made a profit of more than $1.6 million last year and is building a plant primarily for electronics, Tu said.

During a tour of his company headquarters, he showed a visitor a computer with a Keli-designed memory board used by the Oceanographic Bureau to determine sea conditions.

One Keli product, he said, “has not been developed even in Taiwan,” the island ruled by the rival Nationalist Chinese government.