| The Importance of this Symbiotic Relationship  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
Whenever I spoke in China over the last year pushing Life After Google, I spoke of "yuanfen" between the technology cultures of the two nations. Yuanfen is a Chinese word meaning mutual destiny or entanglement, the fate that brings two people or peoples together. I believe yuanfen is true — that our two economies mutually rest on symbiotic technologies that converge in Taiwan. Taiwan (with Israel) is at the most fertile crescent of the world economy, where our silicon chips, silica fibers, electrons, photons, Chinese manufacturing, and Silicon Valley inventions mingle in yuanfen, with wafer fabs and erbium amplifiers and Moore's Law luminosity. The epitome of yuanfen is Morris Chang, a now Taiwanese-American engineering billionaire. Born in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, near Hangzhou in China south of Shanghai, Chang fled the Communists to Hong Kong in 1948 as a 17-year-old boy. He ended up gaining admission to Harvard, then shifting as a sophomore to MIT, before getting a series of jobs in the nascent semiconductor industry and a PhD en passant in electrical engineering from Stanford. After joining Texas Instruments in 1958, where Bill Kilby that September cobbled the first crude prototypes of integrated circuits, the young Chinese immigrant soon took over as chief of engineering. During his 25 years at TI, he became the vice president in charge of its worldwide semiconductor business and pioneered its learning curve model of microchip pricing and progress. If TI's good-old-boy board had made Chang the CEO, that Texas company would likely have forged ahead to become the world's leading semiconductor company. By contrast, Intel's board boldly named refractory Hungarian immigrant genius Andy Grove as its chief and Intel usurped TI as the industry's spearhead. Yuanfen was at work, however. It took Chang to Taiwan in 1983, where he fulfilled Caltech legend Carver Mead's vision for the industry by building the first great silicon foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). At the time, in order to make a new chip, you had to build a chip factory. "Then if you had any money left," as Nvidia chief Jen Sun Huang put it, "you could think about designs." Mead at the time was evangelizing the vision of a separation of the industry between millions of designs and a few great wafer-fab foundries. Launched in 1987, TSMC under Chang's visionary leadership has now become by far the world's leading semiconductor foundry. Manifesting TSMC's preeminence is not only its unique new five nanometer process, its scores of thousands of customers, and its some $35 billion in revenues and $12 billion in profits, but the fact that the world's leading technology companies all depend on it to manufacture their most complex and critical systems on a chip. Converging at TSMC are Apple Computer, Google, Qualcomm, and Nvidia from the US and Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent and blockchain-star Bitmain from China. All the leaders and thousands of others depend on Morris Chang's factories to build their unique world leading products. | 
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