“The ignorance reflects the presumption of a lack of innovation in the fledgling computer industry in Taiwan,” Tinn notes. Under an Orientalist gaze, computer makers from the Far East were viewed as a horde of copycats and counterfeiters who had infiltrated Western markets. Yet while narratives from the United States exaggerated the nature and the size of Taiwanese counterfeits, an increasing number of US firms were recognizing the manufacturing capacity of computer makers from the island and began hiring them as subcontractors. Mul­titech
proved to the world that Taiwan could make computers that were just as good as or even better than those manufactured in the West.

Further Orientalized caricatures encouraged this movement of manufacturing eastward too, where the racial hierarchy mapped onto the divisions of labor. Industrial production under capitalism separated the design and manufacturing processes and deemed the latter as lower-skilled, hence less valuable. Not all manufacturing was regarded the same, though, and some products were seen as more difficult to make than others. In a place like Taiwan, Western firms first saw “industrious” and “efficient” Asian workers who could fabricate simple commodities like calculators and keyboards at a fraction of the cost. As Taiwanese workers proved themselves in higher-end manufacturing as well, they were entrusted to make more complex products, such as motherboards and personal computers.

These artificial hierarchies and false dichotomies between mental and manual labor, between lower- and higher-end products, and between innovation and imitation elide the fact that going from a prototype to mass production demands much more than naïve copying. Improving yield, scaling up output, and optimizing supply chains all require skills and vision. Taiwan’s early dominance on the periphery of the electronics industry facilitated its advancement to the core. Stan Shih, after all, began his career making calculators. Mass-manufacturing these relatively simple products helped build up a rich supply chain and a skilled workforce that were all local to the island. Western tech firms, on the other hand, were more than happy to outsource the labor and component demands to Taiwan so they could focus on the so-called pinnacle of the profession: the design process.

Compared with computers and other electronic appliances, the separation between design and manufacturing took place a little later in the semiconductor industry. Leading chipmakers like Intel both designed and built their products in-house. As the equipment and labor costs to make one’s own chips were prohibitive for most newcomers, industry leaders and policymakers in Taiwan saw a historic opportunity. TSMC pioneered the pure-play foundry model in semiconductor manufacturing: It only produces other people’s designs; in other words, it is a subcontractor. As more clients utilized TSMC’s services, the Taiwanese firm was able to perfect its manufacturing process through practice.

TSMC’s innovative business model took inspiration from the long history of electronics manufacturing in Taiwan. Its success was built on earlier companies like Multitech. In 1987, the year TSMC was founded, Multitech was renamed Acer. By the mid-1990s, Acer had become one of the largest personal-­computer makers globally. Taiwanese companies also produced most of the world’s laptops and “held over half of the world market share of most computer components,” Tinn writes. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Stan Shih as one of its “Asian Heroes.” The CEO of Intel at the time credited Shih with helping “spread computing power to the masses”: “He’s a big reason why your PC costs $1,000 and not $10,000.”

Shih may have helped spread computing power to the masses, but the gains from Taiwan’s electronics industry were not shared equally. One of the strengths of Island Tinkerers is its attention to the gendered dimensions of labor. Before the advent of electronic computers, young women fulfilled the role of manual calculators. The term “kilo-girl” was coined in the 1940s to measure the computing power of machines against that of 1,000 women workers. With the invention of mainframe computers, the operators were also predominantly women. At NCTU, two women worked on the IBM mainframes provided by the UN aid program. They were referred to as “girls” by their male colleagues and in official reports. The slight was a form of linguistic de-skilling, Tinn notes, where the women’s professionalism was erased.

In 1966, the Taiwanese government established the Kaohsiung export-processing zone to attract foreign investment. A sculpture marked the entrance to the zone, featuring a Herculean man pushing a giant wheel; its inscription read “Production builds the nation.” However, as Tinn highlights, it was mainly women who worked on the assembly lines and propelled the region’s economy. They built transistor circuits, magnetic-core memories, and electrical appliances for the overseas market, tinkering with the process to enhance production. However, the skills of these workers garnered little acknowledgment and were dismissed as innate, an extension of physical attributes like “good eyesight” and “nimble fingers.”

The women workers lived in cramped company dorms and received meager pay. Sneaking in snacks to the factory floor became a form of rebellion. At times, their employers offered token benefits, such as a free bottle of milk a day at the Dutch firm Philips. Some workers fell ill from the chemicals used to treat metal; several died of acute poisoning. While their male colleagues with engineering degrees rose to managerial positions and were encouraged to start their own firms, the women had little access to higher education or capital and saw few opportunities for career advancement. The gender gaps persist half a century later. At TSMC, women make up three-quarters of its frontline fabrication staff, but few work in research or management positions. As the company automates its production process, the share of women employees has decreased.

Island Tinkerers grew out of Tinn’s doctoral dissertation, which covered the years from 1959 to 1984. While the book extends the timeline to the present day, the sections on the most recent decades feel a bit more rushed than the excellent history and analysis that precede them. One wishes there was more about how Taiwan’s own manufacturing processes became globalized too: The book contains only scant mentions of how Acer and its peers’ global rise was also marked by production expansion into other parts of Asia and Latin America, where the subcontractor began subcontracting and even more layers of exploitation were put into place.

This included Taiwan’s use of labor on mainland China. After martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1987 and China began to abandon socialist planning to embrace global capitalism, many Taiwanese firms started to look across the strait for a vast worker and consumer market. The resumption of trade with the mainland took place alongside the process of democratization and decolonization in Taiwan. The island became more politically and culturally independent from China, even as the two regions grew closer economically. Over the past few years, as Beijing steps up its threat of annexing the self-governing island and Washington pressures its allies to “decouple” from China, the economic ties between Taiwan and China have become a touchy subject. Yet one finds that across the national and geopolitical divides lies a similar process of extraction and exploitation.

Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics, may have been founded in Taiwan, but many of its factories are now all over China, including the world’s biggest iPhone plant. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers toil in these “Foxconn cities,” where dire labor conditions have led to a series of suicides and uprisings. The computer maker Acer also opened production facilities in China in 1995, as Tinn points out in the book. As early as the 1990s, leaders of Taiwan’s nascent semiconductor industry looked for opportunities on the mainland. Their business ambitions sometimes came in conflict with export-control regulations on the island. Seizing new markets while keeping the most cutting-edge technologies to oneself proved to be a tough balancing act, especially with geopolitics in the mix. In the 2000s and early 2010s, when relations between Beijing and Taipei were less charged, groups of TSMC alumni moved to the mainland and established new chip factories there. TSMC itself also expanded operations into Chinese cities and aimed “to become the best partner in the ‘Invented/Made in China’ arena,” according to the company’s own press release in 2004. Before the first Trump administration tightened its sanctions against Huawei in 2020, the Chinese telecom giant was TSMC’s second-­largest client after Apple.

If, in Tinn’s first half of the story, one tracks the exhilarating advances of a set of entrepreneurial tinkerers who developed an impressive computer-making industry in their country, what follows in her abbreviated second half is the transformation of those tinkerers into tycoons. The people in Tinn’s book seized historic opportunities and challenged conventional wisdom. In the pursuit of their dream to power Taiwan with computers, they have proved a possibility and so deserve celebration. Yet their dream is not the only dream, and what they have created is not all that utopian.

In 2017, five mothers from Hsinchu embarked on a mission to obtain clean water. The best water from the region’s reservoirs supplied the Science Park, where TSMC and other leading industries are headquartered. The residents’ water, on the other hand, was sourced primarily from a nearby stream that had been plagued by pollution.

After years of grassroots advocacy, Hsinchu passed a referendum in 2021 requiring better water treatment, but the implementation has been uneven and has faced bureaucratic hurdles. Earlier that year, a severe drought swept Taiwan. The government halted irrigation for nearly one-fourth of the island’s farmland and compensated the farmers for the lost crops. TSMC, the largest water user in Taiwan, kept its pipes flowing. Ironically, as the historian James Lin has shown, throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, before Taiwan became “Silicon Island,” agriculture was the territory’s most important export. The
Nationalist government brandished Taiwan’s advancement in
agrarian science to construct the image of a modern nation and to bolster its legitimacy both at home and abroad, asserting that “Free China” was also the superior China.

Despite important progress in water-­recycling efforts, TSMC is expected to consume more water as it expands production to fulfill rocketing demand. The chip manufacturer has been hailed as Taiwan’s “Silicon Shield” against geopolitical peril, but its water and energy usage incurs other vulnerabilities. The impossible choice that the people of Taiwan have to make is an indictment of the world, especially its richest and most powerful actors, who would rather see the planet burn and the people starve than abandon their quest for techno-supremacy.

As Tinn shows in her book, archipelagic and island nations like Taiwan and Singapore can offer a new way to conceive state power, where strength is not tied to land mass but lies in the ability to open up to water, to find new passageways and forge unexpected crossings. One may apply a similar ethos to the relationship with technology. The goal is not the endless conquest of new frontiers, and territories traversed do not have to be claimed and bordered. True, lasting power is not measured by the capacity to dominate or kill, but by the commitment to nourish and sustain life. After all, our world is not a simulation, and people are more valuable than chips. The question about technology is not just “if one can” but “if one should.” As the world appears entranced by faster chips and smarter electrical brains, elevating a company like TSMC to mythical status, few are pausing to ponder what the computing power is for—and who powers the computers?