SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.

I don't know what a semiconductor does. I don't understand it. I've never understood it.

MIIN WU: Well, semiconductor is very simple way, right?

MALONE: Sure - very simple if you are Miin Wu, who runs a multibillion dollar semiconductor company in what is now the semiconductor capital of the world - Taiwan.

WU: Semi means is half, so this is not conductor, but the - in the certain conditions, and they can conduct in the current.

RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: Semiconductors are these little electronic building blocks that can do all kinds of different things. Semiconductors are key to making microchips, and microchips are critical parts of everything - phones and laptops and satellites and even nuclear weapons.

MALONE: But Miin Wu fell in love with semiconductors way back in the 1960s, when no one knew exactly what they would become. Miin just knew that he was thrilled by the technology.

Miin, when this was a new technology, like this was - you were learning about it at school, how did you explain this to your - either your parents or your grandma even?

WU: Well, fortunately, I don't have to explain to them because they have no interest to find out what I'm doing, OK?

MALONE: They understood you were excited about it, though.

WU: Even today - my mother already 96 years old. She still don't know what I'm doing, OK? She only know I'm busy (laughter).

MALONE: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Kenny Malone, and joining me today, from NPR's Peabody Award-winning podcast Throughline, Ramtin Arablouei.

ARABLOUEI: That's just - that's, like, way too generous and too nice.

ARABLOUEI: Y'all are the OGs.

ARABLOUEI: So we're just swimming in your wake.

MALONE: Well, listen, we are joined by Ramtin and Throughline today because we want to talk about a big, sweeping history that is also about economics because as tensions between the U.S. and China have increased, there's been more and more attention on and concern for Taiwan. And we're collaborating with Throughline to understand how an island about half the size of South Carolina wound up in the middle of perhaps the biggest geopolitical and economic feud in generations.

ARABLOUEI: Taiwan now makes almost all of the world's advanced semiconductors. And today on the show, we follow Miin Wu and Taiwan's semiconductor love story. It's a story of revolution, cold war and an economic expansion so incredible that it's now just called the Taiwan Miracle.

MALONE: All right, we're back with a special PLANET MONEY collaboration with NPR's Throughline, looking today at how Taiwan became the center of the world's semiconductor industry and also wound up at the center of what may become the most important geopolitical feud in generations.

ARABLOUEI: Taiwan is now a self-governed democracy of about 24 million people. However, China believes that Taiwan is - and always has been - part of China. China has vowed to reunify Taiwan with the mainland, which to some sounds like a threat.

MALONE: And just a touch of history about how we got to this point - Ramtin, would you sprinkle a little - some of that magic Throughline sound design on this for us?

ARABLOUEI: Absolutely. Here we go.

ARABLOUEI: In 1949, China underwent its Communist Revolution. The party pushed out by the revolution - the nationalist government - fled to a nearby island about 100 miles southeast of mainland China - a place often known at that time as Formosa.

MALONE: Formosa - of course, more commonly known as Taiwan - it is a tropical/subtropical island, and in the 1940s, it was relatively undeveloped when this wave of people came from mainland China.

ARABLOUEI: In total, around 2 million civilians and soldiers fled to Taiwan. And it wasn't supposed to be a permanent home - just a place to wait until the nationalists could retake China.

MALONE: But years and years went by, and this theoretically temporary population had kids, raised kids in this theoretically temporary home. There weren't a ton of opportunities, and by the 1970s, thousands of young Taiwanese college graduates started going abroad for jobs or for grad school.

WU: At that time, I was - study grad school in Taiwan, and I planned to work in Taiwan.

MALONE: Miin Wu had graduated from college in Taiwan. He wanted to get a master's in electrical engineering. But he had started to wonder - should he also leave Taiwan? Of course, he had big feelings about all of this.

WU: Well, of course, you know, nevers (ph) - you know, first time go to a place where I have no idea, and also, I'm not speaking the language.

MALONE: But there were two big reasons to leave. Number one - his girlfriend was also leaving Taiwan to study in the U.S. So Miin thought, you know, it probably would be good for this relationship to at least be on the same continent as his girlfriend.

ARABLOUEI: But reason number two - Miin was a budding semiconductor nerd. And he knew that whatever techie future was coming, he needed to leave Taiwan to be a part of it.

MALONE: Miin applied to grad schools. He got into McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and landed a position there as a teaching assistant.

WU: When I arrive at McGill, the first day of the school because I got teaching assistant, so I have to report to the professor. So went to see him, and he say something to me.

WU: I was stuck. I didn't know what he's saying. He repeat one more time.

WU: And I still don't get it, OK? So he complained to the professor who assign me to him, his class, and he say, how come you send me someone don't know English to me?

ARABLOUEI: Miin later found out what his professor was saying.

WU: He say good morning in heavy British accent. So I was totally out, OK?

MALONE: Did you do things actively to try and learn English quickly? Did you listen to NPR constantly?

WU: (Laughter) No. At that time, I have no idea about NPR.

MALONE: Although, Miin says, he was using a different kind of radio to study English.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: ...To Hubie Brooks. He's got it. This game is over. It was never in doubt. The Expos have beaten the Pirates 6-5.

WU: I turn on radio to hear the baseball game.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: ...Number 27 for the terminator.

WU: And then I hear the hockey game.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: ...Make it two in a row for the Pirates.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: ...And the puck comes out of the Montreal end.

WU: You know, Montreal Canadiens was a very good team at that time, in the '70s.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: And the game is over. The Montreal Canadiens have won the Stanley Cup for a record 16th time.

WU: That's how I pick up the speed.

MALONE: Miin's English improved. He finishes up at McGill, gets into Stanford for another graduate program.

ARABLOUEI: And when Miin describes working his way through the North American tech world, this language thing comes up in ways that don't sound like they were just about language.

MALONE: Like, Miin remembers turning in a lab report to a big deal Stanford professor and getting just these few words of feedback.

WU: This is not English. I have to redo it.

MALONE: Miin studies more, gets that master's from Stanford and then gets a job at a relatively new company using semiconductors to make memory chips. That company...

WU: In Intel, I did very good job on technical side. But I lost battle as into a program manager position because they tell me there's another guy, and his English better than me. I lost the battle.

MALONE: So English was often part of the battle during your time in the U.S.

MALONE: On one hand, there was no better place than Silicon Valley for Miin Wu. That geeky 1960s kid in Taiwan had grown up and was now at the burning hot center of this obscure technology he loved. On the other hand, he was starting to feel like as long as he stayed in the United States, he would inevitably crash into some kind of ceiling.

TOM GOLD: A lot of the people who graduated from engineering schools in Taiwan felt that they were coming up against a glass ceiling.

ARABLOUEI: This is Tom Gold, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, author of a book called "State And Society In The Taiwan Miracle."

GOLD: So that's where K.T. Li came in.

ARABLOUEI: There was a man 7,000 miles away in Taiwan who had started to sense that there might be lots of people like Miin Wu.

GOLD: So K.T. Li was somebody who I think saw - if you want to call it - the handwriting on the wall.

ARABLOUEI: Li Kwoh-ting - otherwise known as K.T. Li - some people call him the father of Taiwan's Economic Miracle.

MALONE: Big deal - important enough that there's apparently a marble bust of him, named an asteroid after him.

GOLD: He's a hero in modern Taiwan.

ARABLOUEI: K.T. Li died in 2001. But Tom spent some time with him in the late 1970s.

GOLD: I met K.T., and he told me that he was teaching a class at National Taiwan University, which is the premier university. So every Saturday morning, I would go to this class, which was conducted in Chinese. Well, he was slim, under 6 feet tall. He had - as I recall, he had a prominent nose - pretty nice-looking, handsome older man. He seemed very sober, very levelheaded, the sort of guy you could trust right away. And he was somebody who understood what the potential of Taiwan was.

MALONE: The potential of Taiwan, something that, frankly, the United States had also started to wonder about, beginning at least as early as the Cold War.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Since the Korean War, the United States has extended both economic and military aid to the free Chinese to keep the island from falling into communists' hands.

ARABLOUEI: After China had its communist revolution in 1949, the United States started to become more and more concerned about the rise of communism in the world.

MALONE: And in its fight against communism, the U.S. realized that having a buddy near mainland China was going to be important - a buddy like Taiwan.

GOLD: We were providing grants. We were providing loans. We were providing subsidies across the board.

MALONE: All of this foreign aid happened to come at a pretty useful time for Taiwan. See - the economy had mostly been built around agriculture. But Taiwan, along with K.T. Li, had decided to try and shift that economy away from farming.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: In 10 years, more than 6600 new factories of all kinds have been built and all are expanding and prospering...

ARABLOUEI: Taiwan, with foreign help, transformed its economy.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: This mushrooming of industrialization has raised the foremost of standard of living to a place...

ARABLOUEI: Over just a few decades, Taiwan evolved from an agricultural economy into a manufacturing economy. You may remember this period of time in the 1980s when it seemed like every toy or shirt you picked up said made in Taiwan.

MALONE: The fact that this happened so fast was such a big deal in development economics that people just started calling this the Taiwan miracle. However, notably handsome Taiwanese economic hero, K.T. Li - he thought that Taiwan could take yet another leap. He thought Taiwan could move past just making lower-tech toys and textiles and become the Silicon Valley of Asia.

GOLD: Taiwan had to advance to the next stage, and that was going to be technologically intensive industries.

ARABLOUEI: K.T. Li was an economics minister and then finance minister and then basically minister at large in Taiwan. And in 1979, he oversaw the very funky and cool name task force of STAG - a.k.a. the Science and Technology Advisory Group.

MALONE: And so Taiwan, guided by K.T. Li and his colleagues, poured money into building up the research and development at Taiwan's universities. They set up national laboratories that would share discoveries with the private tech sector Taiwan hoped to develop. And they identified a very specific location to try and transform into the Taiwanese version of Silicon Valley.

ARABLOUEI: They found a small, unremarkable piece of land in the city of Hsinchu.

GOLD: You know, it looks rolling hills, and it's green, and it's clean. And it's going to look more like Palo Alto than it looks like, you know, just a barren cement desert.

MALONE: K.T. Li and his colleagues made this an industrial zone, offered tax breaks, other incentives.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Hsinchu Science Park is sometimes called the Silicon Valley of Taiwan.

ARABLOUEI: But there was a huge obstacle for K.T. Li's tech tree. To build a Taiwanese Silicon Valley, Taiwan needed engineers. And lots of engineers, like Miin Wu, had left the island.

GOLD: A lot of the people who graduated from engineering schools in Taiwan felt that their future really didn't lie in Taiwan. So a lot of them came to the U.S, and they started working for companies like Texas Instruments and companies in Silicon Valley, which was just getting going.

ARABLOUEI: And this is when K.T. Li rolls up his sleeves. He started crossing over the Pacific to try and convince Taiwan's tech talent to come back.

GOLD: Bringing these people from Taiwan together and saying, look - we realize that, you know, you're facing these glass ceilings in the United States, but if you come back to Taiwan, if you come back, you know, we will supply you with laboratories. We'll supply you with all of the infrastructure that you need. We'll supply you with engineers. We'll find loans. We'll invest with you. And we won't make political demands on you.

ARABLOUEI: In short, K.T. Li was pulling out all the stops and trying to lure talent back home.

WU: At the time, I was about 40 years old.

ARABLOUEI: Talent like Miin Wu.

WU: So we are already in California for 12 years. You know...

ARABLOUEI: You're married to your girlfriend at this point.

MALONE: But he was tired of hitting that ceiling over and over. He quit his job at Intel to see if he could try to make his own path in the U.S. And he founded his own Silicon Valley company.

WU: But very small. At that time, we have four people, five people to get started.

MALONE: What is the name of that company, and what are you doing?

MALONE: Macronix Inc - and the way Miin describes it, he sounds like the Willy Wonka of semiconductors, like the company was playing with semiconductors and inventing all kinds of wild uses for this new technology, everything from using them to store information to one product that I definitely remember hearing about as a kid.

WU: One product we know we called a key finder. Do you know the key finder?

WU: If you're key lost, you know, you can whistle.

WU: And then that device responds with a beep.

WU: You know where they are.

MALONE: You invented the key finder?

WU: Yeah, well, we are part of it. We are making a lot of money on that.

ARABLOUEI: These inventions, it's not like Miin's company was inventing them and then selling them directly to customers. Macronix would mostly do research and develop technology and then license their inventions to bigger companies with the real power, places with access to huge scale and enormous factories.

MALONE: And that is what Miin wanted. Miin wanted Macronix to have its own factories to make its own semiconductor products. And he was hearing that maybe the place to build that kind of company was back in Taiwan.

WU: You know, I'm from Taiwan, so I have many alumni and friends in this field, so...

MALONE: You have your little birdies whispering to you, saying, Miin...

MALONE: ...There's some stuff going on back here. Some interesting things are happening back in Taiwan.

WU: Well, they don't have to tell me. I can read the newspaper. I know what was going on. So I was one of early member in the semiconductor field. So I think there's opportunity there.

ARABLOUEI: Miin never personally met K.T. Li, but Miin was exactly the kind of person Li was trying to lure back to Taiwan.

MALONE: But Miin wasn't going to be able to do this alone. Eventually, he starts meeting with other Taiwanese engineers, like himself, who'd left Taiwan for the United States. And now he was going to try and convince them to leave their jobs in the U.S. and come back to Taiwan with him.

WU: I told them, in the U.S., they have no opportunity because all their life, they are just engineer. Eventually, they need to move up. But in the U.S., they have no opportunity.

ARABLOUEI: Miin was making the case that in the U.S., they're never going to see you as a boss or a manager or a CEO.

WU: You know, I recruit several people I know, but then, from them, I looking to more. And then, this is the first time I bring those people back to Taiwan. So that was reverse brain drain.

ARABLOUEI: Yeah. How many brains did you drain from the U.S. when you went back? Like, how many people did you bring with you?

WU: In couple years, actually, 40.

ARABLOUEI: All these engineers moving home? The K.T. Li plan was ramping up, and the stakes were much bigger than just economics. If Taiwan could transform into Asia's Silicon Valley, then it would become indispensable to the world, which would give it a kind of geopolitical shield.

MALONE: This effort to bring Taiwanese talent home, it was maybe just about the economy in the moment. But it would ultimately be part of building a critical silicon shield for Taiwan.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Reading) The government of Taiwan is actively willing its sons and daughters home.

ARABLOUEI: This is from an LA Times article in 1989 about Silicon Valley's reverse brain drain to Taiwan.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Reading) Its two offices in California maintain data on nearly 3,000 engineers and computer scientists, information they make available to Taiwanese talent scouts. In addition, they place recruiting ads in Chinese-language newspapers, such as a recent ad portraying an elephant separated from its herd and the plea, come home.

ARABLOUEI: Was there a part of you in the back of your head, though, that was worried? What if this doesn't work? What if we go back to Taiwan, start this company, and it fails?

WU: No, we will make it work. We will make it work.

MALONE: After the break, Taiwan and Miin Wu build this so-called silicon shield with a little help from some very famous plumbers.

(SOUNDBITE OF SUPER MARIO BROS. SOUND EFFECT)

MALONE: The Taiwan miracle is indeed what people now call the extraordinarily fast shift in Taiwan's economy, from growing things to making things to making high-tech things. But it's important to note that even that miracle didn't include making semiconductors right away.

ARABLOUEI: In the 1980s, Miin Wu was on a mission to come home and open one of the earliest semiconductor factories on the island. And sure, maybe Taiwan was more friendly to the kind of long-term, expensive business that Miin wanted to build. But he was still going to need money, lots of money.

WU: Well, at that time, only raised about $800 million NT Dollars. And that means it's only 30 million U.S. dollar.

MALONE: Only 30 million U.S. dollars. Miin needed even more than that. And to get it, he would have to pull off a kind of, like, business trick shot, one of the most joyous global trade schemes we have ever heard of.

ARABLOUEI: A little bit of background here. By the late '70s, early '80s, semiconductors, memory chips in particular were becoming super important. And the world's leader was not in Taiwan. It wasn't in the U.S. It was Japan. Japan was, in fact, so good at certain kinds of semiconductors that the U.S. government had started complaining about Japanese semiconductors flooding the U.S. and world markets.

MALONE: It was a classic dumping dispute. Dumping is the term for when one country heavily subsidizes a product and then floods a foreign market with this much cheaper product, which is quite bad for the local producers trying to compete. You may recall a recent example of this when the Trump administration accused China of dumping its steel in the U.S. market. Well, in the 1980s, the U.S. was mad at Japan for allegedly dumping cheap semiconductors and also for allegedly blocking the U.S. from selling semiconductors into the Japanese market.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: With the U.S. economy sinking, there is growing pressure in this country to get a better trade deal with the Japanese.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: And that's not going to be easy because of the different way each country views both the causes and the cures.

ARABLOUEI: But after pressure from U.S. businesses and a tense negotiation, the Japanese eventually agreed to stop their alleged dumping. But more importantly for our story, to open up its local microchip market to U.S. companies, specifically, Japan agreed that 20% of semiconductors they used would come from the U.S.

MALONE: Miin Wu caught wind of this and thought this might be the break he needed.

WU: So I caught that opportunity. Japanese have to open up 20% market to the U.S. company here.

MALONE: And specifically, Miin knew exactly the right Japanese company to go after.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: This boy is doing more than just playing a video game. He has entered another world.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Nintendo is, well, almost the most fun a kid can have.

MALONE: Yeah, sure. Anyway, we're talking about the original 8-bit and 16-bit systems here, the ones where you - you know, you had the blow on the cartridge, and then maybe that seemed to make them work.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: It may be the most addictive toy in history.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: In just three years, they've sold more than 11 million hardware units at about a hundred bucks each.

MALONE: In the late 1980s and early '90s, Nintendo was exploding in popularity. And like any other computer system, it needed semiconductors.

ARABLOUEI: And what Miin realized was that Nintendo was probably going to want a lot of American-made semiconductors because of that new 20% trade agreement.

MALONE: If Miin could somehow land that contract, maybe that would be enough money to fund his dream of building, like, a proper semiconductor factory. But it was going to take an epic scheme to land that deal.

ARABLOUEI: OK. Problem number one, Miin was in the process of leaving the U.S. and setting up shop in Taiwan. Nintendo did not need a Taiwanese company.

MALONE: But Miin thought he did found a U.S. company, Macronix Inc., the place that made the key whistling stuff. And so maybe Miin wasn't overseeing it anymore, but he still did found it and knew the people there. You know, plus, his Taiwanese company conveniently had the same name, Macronix International. Close enough.

ARABLOUEI: And so he goes to Nintendo and says, look. We're Macronix. Sure, I'm in Taiwan now, but it's a U.S. company that I founded.

WU: So Nintendo need a memory market to sell that cartridge to the U.S. customer. So I'm the only one. So they have to buy from me, has to.

MALONE: And Nintendo apparently says, like, oh, OK, we're interested. Let's get some of these semiconductors then. Now, of course, this is problem number two. Miin does not have a semiconductor factory yet. That is what he's been trying to get money to build. And they take a long time to build. So whose semiconductors actually ended up in the Nintendos that were then shipping to the United States?

WU: At that time, the biggest company called Samsung.

MALONE: Oh, there were Samsungs. (Laughter).

WU: We are buying Samsung and then sell it to them, OK?

MALONE: Miin was buying South Korean Samsung semiconductors through a U.S.-based version of his company in order to sell them to a Japanese company. And the whole scheme was a way to fund his real dream of building his own semiconductor factory in Taiwan.

ARABLOUEI: So this loophole around the 20%, this deal that cut with the U.S., that was your opportunity?

MALONE: Miin, that is genius.

MALONE: And if you think about what was really happening, like, the global forces of it, you have these three global superpowers, China feuding with the U.S., who was feuding with Japan. Miin realized that when these titans fight, there are ways to take advantage of that, almost like a video game. Miin was this clever sprite running circles around these giant bosses.

ARABLOUEI: And at that point, is Nintendo your biggest client?

WU: Even today, still No. 1.

ARABLOUEI: Miin Wu's company grew up alongside Taiwan's semiconductor industry. He built his factory in Taiwan. He was part of this wave of major companies developing in Hsinchu Science Park.

MALONE: In 1987, up pops Silicon Integrated Systems in the Hsinchu Science Park and then the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Macronix International - Miin's company - a couple years later. Within 15 years, there's Powerchip Semiconductor, MStar Semiconductor, Global Unichip Company (ph).

ARABLOUEI: Yeah. All these companies that most of us have never heard of, they make semiconductors that we use every day in our cars and phones and Nintendo Switches.

MALONE: I got one of these guys here. Do you recognize this here?

WU: Nintendo, yes. This is a Switch.

MALONE: This is a Switch.

MALONE: How many of your semiconductors, roughly, are in this guy here?

WU: Well, every year, I shipping about hundred million unit to them.

MALONE: This is Zelda: Breath of the Wild. So this is the best video game ever made. And you're telling me one of your semiconductors is inside the best video game ever made?

WU: Or maybe two, and another one could be controller - and both from me.

MALONE: It is the full realization of K.T. Li's vision to rapidly evolve Taiwan's economy. And it's the reason why he is known as the godfather of tech in Taiwan. He planted these seeds, these policies, and then tended to this idea. And it's now grown-up.

ARABLOUEI: We talked about how Japan used to be the world's semiconductor leader. I mean, they used to make half of the world's semiconductors. But now they're trying to catch up with Taiwan. Frankly, the U.S. is, too, because today, almost all of the world's advanced semiconductors come from Taiwan.

MALONE: And all of this is why people have started to call Taiwan's semiconductor industry its silicon shield. The idea is if the world has become completely dependent on Taiwan for microchips and semiconductors, then the island itself has become indispensable to the world.

ARABLOUEI: And as global tensions rise, as the world worries more and more about whether China will try to invade Taiwan, this is where the silicon shield will get tested. Is China less likely to invade because China also needs Taiwanese semiconductors? Are countries like the U.S. more likely to intervene because it relies on Taiwan?

MALONE: As this ratchets up, the stakes get much higher for business owners like Miin Wu. Miin's company has now grown into a roughly $60 billion company by market cap. And you can tell. Like, if you ask him about any of this bigger stuff - China, the U.S., Taiwan - Miin has gotten very good at not saying anything at all.

ARABLOUEI: Are you worried about what that success is going to do in terms of Taiwan's position and safety as it's stuck between, you know, China and the U.S., obviously both having interests there?

WU: What is good to me to worry about that? I'm a scientist. I'm the businessman. All I want to do is to create the best solution for the world.

ARABLOUEI: Today's show was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was mastered by Debbie Daughtry and edited by Jess Jiang. Special thanks to John Ruwitch and Nishant Dahiya for helping us get this story right.

MALONE: And, of course, extra special thanks to the Throughline team. We couldn't have done this without them - Lawrence Wu, Casey Miner, Devin Katayama and Julie Caine. And if you don't already subscribe to Throughline, it is a superb podcast with, like, fascinating, sound-rich stories like the one you've heard today, everything from the history of "Sesame Street" to reality TV to their Peabody Award-winning series on Afghanistan. I cannot recommend it highly enough. We're so honored that you worked with us, Ramtin. Thank you so much.

ARABLOUEI: Absolutely. It's such an honor to be here. Huge fan of the show. Thanks, Kenny.

MALONE: I'm Kenny Malone, and I'm blushing. And I'm blushing.

ARABLOUEI: (Laughter) And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. This is NPR.

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