Location: Ministry of International Trade and Industry (Tokyo) and Zhongnanhai Complex (Pekin).
Date: Early April 1997.
Point of view: All-knowing (Ryuzaki, Akio Ohga and Minister Wang).
On the tenth floor of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, in the government district of Kasumigaseki in Tokyo, the early flowering of the cherry trees of Hibiya Park did not give rise to any poetic dreaming. But around the long black lacquer table where the masters of the Japanese economy sat, the atmosphere had the serene density of the great historical revenges.
Ryuzaki, the chief dignitary of the Ministry of Finance who had orchestrated in the autumn preceding the union loan of thirty-five billion euros granted to Volta S.A. at a rate of two decimal one percent, aligned before him the sheets of compensation of the Bank of Japan.
In front of him had taken place the patriarchs of Mitsubishi, Toshiba and Akio Ohga, the president of Sony Corporation.
A month after the signing of the Treaty of Laeken, which founded the European Federation, the shock wave from Brussels completed the task of redrawing the map of East Asia.
"The U.S. Department of Commerce has just published its quarterly figures, announced Ryuzaki with her bent voice. Silicon Valley exports to the Pacific have declined by 28 percent in a year. For the first time since 1985, the US Trade Representative cancelled his inspection tour in Tokyo without daring to brandish the threat of Article 301."
A murmur of silent approval covered the leaders of the keiretsus. Twelve years earlier, at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Washington had brutally twisted Japan's arm by imposing a punitive re-evaluation of the yen, which had broken its industrial momentum and inflated a toxic real estate bubble.
But in 1996 and 1997, Tokyo had practiced the art of geopolitical aikido: instead of exhausting itself to fight the architecture of Lazare Bonaparte, as America was struggling there, the archipelago had chosen to become its privileged banker and industrial integrator.
Akio Ohga opened a cardboard shirt with Sony's seal.
"Our operating margins over the first quarter exceed all our projections,"said Sony's president with a sobriety tinted with pride. Thanks to SONG graphics processors and Volta components, PlayStation now holds seventy-eight percent of the world's home console market.
Our Trinitron TVs, professional digital cameras and optical players are tearing themselves out in Europe without any punitive customs duties. We no longer draw the logical heart of the microprocessor, of course, but we rule without sharing on general electronics."
"And our bank balance sheets are purged, complete Ryuzaki by crossing his parchment hands.
By lending thirty-five billion euros over thirty years to Lazare Bonaparte to allow him to redeem the thirty-five billion Korean debts, we have done three blows with one stone: we have placed our savings surpluses in the strongest European currency in the world.
We have put our South Korean rival Samsung under Franco-Japanese supervision for our supplies of screens and memoirs, and we have placed the archipelago under the indirect customs protection of the Brussels Treaty.
As soon as next month, when the Giga Web Center in Volta enters service on the island of Hokkaido under CENTURION encryption, even the American listening satellites of Misawa will be deaf and blind to our financial flows."
While Tokyo enjoyed this emancipation in the shadow of the European shield, two thousand kilometers to the west, behind the purple walls of Zhongnanhai in Beijing, the climate was otherwise more tense.
A yellowish mist loaded with dust from the Gobi desert weighed on the glazed roofs of the Forbidden City. In the underground conference room of the Standing Committee, the Minister of Electronic Industry, Wang, stood in front of the large wall map where the seven founding nations of the European Federation now formed a single block of a steel blue.
"Time has been stolen from us, Comrades,"said Wang in front of the Party's senior leaders and Guoanbu's director, the Ministry of State Security. Our 863 plan was based on the assumption that the industrial war between the United States and Europe would last 20 years and would permanently divide the West.
But by unifying their armies after the Balkan campaign and including Volta's technological monopoly in their federal constitution on March 5, Paris and Bonn locked the door of the century."
The Dean of the Standing Committee placed his cup of white porcelain tea on the green carpet.
"The assembly chains that Volta operates in our home, in the giant Huabei complex, employ forty thousand Chinese workers and technicians,"said the old leader. They earn billions of dollars and train our engineers."
"They're very good assemblage implements of motherboards, but not a single silicon architect! replied Wang with gravity. If we simply assemble Compaq AXIOM computers and European enclosures for another 15 years, the standards of Lazare Bonaparte, its VESLA set of instructions, its VoltaOS system, its network protocols, will have become oxygen itself on the planet.
On that day, we will only be a captive assembly workshop. Our state institutes are too heavy and bureaucratic to meet this challenge.
We need an agile champion, disciplined as a unit of the People's Army, but operating in the form of a private company."
On a sign from Wang, the usher introduced a fifty-two-year-old man with a dark costume without a primer, with a round and burined face illuminated by two eyes of remarkable acuity: Ren Zhengfei, a former military communications engineer and founder, in Shenzhen, of a telephone equipment company named Huawei Technologies.
Wang opened on the table a black antistatic case containing a VESLA-III 2390 processor with its nickel-plated copper dissipator.
"The Council of State has chosen your company, Comrade Ren, announced the minister. You will create in Shenzhen, in absolute secrecy, a research laboratory dedicated to the design of integrated circuits and telecommunications processors. You will have unlimited credit lines with the Development Bank of China and the best young graduates of Tsinghua University."
Ren Zhengfei gazed at the square of ceramic and copper, and then looked calmly at the minister.
"This is a long-term task, Minister Wang. Would you like our laboratories to go back to optical engineering on the layers of this processor to reproduce the masks?"
Minister Wang's face immediately became nervous.
"Not at all! Did he sound in a dry voice that slammed against the walls of the bunker. It is strictly forbidden to copy a single micron of topology or a single line of microcode from Volta S.A.!"
The director of Guoanbu supported a chilly headhold.
"Remember Seoul last year, Comrade Ren,"said the spy master. When Samsung's engineers took a VESLA hydrofluoric acid processor to clone its out-of-order scheduler in their Exynos Alpha chip, Lazare Bonaparte did not file a complaint in a commercial court.
In ninety-six hours, he cut off their supplies, triggered a monetary crash on the won and redeemed thirty-five billion euros of Korean sovereign debt to turn Samsung into an industrial vassal. If Bonaparte discovers any infringement of his patents in Shenzhen, he will close the Huabei complex overnight and have the European Federation vote a customs embargo that will put our coastal industry to unemployment."
Wang placed the index beside the French processor without touching it.
"You will not copy Bonaparte's weapon, Mr. Ren: you will study the physics of his steel to forge a different sword.
Whether it takes you 10 years or 15 years to design a Chinese architecture entirely original and free from any foreign patent, whatever. Until then, our national instruction to Volta S.A. is in two words: absolute patience.
In Huabei and Beijing, our executives will smile, facilitate every customs formality and let the Silicon Emperor concentrate his lightning on the Americans."
Ren Zhengfei bowed slowly, closed the black screen and took it under his arm. In the shadow of Shenzhen, the patient seed of what would one day become HiSilicon had just been sown.
Eight days later, under the sky washed by the spring showers of the plain of Alsace, the huge white and silver vessel of the MégaFab in Strasbourg vibrated from the severe, continuous and almost imperceptible buzzing of three hundred turbomolecular pumps and laminar air filtration plants running at full load.
Standing on the glazed gallery overlooking the number two white room, René Castella observed in silence the dance of robot-powered pods on the ceiling.
Under the inactinic yellow light that protected the photosensitive resins, technicians in a white integral suit, similar to scaphandriers of another century, controlled the two hundred millimetre silicon wafers, where the VESLA-III 2490 processors, which were due to be released at the end of the month, were added in zero point eighteen micrometre copper.
At the age of 56, Volta Hardware's director-general of production and boss had never agreed to wear the cross costumes of Parisian executives. Under his open antistatic blouse, he always wore his blue working jeans shirts with sleeves rolled over old metallo forearms.
On his left wrist was the long pearl scar of a chemical and thermal burn, the indelible memory of the night of August 1994 when a silane gas pipeline exploded in the north wing and entered toxic smoke alongside Lazare to manually close the main valves before the entire plant jumped.
A soft step resonated on the metal slat behind him. Without even turning around, Castella recognized the pace.
"You have the chic to get to the pile when I just passed the marc into the percolator, little, lovingly grogna the old metallurgist by holding a callous handshake to Lazare. So Paris hasn't turned you into a minister with their Brussels treaty yet?"
Lazare vigorously squeezed his production manager's hand with a frank smile that folded his eyes.
"If I ever become minister, René, I appoint you as ambassador to the Vatican just to see you wear the dick,"replied Lazare, clinging to the railing next to him. How does the tantalum nitride barrier behave on the lot this morning?"
Castella's burined face was illuminated by this pride of artisanal pride in front of a perfectly machined room.
"Twenty-one decimal four percent of good cases for service at four hundred megahertz, Lazare. Not a copper atom shoves in the grid oxide.
While Andy Grove's Oregon guys are still tearing their hair off with the electromigration of their aluminum tracks, our damascene electrodeposition baths are turning like free-standing clocks. I already have four hundred thousand 2490 chips sealed in vault, ready to go to the wholesalers from your green light of April 23rd.
And in Hall 4 just behind us, granite anti-vibration slabs for your future machines in zero point thirteen micrometer and three hundred millimetres are cast."
"Perfect,"said Lazare, observing the hypnotic ballet of ASML optical arms modified by home teams. However, when you called me last night on my private line asking me to come to Strasbourg before Meudon's meeting, it wasn't to brag about your copper yields. What's bothering you, René?"
Castella did not reply immediately. He sent a sign to Lazare to follow him in his glazed office perched at the corner of the gallery, a spartan room with a micrometric control plant, an Italian coffee maker placed on an electric stove and the framed photograph of the very first assembly team in 1988.
The old manager closed the acoustic door, served two black coffees tight without sugar and drew three notebooks of land to Lazare with grey roof.
"The succession of our thirty method engineers and workshop leaders seconded to the Huabei assembly complex returned from China Friday night after six months of mission,"said Castella, sitting heavily. I spent the whole weekend drinking beers with them at the Ill brewery to hear about their stay, far from official reports."
Lazare took one of the notebooks and listened with immediate attention. He knew that the eye of an old workshop manager like Castella saw things that escaped all the notes of the DGSE.
"On paper, Lazare, everything is too beautiful over there,"Castella said, tapping the notebook of his thick index. For a month now, it's even become velvet.
Not a minute of strike, not a container blocked at Tianjin customs, Party prefects who come to greet our low hat foremans, heated villas with drivers and cooks. Our young engineers are delighted: they say the Chinese are the most docile and hardworking partners in the world."
"But you don't believe it for a second,"Lazare smiled gently.
"I have forty years of factory in my hands, Lazare! Cracked Castella.
And I know a worker who screws bolts to feed his family with a companion who looks over your shoulder to teach you the job. My head of the line, Paturel, an elder from Peugeot Sochaux I trained myself, told me a detail that put the chip in my ear.
Since March, the Chinese ministry has replaced half of Huabei's local interpreters and maintenance technicians with twenty-two or twenty-three-year-olds, polite as images, who speak impeccable English and French."
Castella leaned over her desk, her brushy brows frowned.
"Paturel noticed that these kids don't care at all about the plans of the Compaq AXIOM motherboards that we assemble on site. They never tried to steal a mask or copy an electrical schema, it looks like they were threatened from the firing squad if they got a Volta certificate.
On the other hand, as soon as a thermal test machine falls into a curtain, or when our guys calibrate liquid nitrogen flows and statistical fault control protocols at the end of the chain, these little guys note everything. Not the plans of the room: the method.
Process physics. How we organize a clean room, how we sort lots by frequency dispersion, how we dissipate forty watts on a high-speed bus.
Paturel checked the names of two of them: they are not provincial technicians, Lazare. These are majors in applied physics and microelectronics from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and others come from a Shenzhen telecom company that nobody has ever heard of here."
In the small office overlooking the Alsatian white room, the silence was only disturbed by the churning of the percolator.
Lazare looked at René Castella at length. A breath of affection and deep admiration warmed his chest.
Where the diplomats of the Quai d'Orsay and the bankers of Frankfurt saw in China in 1997 only a huge reservoir of cheap labour for twenty years, the former metallo of the rue d'Alésia had just floundered, nine thousand kilometers away, the birth of the only real strategic rival of the twenty-first century.
"An apprentice who never discusses his salary, who does not steal any tools in the workshop, but spends his nights understanding why the master blacksmith dips his steel at such temperature rather than at such other..."murmured Castella, supporting the gaze of Lazare,"he is a guy who does not intend to remain apprentice all his life, kid.
They had a blue fear when you kneeled Samsung in Korea. They won't copy us a single circuit.
They learn to think like us to fight loyally in ten or fifteen years."
Lazare placed his cup of coffee and slowly hocked his head. In his silent memory of the other century, the names of Shenzhen, Huawei, and HiSilicon bore the weight of a breathtaking ascent he had seen with his own eyes before 2026.
By butterfly effect, the Brussels Treaty and the Korean shock had just forced Beijing to start its long march five years ahead and a tenfold discipline.
"You have seen more clearly than the entire Military Intelligence Directorate, René,"said Lazare in a warm and warm voice. And you're absolutely right: we can't stop a billion-two hundred million people from learning physics. If we tried to block them by brutality today, we would only rush the break-up while losing our global assembly capacity."
Lazare rose and reached the bay window overlooking the copper lithography lines of Illkirch.
"But there is a fundamental difference between Huabei's assembly and what is happening under our feet here in Strasbourg,"he continued, placing his hand on Castella's shoulder. In Huabei, we will only send final encapsulation and assembly of N-1 cards.
The core of the reactor, the chemistry of the resins in zero point thirteen micrometres, Dr Volkov's atomic layer deposit for the deep trenches of the CELLA-M3 memory, and the native 64-bit architecture that I am completing in Meudon, will never cross the Rhine or the borders of the Federation."
He turned to the old director a calm smile, sharpened like a blade.
"From next month, René, you will discreetly modify the rotation protocols in Huabei: all the benches of fine characterization and frequency sorting of wafers return exclusively here, in Alsace. Chinese plants will only receive chips already tested, sealed in their black resin and locked by fuse material.
If they want to learn how to forge their own sword within ten years, it's great for them. Our job is that on the day they finally get out of their forge with a steel blade... we've already gone by lightning."
Castella let escape a brief and sound laughter by rubbing the white scar of her forearm.
"Here I recognize my boss,"said the old metallo. Come down with me to Hall 4 before going back to Paris: I received the first lithography buildings three hundred millimetres this morning, and it's worth a look."