In the 1970s my grandfather, an electrical engineer in China, received an unusual job offer: would he be willing to move from his city to the foothills of a remote Buddhist mountain, a half-day’s truck ride away, to contribute to an enterprise of national importance?
What clinched the deal was that my grandmother would also be given a good state job, and my mother, uncle and aunt would go to schools specially built for the children of the enterprise. And so my family became part of the first Chinese industrial policy push to create a domestic semiconductor sector.
Fifty years later, the US and EU have made a new foray into semiconductor industrial policy with the US Chips and Science Act, and the EU Chips Act. But in the intervening decades, industrial policy never went away. Western and eastern governments have used a range of tools to structure economic production and to nurture technological innovation. The failures are mostly forgotten, while the successes have been so paradigm-changing that it is easy to overlook their origins.