Faked microchip shames all of China
High-tech race with West suffers jolt By DAVID BARBOZA
THE NEW YORK TIMES SHANGHAI, China -- Not very long ago, China saw itself as a nation on the verge of a high-tech breakthrough. But today, China appears shamed at a scandal that has already begun to tarnish that vision. It involves a computer scientist named Chen Jin who became a national hero in 2003 when he said he had created one of China's first home-grown digital signal processing computer chips, a sophisticated microchip that can process digitized data for mobile phones, cameras and other electronic devices. His milestone met with breathless excitement and held the promise of closing the enormous gaps with the West in science and technology. On Friday, however, the government announced that it was all a fraud. Chen, the government said, had faked research conducted at Jiaotong University and simply stolen his chip designs from a foreign company. Chen was fired from his university posts and stripped of his government honors and privileges. In a society in which the fear of public shame runs especially deep, the story of Chen has a profound resonance. Now, after all the honors and accolades bestowed on this 37-year-old favorite son, who returned home to China from the United States with a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin six years ago, people here are beginning to question whether China is pushing its leading thinkers too hard to innovate and catch up with the West. Could Chen's downfall, they ask, represent an example of how even smart and successful people in China are being forced to cut corners to meet the nation's hyperambitious goals? "There's now a national competition going on in China, and there are very high expectations on scholars returning from the West," said Bai Ruoyun, a media specialist from China who is a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "They're paid very handsome salaries and given lots of incentives to achieve. And in return, these scholars are expected to produce some concrete results." Chen's downfall began last December when a whistle-blower posted a message on an Internet bulletin board here. The message, and letters to the government and his university, led to an avalanche of scrutiny and bad publicity. According to news accounts, some colleagues who had a dispute with Chen claimed that migrant workers had simply scratched away the name Motorola from a chip and replaced it with Hanxin, or "China chip," the name Chen gave to the chip. Presumably, that early version of Hanxin was a foreign company's chip, the specifications of which Chen or an associate could give to manufacturers to mass-produce under the Hanxin name. The whistle-blowers also gave details of an array of companies that Chen operated to profit from the government contracts he received, including a company called Ensoc, which was registered in Austin. The revelation is a huge embarrassment for China, which has been trying to lure talented scientists back from overseas in the hopes of creating its own world-class research and technology centers. How Chen and his team tricked a nation -- and a large group of scientific experts in government and industry -- is still unknown. Whether he or members of his team face criminal charges is also unclear. Reached Sunday by telephone, Chen said only: "This is not the right moment to talk." People who know Chen said they were perplexed. "He was really brilliant," said Yang Yunxia, a Microsoft employee here. "None of us can understand this." "The underlying problem is that the Chinese government has not established a rule of law for research and development," Reed Hundt, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said Sunday. Hundt is also the author of a forthcoming book, "In China's Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship." | 
发表于 2006-5-17 02:52
