“Building two chip production lines in five years was already seen as bold.”
At a national seminar on China’s integrated circuit strategy for the 10th Five-Year Plan period, Shanghai Economic Commission Deputy Director Jiang Shangzhou took the microphone and raised the bar. “Not two,” he said. “Shanghai will build 10 in five years.”
That line captured the scale of Jiang’s ambitions. In 1997, at age 50, he was appointed deputy director of the Shanghai Economic Commission and was handed a difficult task: help identify the strategic industries that could carry Shanghai through a painful economic transition. Textile, steel and petrochemicals, once symbols of the city’s industrial strength, were turning into burdens. Under central planning priorities at the time, Shanghai’s future was expected to rest on high technology and emerging industries.
One of Jiang’s answers was integrated circuits.
Betting on semiconductors
For roughly two decades, China’s chip industry had lurched forward in fits and starts. Under Western technology restrictions, the country could mostly buy production lines that developed economies had already phased out. By the time imported lines were installed, localized and brought into mass production, they were often several generations behind. The result, as the article describes it, was a recurring cycle of importing, building, launching, falling behind and importing again.
Domestic efforts such as Projects 908 and 909 had also failed to deliver the hoped-for breakthrough. At the same time, the global semiconductor industry was in a downturn and profit margins were under pressure. At the national planning seminar, the mainstream consensus was cautious: China should continue with chips, but over five years it should build only two 8-inch production lines.
Jiang argued for a very different pace. In his view, semiconductors were among the sectors where China was most heavily constrained, and the country had to press on despite the difficulty. The article says that by around 2000, chips had become China’s largest import category, exceeding imports of five strategic materials and even total energy imports, while television and mobile phone chips were 100% imported.
After returning to Shanghai, Jiang reviewed the history of Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park and compared it with Shanghai’s own strengths. He proposed that Shanghai plan the Zhangjiang Microelectronics Development Zone in Pudong, covering 22 square kilometers, about three times the size of Hsinchu Science Park.
He believed the semiconductor sector had a uniquely strong Chinese talent base and relationship network around the world. Shanghai, in his reading, had two advantages that mattered: it was one of the most attractive mainland cities for international capital, and it had a deep industrial base. If the city could first build the right platform, it would have a chance to overtake Taiwan in the future.
Jiang then went to Taiwan to recruit talent and approached Richard Chang. In Shanghai, Chang received what the article calls the strongest possible promise: in Zhangjiang, “you can have whichever parcel of land you want.”
Money was the next problem. Under the manufacturing processes of that period, building 10 production lines would require investment of at least tens of billions of yuan. Jiang’s solution was foreign capital.
According to the article, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., or SMIC, was structured with a widely dispersed group of Chinese and foreign investors, including Goldman Sachs and Walden. That arrangement gave the company funding and also helped it work around the limits imposed by Western restrictions, allowing it to obtain a large amount of semiconductor equipment and join the race quickly.
On Aug. 24, 2000, Jiang led the groundbreaking for SMIC’s first project in Zhangjiang, Pudong. Trial wafer production began only 13 months later. Within three years, SMIC had built four 8-inch lines and one 12-inch line. The article describes that pace as unprecedented globally.
By 2003, SMIC had risen to become the world’s fourth-largest foundry.
Bringing Gerald Yin to Zhangjiang
In 2004, Jiang met another important figure: Gerald Yin Zhiyao. The article says Yin had worked at semiconductor giants including Intel, Lam Research and Applied Materials, and at the time was vice president at Applied Materials as well as a top expert in chip etching.
Yin, then 60, was invited to Shanghai’s Zhangjiang area to found what became AMEC, marking what the article calls China’s “pioneering era” in etching equipment.
With Jiang pushing the effort, a group of chip industry professionals set up businesses in Shanghai. In less than five years, the city had 18 built or under-construction 8-inch IC production lines, surpassing the initial target.
Jiang believed that at that rate, the prediction he had made in 1998 — that the mainland chip industry would surpass Taiwan between 2015 and 2020 — could be realized.
Turning to large commercial aircraft
The article places Jiang’s work on commercial aircraft alongside his semiconductor push as another major industrial wager.
His formal involvement began in 2003, when he became head of a State Council major-project review group and took part in drafting the national medium- and long-term science and technology development plan. It notes that this came in the third year after he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
While leading the review group, large civil aircraft became the first project he selected and also one of the hardest to argue through.
China’s effort to build large civil aircraft had been difficult for half a century. From the Y-10 to the later C919 program, the path was marked by repeated setbacks. At the time, the idea that “buying is better than building, and leasing is better than buying” was widely heard. Because of technology monopolies in developed countries, China faced high costs and long return cycles in commercial aircraft development, and the project was also entangled with complicated interest conflicts.
Jiang’s position was blunt: large commercial aircraft had to be developed. The article quotes him as saying this was not only an economic issue but also one tied to national strategic security.
He believed developed countries were not simply trying to contain one aircraft technology. What they really wanted to limit was an entire platform for technological capability. Jiang saw early on what a large aircraft program could mean for China’s industrial restructuring. As quoted in the article, “You may have 100 technologies and still not be able to build a large aircraft. But if you build a large aircraft, it can drive the development of 100 technologies.”
In that framework, a large aircraft project could pull advances in new materials, electronic information and automatic control, while also supporting basic disciplines such as fluid mechanics. Putting the aircraft program into the national strategic plan, the article argues, meant creating a lead project for machinery, electronics, materials and metallurgy.
Jiang also believed Shanghai had the industrial base for the job. The article points out that the city had independently produced the Y-10 large passenger aircraft in the 1970s and had worked with McDonnell Douglas multiple times, building up technical experience.
To move the case forward, he organized a three-year discussion across academia and industry, traveling repeatedly between Shanghai and Beijing. On Feb. 26, 2006, the State Council approved the project and placed “large aircraft” under a major national science and technology program, marking the first formal step toward the C919.
An official often described as ahead of his time
The article also looks back at Jiang’s earlier career and says he handled big projects but was not especially skilled at officialdom.
Before the age of 40, he was closer to a scholar than a politician. In 1965, he entered Tsinghua University’s radio engineering department, though the Cultural Revolution meant he stayed there only a little more than nine months. For more than a decade after that, he never stopped studying. Together with his classmate and later wife, Wu Qidi, who would go on to become a vice minister of education, he continued self-study at the university level. In 1978, both were admitted back to Tsinghua, and they later became part of the first group of Chinese intellectuals sent abroad after reform and opening-up.
In 1987, Jiang moved to Sanya in Hainan. The city had only recently been upgraded from county level, had fewer than 1,000 telephones in total, and even phone numbers with only three digits. His eight years of overseas study gave him a strategic outlook that often looked too far ahead for the time.
One example was his idea of building a science city in Sanya and turning it into China’s “Hawaii.” In 1990, mainland China’s GDP stood at $387.8 billion, while Hong Kong, with a population of just over 5 million, had GDP equal to 20% of the mainland total. At that stage, the more immediate challenge for China was feeding and supporting a population of 1.1 billion, and the importance of high technology and tourism was not easily accepted by most people.
Ideas such as creating public urban space and establishing a land trading system are now common in city governance, but at the time they met heavy resistance. Jiang lost the 1989 election for Sanya vice mayor. The article notes that his father, Jiang Yizhen, was then vice chairman of the Hainan Development Promotion Association, yet Jiang himself still lost the local vote.
He did not leave. Instead, he stayed on as mayoral assistant and kept trying to push Sanya toward becoming an international tourism city. That work helped him win the 1991 election for vice mayor with a high vote tally.
That year was only his third in officialdom. At 43, the article says, he moved with the energy of someone 20 years younger and spent much of his time in field research. But in the debate over whether Sanya should focus on tourism or agriculture, the city chose the latter, and Jiang eventually left.
With backing from then Hainan Party Secretary Ruan Chongwu, he became director of the Yangpu Development Zone Administrative Bureau. In 1993, Yangpu was regarded as a testing ground for reform and opening-up. Jiang introduced ideas there such as “look for markets, not mayors” and “the least administrative intervention, the greatest economic freedom.”
The article says Yangpu’s experience later fed into broader Chinese administrative reforms over the next decade, including civil service recruitment by examination, centralized procurement and public finance practices. Yet once again, because his approach was seen as too far ahead, Jiang suffered another setback there.
Only in September 2007, when the State Council approved the Yangpu bonded port area, did the zone enter a new phase of opportunity. The article presents that as a delayed recognition of Jiang’s earlier work, though by then he had long since left Hainan for Shanghai.
Late years at SMIC and the aftermath
Because SMIC was seen as a competitive threat, the company faced repeated attacks from industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, and large compensation pressure, according to the article. In 2009, co-founder Richard Chang was forced to leave the company, and Jiang was brought in as chairman at a critical moment.
The article says few people knew he was then in the late stage of lung cancer.
Even so, he kept thinking about a path for China’s semiconductor industry. One comment quoted in the piece reads: “In semiconductor processes, we do not have to master everything. As long as we can stay ahead of foreign competitors in a few areas, we can find our own development path.”
Jiang died of illness on June 27, 2011. SMIC then quickly entered a period of turmoil. During two years of infighting, senior executives left one after another and development nearly stalled.
China’s chip industry was also going through what the article describes as one of its darkest periods. Only in 2014, after the establishment of the national integrated circuit industry fund at a scale of 100 billion yuan, did the sector gradually begin to recover.
For that reason, Jiang did not live to see ARJ21 enter commercial service in 2015, nor did he witness the later commercial progress of the C919.
What the article says his legacy became
The piece ends by portraying Jiang as a behind-the-scenes figure whose foundations helped make Shanghai a front-runner in both integrated circuits and commercial aviation.
It says Shanghai’s integrated circuit industry exceeded 570 billion yuan in overall scale in 2025 and had ranked first among Chinese cities for several consecutive years. It also describes Shanghai as the domestic region with the most complete chip industry chain and the highest overall technical level, with leading companies across all five key areas of design, manufacturing, packaging and testing, materials and equipment.
The article lists companies including SMIC, AMEC, Shanghai Micro Electronics, Unisoc and Shanghai Xinxin as examples of firms that represent hopes for breakthroughs under external restrictions, adding that many had at least some support from Jiang.
On aircraft, it says the large-plane project that Jiang first advocated has already advanced into the commercialization stage through Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China’s C919 series, becoming a new calling card for Chinese manufacturing.
Looking back, the article argues that Jiang never chased fads. Instead, he maintained a cold-eyed view of Shanghai’s positioning and of the real economy. His view, as summarized in the piece, was that Shanghai, as one of the world’s most concentrated manufacturing-resource regions, should strive to seize the industrial high ground and help upgrade traditional industries nationwide.
The article closes with a quote from his friend Wan Gang, vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference: “The government needs a group of people whose eyes are fixed on change and the frontier. The economic impact they bring may not show up in the present, but it plays a crucial role in development over the next 30 years.” In Wan’s words, Jiang was “ahead of his time throughout his life.”
The article was originally published on the WeChat public account Huashang Taolue and written by Huashang Taolue.