Beijing Blog Part 7: Among the high-rises

June 6, 2009-(SMIC Residential Community -Pudong, Shanghai)

Shanghai is a sprawling metropolis of high-rises and skyscrapers, and it seems that wherever you walk, you can always hear the sounds of jackhammers and construction cranes. This is the sound of progress.

15 years ago, the city itself was a simple town with a few old-style buildings among the famous “Bund” area, remains of

The SMIC factory in Shanghai-Pudong.

China’s ill-remembered semi-colonial period. Pudong itself, across the Huangpu River, was farmland and people could only travel to the island by ferry.

But today things have completely changed. Every inch of Pudong seems to be teeming with people, construction, and brand new buildings as the Shanghai of tomorrow has broken its ground within its soil.

Yet, go a few more kilometers from Pudong’s crowded business district, and you immediately find yourself among the heavy industries and technology parks of Shanghai. Here is also where you’ll find the factory and the Shanghai headquarters of SMIC, the largest semiconductor manufacturing company in China and the third largest in the world.

Go a little farther and you might be surprised to find apartment complex after apartment complex, a school, and even a church. This is the SMIC housing community, the brainchild of Dr. Richard Chang.

Yet, SMIC and the man behind the company at first glance may strike you as kind of odd. For one, Dr. Chang doesn’t look like the multi-million dollar business executive that he really is, but rather, like any other engineer simply looking for that next calculation.

The second characteristic that you may not know about Dr. Chang is that he founded SMIC’s community based on Christian principles. Dr. Chang, who initially preferred to be a missionary in China, would probably tell you himself that making his own little “city”, of sorts, was a calling from the Lord himself.

Yet, regardless of the reasons, Dr. Chang’s work seems to have paid off. In addition to being one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing companies in the world, SMIC Shanghai now has a private K-12 school that will help students get into universities, Chinese or American, a Christian church that offers both Chinese and English services, and several housing complexes that have the ability to house a good majority of the several thousand who work at the Shanghai plant alone.

In addition, similar complexes and schools reside all over China in areas such as Beijing and Wuhai. Such complexes don’t exist in America, for in America, we rarely have one large corporate giant. But the fact that such a complex exists and thrives every day is just a testament to what kinds of minds and hearts reside in China.