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Happy’s Tech Talk #44: Memories of the ‘Mystery Systems of the East’

For some time now, I’ve wanted to share my observations about living and working with the Chinese. If you plan to stay in the electronics profession, specifically printed circuits, China will have a profound effect on you, and I hope some of my experiences will help you.

My Historic Connection to China
It is ironic that I would end up working with the Chinese. My father was a farm boy from Wisconsin who fought alongside the Chinese to defeat the Japanese on the China-Burma border during WWII. My father took many photos and had stories that he later shared with us kids. I remember the story he told of shooting an Indochinese leopard he saw lurking in a tree, its eyes glowing. It looked ready to pounce and to kill. Fearing for his life, my father took the shot, and the tiger landed right in the back of his jeep.

As a boy, my father used to trap, skin, and sell muskrat pelts to the local Native Americans, so it was no issue for him to take the tiger back to the local village and trade the meat to the village leader in return for tanning the pelt. He carried that pelt with him throughout the war, brought it home, and I grew up with it on the living room floor. That experience had such a profound effect on my father, and even 60 years later, he still remembered many words in Mandarin. By the way, that species of Chinese tiger is now extinct.

My personal connection to China began with three days of R&R on the beach in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 1969, on my way back from Vietnam. Many years later, you can appreciate the irony of my having dinner with the engineers of Boashung Steel in Shanghai and them declaring me a “comrade” as they also fought the Vietnamese, and their fathers fought the Japanese.

Mystery Systems 
When I became involved with the Chinese nearly 45 years ago, I read an article about the “mystery systems of the East” that contrasted Eastern vs. Western cultures in history, religion, philosophy, language, government, law, education, and geography. These fundamental observations were very helpful to me as I began working with Chinese companies. As U.S. companies have moved their operations overseas to China and Southeast Asia during the past few decades, we have all become more familiar with the Eastern perspective and way of looking at life and business. Will these perspectives begin to dominate the world’s production of PWBs, and will it be to our benefit?

Working for the World’s Largest PCB Manufacturer
Until 2008, my work experience was mostly limited to Taiwan, where I had lived for many years, working for Hewlett-Packard. I also lived in Hong Kong before its return to China in 1997. In 2008, my HP boss from Taiwan, who had been promoted as the executive vice president of Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn), asked me to become the CTO of Foxconn’s components division, which made all the connectors, cables, flex, and PCB multilayers. He even sent me a 150-slide PowerPoint presentation about the division.

To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. Foxconn PCB had five sites in China, all built after 2006, with 17 facilities of 1 million square feet each. Of those four plants, Huai’an alone produced over 18 million square feet of an average eight-layer multilayer board every month. The entire captive manufacturing was eight times the size of the known largest PCB manufacturer in the world (a Japanese giant). Foxconn’s largest site, 300 km north of Beijing (where the Great Wall begins), had six enormous plants and 30 more planned, making it the largest in the world.

I was tasked with improving efficiency, yields, and profits over the next three years so Foxconn could launch an IPO for the PCB unit.

Fundamental PWB Infrastructure Advantages
In my experience, the Chinese have many infrastructure advantages over the Western world, including:

1. Long-term business planning and vision to drive strategic focus.
2. Access to low-cost, vast technical resources and manpower in engineering.
3. Belief in organic growth through added capacity, not by acquisitions, including verticalization of the supply chain.
4. Connections to financial backing (banking and investors) that also shares the same vision of growth and market share over profits—overseas Chinese banking, not China’s banking system.
5. Cooperation of government research laboratories to develop and promote new materials, processes, and technologies.
6. Innovative use of the world’s best ideas, equipment, and processes.

Challenges for the Chinese 
Despite this, I’ve observed that China does have its own set of difficulties to work through. I’ll list a few that come to mind.

Starting from Scratch
Their practice of training to copy until perfection and not sticking out means that their first action is to look for an answer from others. The top-down rule means they will do whatever the boss says, even if it is a waste of time. The idea of brainstorming a problem breaks too many cultural-hierarchical protocols to be effective, but with training and coaching, they can learn to be self-starters.

Higher Education
University attendance is not open to everyone. Herculean entrance exams make getting into a state university all-consuming. If you do get in, you are required to continue at a hectic pace. Where I attended college, our engineering program let just about everyone in. Only the strong would survive, meaning each year about a quarter of the students could not make the grade. Another advantage of the U.S. education system is that age is not a factor for entrance. Many motivated older family men or military veterans were my classmates.

Regard and Understanding of Intellectual Property
The Chinese have a hard time understanding that you can own an idea and that you can buy and sell it. To them, objects have intrinsic value based on their materials and the labor to construct them. Since they were taught to copy the masters until they had perfected their techniques, imitation was a sign of respect and honor. At one time, 90% of industrial software in China was pirated. When I lived there, I could buy a Microsoft XP or Windows 2000 for $1.20 a disk, or a CAM350 v8.6 field solver for $4. It has taken many years for IP to be respected.

Technical Management (Middle Management)
The concepts of delegating and coaching still need to be established. Chinese hierarchical protocol is still the rule, with the people at the top making the decisions and issuing the orders. It’s a battle to climb the ranks against so many, and it’s difficult to share your knowledge and experience with your subordinates.

Engineering Statistics
Japan realized that quality comes from engineering on the factory floor and in product refinement, and made it a national priority. China and Taiwan have a poor record of using statistics and DOE. I taught Chinese engineers about it, so I know some of them are using it. However, most process optimization comes from one-change-at-a-time experimentation. Beware of “chàbuduō,” “about right,” or “good enough.”

Conclusion
Learning about other countries and living and working with them has been one of my life’s greatest experiences. You learn that there are so many ways to approach the same problem, and that solving them together contributes to the greater good of the industry—and the individual.

An excellent set of articles I read early in my career was authored by Mia Doucet, an international marketing consultant who wrote China In Motion: 17 Secrets to Slashing the Time to Production, to Market, and to Profits in China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. This helped me enormously to understand the differences in culture and doing business in Asia. Maybe I will write another column listing some of the most useful advice and how it worked for me.

This column originally appeared in the October 2025 issue of PCB007 Magazine.