China's PC Alley swept into history's dustbin

BEIJING -- China's PC Alley " the ragtag collection of shops selling bootleg personal computers, silicon, software and computer books that was the birthplace of this country's Silicon Valley " has gone the way of New York's Radio Row and Fairchild Semiconductor's Rusty Bucket.

Once described as a "frenetic hub that epitomizes the uniquely Chinese OEM business model of on-the-spot manufacturing," PC Alley has been leveled to make way for the next wave of progress: the widening of Zhong Guan Cun Road.

A block away, China's "new" Silicon Valley is rising from a tangle of cranes, steel, glass and dust in the heart of Beijing's student quarter. A mixed-use complex of high-rise computer shopping malls houses computer and communications corporate research centers for companies like Qualcomm, Samsung and Lucent. The Legend Group, the former PC assembler that is now one of China's largest and wealthiest conglomerates, moved its corporate headquarters across town long ago, fleeing its humble digs along Zhong Guan Cun.

Black-market bookstores that once served as a pipeline for electronic design and computer titles "imported" from the United States have also disappeared, replaced by the likes of the brand-new Focus Book Center, one of the largest technology book stores in China.

The urban renewal of PC Alley is just one of thousands of massive building and road projects across China. The expansion is being driven by the country's red-hot economy, itself fueled by electronics and IT.

"This country is basically one big construction project," said James Liao, chairman and president of Unisun Group Inc., an investment firm that backs CSDN.net and Programmer magazine, which are among China's hottest new software-development Web sites and publications.

The shadow cast on Zhong Guan Cun's former screwdriver PC shops by modern skyscrapers is not just symbolic. "China is progressing rapidly from a labor-intensive market to a knowledge-intensive market," Liao said, noting a trend that seems to be confirmed daily by reports of an engineering exodus from that other Silicon Valley, the now-struggling Bay Area.

Tech-nostalgia buffs will recall the Rusty Bucket, the steel building on Ellis Street in Mountain View where Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce invented the first tiny IC for Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. Unlike David Packard's Palo Alto garage, which was designated a California historical landmark, the Rusty Bucket succumbed to the wrecker's ball in the early 1990s.

New York City's Radio Row, real old-timers will recall, was the home of City Radio, one of the first radio shops in America. It opened on Cortlandt Street in 1921, back when radio was a novelty.

Over the next few decades, hundreds of other stores popped up in the area, including video shops serving the nascent television industry. Until the '60s, the largest concentration of radio and electronic parts and equipment stores anywhere in the world was located in downtown New York. The area was familiar to all active radio amateurs. To make room for the World Trade Center, blocks of buildings had to be razed, including all of Radio Row. It's called progress.