Chang, who prizes his place atop the corporate pyramid here, is clearly rattled by the prospect of being left behind.
"Even if Taiwan companies did not go to China, even if no other foreign companies were interested, they could always do it themselves," he said. "You can pick up the low-end expertise pretty easily."
There are still a few brakes on China's chip industry.
Restrictions on the export of advanced technology from the US mean that the latest technology -- etching chips on 300mm wafers -- cannot be done in Chinese factories.
But that leaves many other simpler memory and logic chips that can be produced there. And analysts believe that with China about to enter the WTO, the export controls will eventually disappear.
That will make the global chip industry, which has fallen into recession roughly every five years since 1970, even more competitive.
Since the early 1980s, when Japan aggressively entered the market for memory chips, Chang said, these boom-and-bust cycles have been precipitated by new competitors like South Korea and Taiwan building factories.
As painful as this recession is, Chang said he fretted even more about the next one, when China's factories will be churning out chips.
"They will be enormously disruptive in about five years," he said. "I wish they would go away, but they're not going away."
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