Presidential adviser Lee Chia-tung (李家同) in an opinion piece quoted Zhao Weiguo (趙偉國), the chairman of the Chinese company Tsinghua Unigroup, as saying that Beijing should put pressure on Taiwan to open up its integrated-circuit manufacturing industry to Chinese companies, and that it should impose sanctions if Taiwan does not do so. Lee said that Zhao’s suggestion is very strange and exposes China for the backward nation that it is.
Lee is highly respected among businesspeople involved in Taiwan’s electronic engineering and information technology sectors. His book Let the Wall Come Down (讓高牆倒下吧) has inspired many young people to come down from their ivory towers and engage in social issues.
Lee said that he was anxious about China not asking Russia to transfer the technology used in making and designing fighter aircraft engines. China does not make demands from Russia and only bullies Taiwan, and that is very embarrassing for the nation, he said.
When people started campaigning against the cross-strait trade in services agreement last year, Lee took a neutral position, saying that he understood what young people were thinking and hoped that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) could communicate with them.
He did not sign the petition against opening Taiwan’s Type 2 telecommunications enterprise sector to China.
Why, then, is he reacting so intensely now? It is because the problem this time is much more frightening than the protests against the trade in services agreement.
The importance of information security can be better understood by considering the life cycle of information technology products: research, development and design; manufacturing; marketing and transportation; operation and maintenance; and destruction.
Each link in the chain comes with its own problems regarding information security.
The opposition to terms within the trade in services agreement that deregulate telecommunications and database systems stems from possible information and national security risks that can arise during operation and maintenance stages.
If Chinese companies become involved in integrated circuit chip design, that would make them part of the research, development and design stage, which is the most basic link in the chain.
If a time comes when Taiwan-made chips become controlled by China, then, in the information-oriented world, control over the Internet of Things would also have entirely fallen into the hands of the Chinese government, along with Taiwan’s extensive database systems.
If telecommunication and database businesses were linked with and run by Chinese capital, Taiwanese would still be on their guard to some extent, but if every mobile phone and computer, and industrial control systems used in Industry 4.0 — the combination of industrial technology and the Internet of Things — contained chips that have been developed and manufactured with Chinese companies, that would pose a great threat to Taiwan’s information and national security.
The issue is not a matter of the high technology sector’s competitiveness, and it is not at a level at which manufacturers would be able to handle the threat and protect themselves.
It is a major threat to Taiwan’s information security, so the public should pay close attention to what policies and countermeasures the government and the legislature would adopt to deal with it.
Li Jung-shian is a professor in the Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering at National Cheng Kung University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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