A few days ago, Chinese government-backed company Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd — China’s largest chip designer — issued an announcement saying that the company planned to acquire stakes in large Taiwanese integrated circuit (IC) packing and testing firms. There were also reports that the company had been putting pressure on the government to open up the local IC design industry to Chinese investors.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs, which has all along promoted such deregulation and opening up, has said that it would scrutinize Tsinghua’s investment plan in close detail. However, because the Chinese government stands behind Tsinghua, other nations are submitting similar investment plans to even stricter reviews.
When it comes to industries of strategic value and national importance, a government has a great responsibility to provide adequate protection.
Consider the US. In July, Tsinghua Unigroup offered US$23 billion for Micron Technology, a big US manufacturer of DRAM chips, but the US government came up with several reasons to block the deal. The most important among the reasons offered was national security.
If even Washington blocks Tsinghua from investing in nationally important industries, why does Taipei think it can open the doors to such investment without consideration?
Based on national security concerns, many governments are placing restrictions on the investments and other commercial activities of foreign firms.
Here are just a few examples: In April 2003, the US government cited national security concerns as a reason to block Chinese investors from acquiring Global Crossing, a telecommunications company that provided worldwide computer networking services and was a tier 1 carrier. That same year, Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-shing’s (李嘉誠) Hutchison Port Holdings Trust wanted to invest in the development of a bulk terminal run by Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai, only to have the investment rejected by the Indian government because the Cabinet Committee on Security said that the port was too close to India’s Southern Naval Command and that a facility operated by Chinese investors so close by would be a major national security concern.
One of the many ways that the US and India differ from Taiwan is that the two nations do not have to worry about being annexed by China. Despite that, their governments still want to prevent any negative eventualities that could arise in connection to Chinese investments.
The reason for such considerations is of course that they are concerned over China’s fundamental character as a dictatorship and that this could result in Chinese companies operating in ways that are different from how normal markets operate, such as investing in and running operations for political rather than commercial reasons.
The threat that China poses to Taiwan is much more direct than that, so of course there is absolutely no reason for the government to make light of allowing Chinese investors to acquire Taiwanese companies. Doing so would be tantamount to abandoning all pretense of protecting national security.
Huang Di-ying is an attorney and spokesperson for the Democratic Progressive Party.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Ideas matter. They especially matter in world affairs. And in communist countries, it is communist ideas, not supreme leaders’ personality traits, that matter most. That is the reality in the People’s Republic of China. All Chinese communist leaders — from Mao Zedong (毛澤東) through Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), from Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) through to Xi Jinping (習近平) — have always held two key ideas to be sacred and self-evident: first, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is infallible, and second, that the Marxist-Leninist socialist system of governance is superior to every alternative. The ideological consistency by all CCP leaders,
The US on Friday hosted the second Global COVID-19 Summit, with at least 98 countries, including Taiwan, and regional alliances such as the G7, the G20, the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) attending. Washington is also leading a proposal to revise one of the most important documents in global health security — the International Health Regulations (IHR) — which are to be discussed during the 75th World Health Assembly (WHA) that starts on Sunday. These two actions highlight the US’ strategic move to dominate the global health agenda and return to the core of governance, with the WHA
Just as the cause of the Kursk submarine disaster remains shrouded in mystery — the nuclear-powered Russian submarine suffered an explosion during a naval exercise on Aug. 12, 2000, and sank, killing all 118 crew onboard — it is unlikely that we will ever get to the bottom of the sequence of events last month that led to the sinking of the Moskva guided missile cruiser, the flagship of the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet. Ukraine claims it struck the vessel with two missiles, while Russia says ammunition onboard the ship exploded and the ship tipped over while being towed
Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has lived in a constant state of fear that it might share the fate of its former mentor and ideological bedfellow. To stay in power, the party had to strike a difficult balancing act: maintaining a tight grip on information, while simultaneously opening up to the world under the program of economic reform initiated by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平). The balancing act became increasingly difficult with the popularization of the Internet in the mid-1990s. The CCP could not block Chinese citizens from accessing the Internet, as
RSS