During an interview in Canada on Friday last week. 28, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “China is becoming more aggressive toward Taiwan, a region where maritime trade accounts for 50 percent of daily global trade, and where most of the chips needed for cell phones and other goods are made in Taiwan,” and that “a crisis in the Taiwan Strait would be bad for the world, so security in the strait must be maintained.”
It was the third time that Blinken mentioned the importance of Taiwan’s chips to the global economy, following an ABC interview and a conversation with former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.
The international community views Taiwan as having two global advantages that are irreplaceable by any other country:
The first is Taiwan’s strategic position. From the US perspective of its global strategic deployment, Taiwan, surrounded by sea on all sides, is in the center of the “first island chain.” It faces the Taiwan Strait and the Bashi Channel, both important international waters that control the main sea routes of Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
If a war breaks out across the strait, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) blockade of Taiwan’s maritime shipping routes — which the large military exercises around Taiwan in August seemed to be in preparation for — would not only choke the country’s economic and trade activities, and war supplies, but also affect maritime traffic safety and benefits for other Asia-Pacific countries. Not to mention that it would threaten the US’ overall interests in the Indo-Pacific region.
Second is the importance of Taiwan’s chip technology. Chris Miller — a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the author of a new book, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology — has said that Taiwan is the “beating heart” of the global semiconductor industry and that if its semiconductor industry were destroyed, the total global economic loss would be greater than the losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The international status of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry can be attributed to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC). Data from Taiwanese market research firm TrendForce Corp show that the revenue of Taiwan’s chip foundry accounted for more than 60 percent of global chip foundries in 2020, with TSMC accounting for 54 percent of the total.
Taiwanese chips have become “strategic materials” that are no less important than oil. The world’s telecommunications infrastructure and advanced weapons systems, and artificial intelligence, network systems, smartphones and self-driving vehicles all rely on advanced chips.
From Taiwan’s geostrategic significance and its mass production of high-end chips, a cross-strait war would be a “global chip war.”
As TSMC founder Morris Chang (張忠謀) warned during an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes: “If there’s a war, I mean, it [TSMC] would be destroyed. Everything will be destroyed.”
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a catastrophe for the global supply chain.
How can Taiwan prevent the Chinese People’s Liberation Army from attacking and destroying the country’s chip production sites? The National Security Council, the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and other government agencies should jointly study this, setting it as an “operation scenario” in the annual Han Kuang military exercises.
Yao Chung-yuan is a professor and former deputy director of the Ministry of National Defense’s strategic planning department.
Translated by Eddy Chang
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS