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
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past