None of the war game scenarios conducted by the nation’s armed forces have included the evacuation of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) engineers to the US in the event of a Chinese invasion, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) said yesterday.
“None of the war games we have held have included that scenario [of evacuating TSMC engineers to the US],” Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of a legislative session.
“We have only ourselves to rely on in terms of defending our country, and everything we have done so far is to exercise a high degree of self-restraint to prevent war from breaking out,” he said.
Photo: Lam Yik Fei, Bloomberg
A Bloomberg report on Friday cited unnamed US officials as saying that Washington had accelerated contingency planning for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, with the main focus being the fate of the nation’s cutting-edge chip industry.
The planning intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the report said.
All scenarios place increased strategic importance on TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, and in the worst-case scenario, the US would consider evacuating the company’s highly skilled engineers, sources familiar with the discussions told Bloomberg.
Reporters yesterday asked Chiu if the evacuation of TSMC engineers had been part of military war game scenarios, given that the US has regularly sends officials to observe Taiwan’s annual Han Kuang military exercises.
Attending a legislative session together with Chiu, National Security Bureau Director-General Chen Ming-tong (陳明通) told lawmakers that it would be extremely difficult to replicate TSMC, as the semiconductor giant is not just about its engineers.
“TSMC is about a whole system, and you cannot simply relocate it,” Chen said.
Responding on Saturday to the Bloomberg report, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a news release that China should understand that Taiwan’s economy has become interwoven with that of the world and China’s.
“For the entire world, the stability and security of the Taiwan Strait is the best supply chain investment,” it said.
At yesterday’s legislative session, Chiu also pledged that conscripts who had completed their required four-month military training would not be asked to return to the armed forces to serve another eight months if Taiwan decided to extend mandatory military training to one year.
The issue of whether to extend the four-month mandatory military training period for conscripts to one year or longer was still being discussed, and the final decision would likely be announced before the end of this year, Chiu said.
The new rule would take effect a year after a decision is made, he has previously said.
All Taiwanese men over the age of 18 initially had to serve two to three years in the military as part of a conscription system adopted by the Republic of China government after it relocated to Taiwan in 1949 following the Chinese Civil War.
Conscription was gradually reduced from 1996 until 2008, when it became one year.
During former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration from 2008 to 2016, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government turned the nation’s military into a voluntary force in which conscripts were only required to undergo four months of military training, starting in 2013.
The nation’s military is now mainly a volunteer force, with conscripts serving a supporting role.
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