Little Taiwan is threatened by giant China. The two countries will be reunited, Chinese President Xi Jinping said last October. Whether it happens peacefully or not. And on Wednesday, CIA Director William Burns said he believes the risk of an invasion will increase as more time passes. Taiwan has had to think carefully about how to defend itself. The country’s 23 million inhabitants can no longer compete with China’s massive military force. They have long been dependent on support from the United States. But it is not unreserved. After all, the US and Taiwan are not formally allies. PREPARED: Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen poses for the camera with soldiers in Taoyuan in 2019. Photo: TYRONE SIU / Reuters So Taiwan has built missile defenses and bought fighter jets, built military bases and trained hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Prepared to be able to defend himself, completely without help. But perhaps the most effective defense is in the screen you are reading from right now. It is part of Taiwan’s “silicon shield”. Data chip dominance The phone, PC or tablet you are reading from is made with data chips. Computer chips that most likely come from Taiwan. Much of the best defense technology also relies on the little dabblers. SILICON: A computer chip is made with so-called semiconductor material, most often silicon. Photo: FLORENCE LO / Reuters The island nation of Taiwan controls over 90 percent of the market for the most advanced variants, and 65 percent of the semiconductor market in general. Much thanks to industrial giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which alone has control over 55 percent of the market. Silicon addicts Little by little, both the USA, China and the rest of the world have become dependent on these computer chips. It is very noticeable now. The semiconductor industry is already in the middle of a shortage crisis that is causing large price increases and waiting times. Also in Norway. The Chinese may have become so addicted that they don’t even want to bear the cost of invading. According to a report to the US Congress, China accounts for 60 percent of the demand for semiconductors in the world. Professor at the Norwegian Defense Academy, Øystein Tunsjø, says the semiconductor industry is very important for China, but also for the rest of the world. Photo: Inger Kristine Lee / news – China is the world’s factory, and the semiconductor industry is very important in that production. At the same time, the rest of the world is dependent on Chinese production. If Taiwan suddenly stopped exporting semiconductors to China, it means, among other things, that Apple, German car companies, and so on will not be able to produce what they are supposed to. So all this is connected, explains professor at the Department of Defense Studies, Øystein Tunsjø. For the United States, the dependency may mean that it is more willing to defend the island. – This is not just a question of our financial security. It seems to have a clear connection to our national security as well, Taiwan’s Economy Minister Wang Mei-hua commented to Reuters last year. SEMICONDUCTOR-CONDUCTOR: One of the factories of the world’s by far the largest manufacturer of semiconductor computer chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in the city of Taichung, on Taiwan’s west coast. Photo: YIMOU LEE / Reuters Factories on the front line Part of what helps to deter a Chinese invasion is the strategic location of the TSMC factories. They lie like pearls on a string along Taiwan’s west coast, some of them only 130 kilometers from China. The most advanced factories are to be found in the cities of Taichung, Hsinchu and Tainan. All near so-called “red beaches”. These are the beaches where it would be by far the easiest for China to land soldiers if they were to invade. Both TSMC’s headquarters and several of the largest factories are located in Hsinchu, just 22 kilometers from the nearest “red beach”. And the vast majority of factories are located close to military bases. The fear is therefore great that the factories would be destroyed in a conflict. NEARBY: Taiwanese soldiers fire smoke grenades during a military exercise on the beaches outside Taichung on July 16, 2020. Photo: SAM YEH / AFP US ambiguity The US attitude towards Taiwan is somewhat unclear. In professional language, it is called “strategic ambiguity”. This means that the US will be a safe arms supplier to Taiwan, but has left it up in the air as to whether it would deploy its own military forces if China attacks the island. At the end of May, however, there was no ambiguity to be found in President Joe Biden’s mouth. Joe Biden answers unequivocally “yes” when asked if the United States would defend Taiwan if China invaded while on a trip to Japan in May. Then he stated, for the second time, that the United States would contribute militarily to defend Taiwan if it came to that. Dr. Ely Ratner is one of the US Department of Defense’s foremost experts on Taiwan. On 8 December last year, he gave a possible explanation for Biden’s change of pace in American foreign policy. In front of the Senate, Ratner cited precisely the dependence on the Taiwanese semiconductor industry as one of the reasons why Taiwan’s security is important to the United States. – Not the most important thing Professor Øystein Tunsjø admittedly believes that Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is not the most important consideration when deciding how likely a Chinese invasion is. – Of course, there is a certain form of deterrence in that Taiwan has this capacity to produce important technology that China needs. But, a war between China and Taiwan is not about semiconductors. It is about China wanting to gain control over Taiwan, he says. Tunsjø believes that semiconductors would only be one of many concerns during what would most likely be a total economic collapse: – But the risk China takes if they start a war is much greater than losing access to semiconductors. That would mean a complete stop to trade with the USA, Japan, South Korea, perhaps also with the EU. At the same time, it is not clear that it will stop China, says the professor: – There are many indications that China is willing to take that step in a few years anyway, and go to war. It is very reminiscent of the situation we have in Europe now. Germany and the EU depend on Russian gas, and Russia depends on the European market, but in the end it didn’t matter. POSSIBLE SOURCE OF INSPIRATION: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting in Beijing on February 4 this year, just three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. Photo: Alexei Druzhinin / AP The conflict between Taiwan and China Photo: AP Taiwan and China have been separated since 1949. Then Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese nationalists lost the civil war that had ravaged China for the past 20 to 30 years. Mao Zedong and the Communists rolled into Beijing with tanks, establishing the People’s Republic of China on the mainland. At the same time, Chiang’s Republic of China continued on Taiwan. Formally, the two countries are still at war, and believe they should rule the whole of China, i.e. the mainland and Taiwan. Taiwan had long had the support of Western countries, and even sat on the UN Security Council. But in the 1970s, fortunes turned. Countries such as the United States, France, and Great Britain began to recognize China, sending Taiwanese diplomats home. Today, only 13 countries, mainly in Latin America and the Pacific, recognize Taiwan as the “rightful” China. The breakthrough at the breakfast table To understand how Taiwan’s semiconductor adventure came about, we have to go back in time a little. The breakthrough came in 1974. There was perhaps a slightly sluggish atmosphere at the time in the capital, Taipei. Taiwan was losing its international recognition, and soaring oil prices and inflation led to poor economic growth. GLITTERING: Two wafers made of silicon are displayed at the Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute in Hsinchu, Taiwan, February 11, 2022. Photo: ANN WANG / Reuters But according to a description from the Taiwan Industry Archives, that’s when the big breakthrough came. A group of Taiwanese ministers were having breakfast at a cafe known for soy milk and steamed buns, along with an engineer from the United States. The Taiwanese government wanted to develop the electronics industry, but did not know how. The engineer suggested that Taiwan invest in semiconductors, and so it happened. It wasn’t long before ministers were sending promising young Taiwanese to the US to learn how. The giant TSMC LEADER: Morris Chang founded the company TSMC in 1985, which was the start of Taiwan’s semiconductor adventure. Photo: JEROME FAVRE / AP It was this local Taiwanese knowledge that businessman Morris Chang made use of when he founded TSMC in 1985. He had extensive experience at the American computer company Texas Instruments, and knew what had to be done: TSMC was to specialize in making the computer chips from scratch, and then sell them on. Until then, all the big computer companies such as IBM and Texas Instruments made their own computer chips, which became more expensive the more advanced the chips became. The orders started pouring in. Today, TSMC has a market value of 448 billion US dollars.
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“Silicon shield” can save Taiwan from a Chinese invasion – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
