Chinese President Xi Jinping told U.S. President Joe Biden during their four-hour meeting on Wednesday that Taiwan was the biggest, most dangerous issue in U.S.-China ties, a senior U.S. official told reporters.
The official quoted Xi as saying China’s preference was for peaceful “reunification” with the Chinese-claimed island of Taiwan, but that he went on to talk about conditions in which force could be used.
Xi was trying to indicate that China is not preparing for a massive invasion of Taiwan, but that does not change the U.S. approach, the official said.
“President Xi … underscored that this was the biggest, most potentially dangerous issue in U.S.-China relations, laid out clearly that, you know, their preference was for peaceful reunification but then moved immediately to conditions that the potential use of force could be utilized,” the senior U.S. official told reporters, referring to Xi’s comments on Taiwan.
Biden responded by assuring Xi that Washington was determined to maintain peace in the region.
“President Biden responded very clearly that the long-standing position of the United States was … determination to maintain peace and stability,” the official said.
“President Xi responded: look, peace is … all well and good but at some point we need to move towards resolution more generally,” the official said.
Taiwan is a ridiculously valuable tech asset. If China can seize control of TSMC, it’d be in an incredible position to make tons of money and potentially spy on the rest of the world. If the factories wind up inoperable for whatever reason… well, most of the chips they produce aren’t being sent to China anyway, so while it wouldn’t be good for anyone, it’d be much worse for the rest of the world. And with TSMC making efforts to offshore its talent and production anyway (even if it has been with very limited success so far), China wants to make a move sooner rather than later.
It’s a very valuable spot geographically in the island chain too. With Taiwan under their control, they basically oversee all cargo ships coming through the South China Sea to East Asian countries like Japan and Korea, not to mention the additional economic area and military potential.
Yeah, I think geography is the main point here. As it stands, China’s coast is fully surrounded by American allies in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines and owning Taiwan could give them control of the surrounding waters allowing their cargo ships to safely pass through if things get ugly with the US.
Seizing TSMC is only a good move in theory. First, they wouldn’t be able to operate it as well. Second, the world would immediately mobilize to divest from TSMC dependence, just as it is divesting from Chinese manufacturing toward Vietnam and India. Third, it would never get as far as China successfully continuing the TSMC dominance but ALSO with embedded spyware. Huawei equipment is being ripped out and thrown away in data centers across the western world. There’s zero chance the world would just sit there and accept compromised chips.
SMIC already poaches an obscene number of TSMC engineers. TSMC’s only value-add is their EUV machines, which would get fucked the minute after a declaration of war.
China’s goal has always been economic and cultural reintegration with Taiwan. They want Taiwan-China relations to be like Canada-US relations: nominally “independent,” but everyone knows what really happens.
TSMC isn’t worth anything without EUV light, only ASML makes the light that makes modern processes possible. Without new lights, TSMC can only run for a few months because the lifetime of those lights are pretty short. Then they would have to revert to noncompetitive processes. Only Canon is somewhat close AFAIK. So no luck there either.
Not totally true. There’s a reason why TSMC chips have better yields and efficiency than Samsung chips, even though they are on the same nodes and also use ASML machines. AFAIK, you still need to develop a know-how to build good chips, and ASML’s tools enable that, true, but they don’t know the rest of the process to make that happen. Neither does Apple nor other chip designers, and that’s worth value.
Without the tools, the knowhow is worthless. Apart from that, Taiwan say they have made sure TSMC will never fall into the hands of China.
I’m not disputing it will cause major disruption in western supplies too, obviously neither Samsung or Intel will be able to replace TSMC immediately, they are behind both on quality and volume, and they are the only existing alternatives to high end process manufacturing. Apple doesn’t know shit in that regard, they are not a manufacturer, and TSMC is not a chip designer.