TSMC is the center of the universe for chip fab. AMD, NVidia, Qualcomm, and Apple all rely on their manufacturing. Doesn't this create a systemic risk especially with Taiwan's ties to China?
TSMC's ties with the U.S. are, on the other hand, a big strategic threat to China, and maybe to other countries that aren't the U.S.
TSMC isn't real bottleneck here. It's US semiconductor manufacturing equipment firms fully under US jurisdiction that underpin the supply chain for any modern fab.
https://www.nextplatform.com/category/hyperscale/ has interesting stuff on uses and development you don't see from a consumer POV
I guess the real danger here in our unforeseeable world will arise if the American government becomes either unwilling or unable to defend Taiwan from a sea invasion from the CPC, something that would probably be more serious to American (and world) security than losing a few fabs in Asia, I think.
That's not the case since 1991.
With China about 100 miles from Taiwan, I don't see how anyone could get close without mass casualties. China has the shorter and more secure supply lines. They could send an invasion force using numerous small water vessels in waters they could easily defend. In the end, the losing side would just destroy all the important places in Taiwan.
So yes, I think the conflict will definitely remain frozen for the next decades, and it will be at least until either the CPC loses control of the mainland, the USA lose their grip on the region, or some US politician goes bananas and pushes for Taiwanese independence.
It does, and that's not only TSMC, or even fabs as such.
Taiwan is a source for a many single vendor semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and consumables. Taiwan going down means the semiconductor industry as such, globally, going down for a few years at least.
First thing that comes to mind are lithography machines, but for the very high-end ASML is the only game in town currently afaik. And they are sitting in the Netherlands (working with Zeiss in Germany). For larger feature sizes there are vendors too.
Clean room material markers, few makers of vacuum grade plastics, FOUP, film, and other carriers.
They will have to go back few generations in the resist tech to resume production with non TW suppliers.
And like that with many, many other parts of the ecosystem. It's only a tip of the iceberg.
Is this an abstract example, or is this actually the case?
Except completely reclassifying it to remove the thing that made China want to seize control in the first place: special trade status. Other than that, what could the current administration do that wasn't screwed up by its predecessors?
Instead, Trump has spent so much of his time kissing up to Xi to get his help to win the re-election (per Bolton's book). And check out some tweets from 2020: "Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country." "In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” "“Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus."
"Of his many tweets over the three-day Memorial Day weekend, when the Hong Kong issue was at the top of the news, none was about Hong Kong. During the Hong Kong protests of 2014, Mr. Trump tweeted one of his few clear statements on the plight of the territory: “President Obama should stay out of the Hong Kong protests, we have enough problems in our own country!”" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/opinion/china-hong-kong-l...
This is literally, exactly what the White House did.
It isn't enough, we need to do a lot more.
[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/fcaf0a57-ac0f-4695-af0f-82a44e6ae...
The UK and Australia are willing to flap their mouths a bit [1] over it at least, and the UK is much closer to actual sanctions (Australia has, for the time being, not terminated their special trade arrangements with Hong Kong).
[1]: https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/05/us-uk-canada-and-au...
Ultimately only the U.S. has taken any leadership on this matter, even if I think it will be inadequate. There is more to be done; but with the U.S. Presidential election looming, one thing that would steel the resolve and buff the resources of PRC assets in American politics would be a major announcement.
Nothing is as simple as the free world bullying the nominally-free world to condemn the only major state in the world conducting a holocaust; because apparently those "allies" don't give a toss.
What can any Western country or US president can do? Do you declare a war with a country over a piece of land that is rightfully their?
I don't understand the logic behind "without a peep from the US"? like what? a WAR with China?
PRC signed an agreement with the UK that set out the legal parameters for this transfer of sovereignty, and PRC is contradicting that agreement with their actions. While it may not legally be the UK's to keep, it was not China's to take in this respect either.
> What can any Western country or US president can do? Do you declare a war with a country over a piece of land that is rightfully their?
Well, in the mean time, the U.S. has terminated the special status of Hong Kong which allowed it to serve as the conduit between the civilized world and a country with essentially no rules that regularly outweigh pure class/political privilege.
The English legal system and liberal order that the UK imposed on Hong Kong was in large part what made them so dazzlingly wealthy and dynamic; and if PRC wants to corrupt that, the result is that the benefits of the system they are corrupting disappear with that system.
Also, it is not always right to honour the law, when dealing with bandits. The CCP does not care for the law, so their assertion of a legal right to Hong Kong (which has not matured anyway) is hypocritical, and can essentially be ignored at no moral hazard.
Furthermore, even if we asserted that the CCP has some agreed legal right to Hong Kong that will mature in some years, I would not agree that it has a moral right to take its people as property.
Given that China has not always existed, how am I to interpret this statement?
> UK gave back a land that wasn't their to keep.
Portions (though not all) of Hong Kong were ceded in perpetuity. They simply were _not_ part of China before being given back.
HK isn't a sovereign nation, Taiwan is. Also, having the US go in would be questionable. Wasn't the "one country, two systems" treaty an agreement between uk and china?
Depends on who you ask.
I don't think you mean Native Taiwanese (as in Native Americans) here, so I have to say people are not unanimous about whether "Taiwan" is a sovereign nation.
I mean, you can make the same argument with "the earth is flat... depends on who you ask". At least when it comes to the Taiwan (the island) I don't think there's any doubt that the ROC government has a monopoly on violence there. They also have their own military, police force, and collect their own taxes, independent of the PRC.
Obvious a lot of time has passed, but it's not quite flat earth. It just requires a sence of 'historical justice', however unhelpfull
The U.S. started removing the extra trade agreements from Hong Kong (which arguably is a large part of what made Hong Kong what it is today) and sanctioned individuals in the Chinese government [1]. While this seems to be a "weak" response, I'm not sure what else I would like to see short of getting the military involved.
I have no idea. There's a reason I make my living as an engineer rather than as a politician or a diplomat.
The UK is trying to welcome people from Hong Kong to the UK (passports left over from before the handover) which could hurt them where it actually matters if lucky.
The original seisure of Hong Kong was an act of gunboat displomacy, and not exactly an exemplar of justice and law. Consider how its seen in donestic politics in China.
This does not mean that I approve of China's activity, just putting things in perspective.
Except the UK has much bigger issues ATM like dealing with the social, political and economical fallout of Brexit and Covid-19.
To put it mildly, even if they wanted to, it's tough for them to help put out a fire in a far away village when they have a huge dumpster fire in their own back yard to deal with first.
Obama promised to end wars close down Guantanamo bay and in the ended up keeping up all war campaigns and on top of that he started droning people around the world.
The 'big boys' of the industry have enough fingers in the pie(s) to have their say in things that would affect them.
And independence of Taiwan is definitely one.
> Hong Kong fell without a peep from the U.S.
Because it was mostly Chinese businessmen window to the world, is fall of independent HK really that big of a deal for US or UK?
Nobody is going to lift a finger for Taiwan over (checks notes) slightly smaller transistors.
We had an audition for disrupted supply chains just this year. It turned out hardly any of it really mattered.
Pretty much any company that imports stuff from China would have already had additional supplies built up to cover the normal CNY shut down and ramp up so the supply chain issues were lower than if COVID had shut down China at a different time of the year.
Russia for example still keep tries to have a 100% internal military semiconductor supply chain. Their best chips made on a domestic process are 10μm. TI military foundry is not much further ahead.
I doubt that any actual "strategic planner" actually put his hand on any American policy making process in the last 30 years. The way how terribly unprepared the US was to even such an insignificant nationwide emergency like the virus, is the best proof.
And we are only talking about digital chips. Analog chips case will likely be hopeless without a specialty analog foundry.
In the peacetime, it is very, very unlikely they will be able to "reorient" to make defence chips, as it will seriously disrupt the company.
And in the end, it may not matter at all if the supply chain for materials will go down in case of a military conflict.