Causing an "accident", or just openly invading Taiwan gets better and better deal for China every day.
If you wanted to cause worldwide mayhem, I guess this would do it, but I wouldn't assume that TSMC could just be invaded and taken over like that.
There is almost certainly at least a plan to render any critical equipment like that unusable, even if there aren't wired up explosives at the fab at all times.
Only if it very safe explosives planted in strategic places by Taiwan military with consent from all parties involved with solders posted 24/7 to protect from sabotage.
Like bridges in military time.
I'm not an expert on explosives, but aren't modern explosives relatively safe? As in, they require very specific conditions to explode, so they're not going to be set off by a random fires or impacts. The blasting caps (needed to initiate the explosion) can be placed in a safe in the plant manager's office.
CCP has a policy of reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. If they could do it today, they would.
> Not to mention the potential for millions of people to die
Chinese premiers have stated they would sacrifice half their citizens if necessary. In fact, they are sacrificing whole towns during the current floods to save various dams, reservoirs and cities, flooding them at nite to make investigations more difficult to avoid welfare payments.
Not sure which imaginary China you're talking about.
I don’t mean this as a ‘citation needed’ dismissal. I’d like to learn more about when such a statement was made.
"If the Americans are determined to interfere [in a confrontation over Taiwan] we will be determined to respond,” said Gen Zhu, who is also a professor at China's National Defence University.
"We will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian."
The source link is still online 15 years later: https://www.ft.com/content/28cfe55a-f4a7-11d9-9dd1-00000e251...
> Chinese premiers have stated...
US senators and congresspeople have stated all sorts of crazy things too, but it doesn’t mean much. If China were to sacrifice over 500 million people to take over Taiwan, there isn’t anything stopping them from doing so today besides that statement being untrue.
China has a lot of Communist Rhetoric in the general speech patterns of the government, but if you stop and think for a second the Chinese, like everybody else, are just people. They drift cars and buy iPhones and go to the grocery store. The willingness to kill 500 million to invade Taiwan is probably not there.
Then we can conclude that so far they haven’t been in a position to enact that policy, and that unless circumstances suddenly fail to no longer obtain, they will continue to be impeded.