How would this benefit the people living in Taiwan in case of invasion? It would just make them poorer.
It's plainly obvious that US does not want the PRC to have access to TSMC, or anything like it. And this suggestion from US military academics is most likely based on the fact that the US is not going to send its troops in for Taiwan.
So far, nothing new.
PRC wants Taiwan back for reasons beyond just TSMC. It's probably the only one of the containment that the Chinese has a chance of breaching without going into full scale war.
If the situation gets bad enough for Taiwan to blow up it's own crown jewel in anticipation for war, at that point, what's stopping the Chinese from bombing the shit out of the rest of the Taiwanese government and military installation and follow through? Probably nothing.
Doing that is dumb for the lives of Taiwanese. It would only benefit the US and no one else.
For US it’s “broken nest”, for the Taiwanese that’s the only nest - before or after invasion.
This is obviously all in US's interest.
TSMC would be chinese, and the taiwanese too. It's not like they are gonna kick everyone from taiwan and claim the earth.
> If Chinese would knew that TSMC is blown up once they start invasion,
I'm not sure, they'd still be better with taiwain under their control than not.
If possible, Taiwan should keep TSMC so that the West has a reason to defend Taiwan.
There are other chip manufactures in the world too if people are willing to buy outdated technology (like 10 years in the past)
Also intel is investing a lot in manufacturing technology, it plans to be better than TSMC by 2025 iirc. Will it happen? No idea, but they are working toward this. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US government were financing this in some way
Due to some obscure legalities, Taiwan dropping the claim would amount to declaration of war
Your wording is a bit vague, but it sounds like you have it backwards. Taiwan's dropping of claims to the mainland may trigger a _Chinese_ declaration of war. That comes from certain interpretations of article 8 of the China's Anti-Secession law. Of course China doesn't actually have to declare war in this situation if they don't want to. They could always interpret it differently or they could simply ignore it (China's laws guarantee free speech after all and they certainly don't seem to have trouble getting around that).
China has cared about Taiwan for longer than semiconductors have been in existence. Whatever reasons China has, semiconductors is not one of them.
Furthermore China prefers peaceful solutions where it can, so as long as China believes it can build its own advanced semiconductor industry it won't use military means to do so.
Gaining control of TSMC will vastly accelerate this process, which makes this one big additional reason China has to invade.
Look at Hong Kong. Is China patiently waiting out the agreed upon 50 year period to assert their eventual control?
TSMC requires EUV. China is already banned from acquiring EUV so TSMC would be dead on arrival even without plans to blow it up.
Destruction of TSMC would make such conflict very very inconvenient for large part of the world. And China wouldn't want to upset literally everybody. It's probably close to usage of a strategic nuclear weapon.
Also, a strategic timing of an invasion and the threatened TSMC destruction may even boost the Chinese semiconductor industry: In a post-TSMC world, their less-advanced chips will suddenly be selling like hotcakes.
In this case, the blind spot of western liberalism - demography. Taiwanese fertility rates are below 1.3 for nearly two decades now, some years even dipping below 1. All China has to do is wait for 30 years - half of the island's population will perish of old age by then, the remaining 2/3 will be retirees
So, like China itself, which is aging faster than almost all other countries in modern history [0]. In 30 years (~ 2050), the proportion of Chinese over retirement age will become 39 percent of the total population.
Taiwan vs. mainland is technically like North vs. South Korea or East vs. West Germany.
Taiwan is a recognised Chinese territory. It so happened that there was a civil war in China and that the communists overthrew the government (which was already authoritarian and controlled by the KMT), which withdrew to the last province not under communist control: Taiwan.
For various reasons the communists never pursued them so the ROC remained in Taiwan while the communists founded the PRC on the mainland.
That's why the KMT is officially also pro-unification, in fact the ROC itself is of course formally pro-unification since its formal policy is that they do not recognise the PRC and claim the whole of China (including the South China Sea) as rightful ROC territory. At first they thought they might come back or that the communists regime would collapse, but, well, they're still waiting...
In practice that means that peaceful re-unification is not realistic, IMO, for as long as the communists rule the mainland.
"part of China" is always an ambiguous term because it means different things to different people. For instance, 'China' does not necessarily mean PRC.