We Need Taiwan
alethios.substack.com
alethios.substack.com
Having lived a couple months in Taipei, my only complain really is the bloody ICE scooters. It boggles my mind that they didn't solve this problem yet. The air quality is absolutely horrendous, and you'll have trouble sleeping anywhere near a main road. It is even more shocking when we realise how convenient and efficient their electric counterparts are, Gogoro in particular is doing an amazing job [1]. It made me realise that we're doing something wrong in Europe by not including them as part of the solution for climate-friendly transportation.
The main thing I keep on raving about in Taiwan is the lack of urban sprawl: it's very difficult to find suburb-style detached homes even in the countryside, single-family homes exist but they are usually packed together in hamlets. It means that shops are always close because the settlements are dense enough for them to be viable businesses...
I've regularly seen electric scooters carrying two adults and one child. I think it's relatively safe at low speed in the less dense areas, but definitely not in Taipei.
It’s wrong to think one is better than the other, it’s really about density.
French cities for instance have sprawled outward since the 60s, due to the prevalence of cars and influence of the "american dream" through media. There wasn't an abundance of space to start with...
> It’s wrong to think one is better than the other, it’s really about density.
One is definitely better than the other if you look at sustainability. American suburbs need cheap and abundant energy to operate, which they may not have in a not-so-distant future.
Cheap and abundant energy is here but there is no political and economical will to pursue such an agenda. The US has plenty of deserts and is yet to expand all its renewable potential and these are blue collar jobs!
> The Taiwanese are some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever meet. As a free and open democratic society, they would deserve our support for that alone.
Part of my family is Taiwanese so I'm biased of course. But it's really a tragedy that these people may get attacked and invaded by China in the near future. What drives me crazy is people who try to argue that it's right for some historical reason. "Taiwan belongs to China" like if an entire population's faith could belong to some dictator. Conflicts are not always clear, but it's really a good vs evil fight in that case.
I wonder what will be the US stance on this.
so thats going to be awkward for us to cater to a national identity that appeared over the last century, at the drop of a hat
obviously none of us actually care, but its fun to pretend to keep a couple of instagram followers and employment
So it sorta seems like they both agree on 'One China', but not who should be running it.
I do think we need taiwan and TSMC is a big part of it. There is too much cutting edge tech in Taiwan, I think the US would go toe to toe to defend Taiwan if necessary. But we're trying to reduce that dependence by building fabs in the US, so that could change in the next 10 years.
"ROC claims the mainland" only exists because any change from the status quo would look like declaring independence. It's not taken seriously in Taiwan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Taiwanese_presidential_el...
Like if it could belong to anyone but the Taiwanese, who are perfectly capable of knowing what is in their interest.
I keep on stumbling across this stupid historical argument as well, and I fail to understand... I think it's in part an heritage of the colonial mindset that was prevalent in Europe not so long ago.
A great goal but I don't have much hope for it because in the West you'll have to fight on two fronts for this. One is the sort of ground level activism against seemingly anything that resembles construction, and an upper echelon of people who think functional, cheap architecture is a crime against humanity because they want to cosplay as Belle Époque Europeans.
The willingness of Taiwan, and also mainland China as they're not different in this regard to just build cheap but with very decent quality and quickly is just completely lost. In most of the Western world people will rather blow 40% of their income on rent than get someone into power who will just build some decent apartment blocks.
That's because they want a house, with a garden, and at least one car so that they can have a "bbq with some friends on sundays" like they've seen on countless ads and movies. Everything else is secondary in western urbanism. Have you seen the architecture of modern suburb houses? Commie blocks could pass for Art Deco in comparison.
The most immediate need we have to Taiwan is TSMC. Without them Nvidia, AMD and Apple are effectively dead, along with any car company, and a good deal of the products and services we use. A war with China would make 2008, 9/11 and the Internet bubble look, like tiny blips in terms of economic upheaval.
What bothers me most are three misconceptions about the ramifications of an invasion:
The first is that people don't recognize how important TSMC is, and how much its hardware powers.
The second is that people think US/European firms could just do the same. The skills, effort, time and money that TSMC has put in to be where they are is not easily replicated and we would happy if we could do it in 10 years, but that is doubtful.
The third is that China could just take over and run TSMC. You cant build chips in a warzone. And even if Chine would take over swiftly, and the infrastructure would be largely intact, each fab has thousands of employees, and all it takes for one of them to sabotage a fab is to cough in the wrong place, and it may never run again, and it would need to be abandoned. You do not need to smuggle in a bomb to disrupt a fab. Even if they did keep some fabs running, they wouldn't sell the output to the west.
On the upside, I get the feeling someone in the know has given the right presentation at the white house, because Biden looks like he understands this and takes this seriously, unlike many others.
Taiwan is a liability, on the grand scheme of things. We need to not have a concentration of such vital capability in a single source.
The cost of an invasion or the cost of booting up fabs in more Western nations - or even in the global south? This is the real question.
War will only happen when the decision is made that its cheaper to steal a factory than build another new one. This is not always the focus of the conversation when it comes to the hegemonic power of China's ability to make things... but it should.
Especially when The Western Empire™ makes decisions about the values of other states ..
Once you connect a regime's domestic prestige to a project, external motivations matter little. Once not attacking Taiwan is seen as a "being weak" at home, you will have a war.
If China PR believes the same, we have big problems. My hope is that the Xi administration believes that going to war and losing will cause them to lose power to domestic mainland opportunists. It might be naive but then couldn't we say the same thing about mutually assured destruction (mad)?
Much better option is some sort of economic war, sanctions, naval blockade... US is importing a lot from China, even factories in Mexico are just assembling Chinese parts.
I do not think support for Taiwan would survive for very long.
They may look pointless to _you_ at the _present_ time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
China’s navy is capable of disrupting things around China, and could prevent exports from Taiwan from reaching other countries. The US Navy is capable of disrupting things everywhere, and could prevent ships carrying food and oil from reaching China.
> I do not think support for Taiwan would survive for very long.
I don’t know how to predict that, but the US would tangibly be giving up a lot by letting Taiwan fall. That alone is motivation that might have seemed somewhat lacking when comparing a confrontation with China over Taiwan with some of the other conflicts the US has recently taken part in.
TSMC might be the the best and ahead of everyone in technological sense, but there are enough semiconductor companies worldwide to handle a potential TSMC demise. So what if our hardware stops improving at breakneck speeds (which might happen anyway in the near future..)?
I can argue that would be a good kick in the ass for every software dev that writes shitty bloated code. People like that won't be able to "just add more CPUs" to their problem and they'll have to do some actual engineering again. The state of software dev and performance today is abysmal given the amazing hardware we have.
That's true and yet I'd say that's not my problem? The market will be fine. If anything that means more software work for me. New opportunities will arise. People won't buy a new phone every year for a while (which is objectively a good thing!). The M series MacBooks are so good now there's virtually no reason to upgrade to M2 or M3 if you have the M1 (like in my case). I fully expect to use this computer for the next decade. My desktop PC is basically unchanged since I built it in 2016 (+1 extra SSD I've added after, but that was it). The i7-6700K in there is still chugging happily along.
Apple have more than $100 billion of cash at hand. They will be fine no matter what happens. It's not like they didn't change chips before :)
Qualcomm switches their Snapdragon SOC between TSMC and Samsung in one generation. I think the difficulty is overstated. Clocks might have to be lowered to keep the thermal envelope.
I suspect the biggest problem (in context of semiconductors) would be the lowered production capacity, building new Samsung factories would take time.
I think the US government understands this very clearly, that's why it's prepared to defend Taiwan. There is some strategic ambiguity, but the relevant parties understand that the US would protect Taiwan with its own military.
Judging by how that gesture turned out for Ukraine, we can safely assume Taiwan won't fare better as well.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
It's not very believable to be adamant about mainland China and Taiwan being the same country that you will rule after conquering the mainland when you have a significant military advantage in tech and allies, then when the mainland gains the upper hand militarily you start insisting that actually you're not both part of China, the civil war is ancient history and wasn't really a civil war anyway, and anyone who appears to be willing to breach the status quo with violence is horrible. It comes across as disingenuous, like if Taiwan was militarily significantly stronger than the PRC today then it wouldn't be "Taiwan independence" being advocated, it would be "eliminating the communists to unify China" being advocated.
Certainly the government doesn't, they still claim the entire territory the PRC controls and more.
The people generally consider themselves Chinese when asked and wishing for peaceful reunification, with a small (and possibly growing) minority disagreeing.
It is also false that they desire peaceful reunification. The same source shows only 11% want to become part of China.
So the insistence you refer to is consistent with the will of the people of Taiwan.
No one in the Taiwanese government talks about claims to mainland PRC territory. Denouncing these previously made claims it would be a de facto (maybe even de jure?) move to independence and result in who knows what.
Not commenting about the rest, but anyone who is willing to breach the status quo with violence IS IN FACT HORRIBLY HORRIBLY HORRIBLE. Start digging into history and each side will have enough justifications for war ten times over.
And of course, all of this is in the context of me explaining why bringing up that Taiwan nearly had nukes until the US stopped it is not a great idea for those attempting to advocate for Taiwan's side in the dispute, because it raises the obvious question of "Why did they nearly have nukes, what were they planning to do with the nukes?"
https://taiwaninsight.org/2018/02/26/cross-strait-relations-...
But honestly - yeah, our online banking apps and app for state frovided services are pretty good.
The paragraph about how "wonderful" Taipei Metro is so laughably demonstrates the disconnection between Western expectations of public transit and Asian reality. I'd like author to visit Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Moscow, Dubai - wonder what his opinion will be.
I lived in Beijing a decade ago, too, and its metro was also a far worse experience than Taipei's.
All of those places are amazing in their own ways, but I maintain that Taiwan is both incredibly special, and perhaps the most underappreciated.
Taiwan is important and valuable until it isn't.
this applies to everywhere. no new information.
> As a free and open democratic society, they would deserve our support for that alone.
ah, so it's really about ideology?
> If that’s not enough, then we should support them out of pure self-interest, as we’re all better off for having them.
??