isn't it risky to build this in a seismically active region? wouldn't somewhere that has almost no history of earthquakes like korea be better?
But then Japan seems amazing at producing all sorts of other delicate things, despite all of its soil being basically built out of earthquakes, so I guess they have this bit figured out.
Apparently these were not huge blows to their fabs, otherwise we would be talking about that day-in-day-out, but there's always a risk of that happening.
Japan is building Japan at semi conductor industry, for the benefit of itself, of course it is located in Japan.
Is "politically unstable" once again an acceptable euphemism for a small democracy being threatened with destruction by a totalitarian superpower? I thought we decided that was gauche. After, say, the German invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Also a success by the PRC would still result in the political destruction of the Republic of China and the subjugation of its people.
Back in reality, the Republic of China (Taiwan) is fully independent from the People's Republic of China and fulfills every criteria of nationhood.
Facts on the ground appear otherwise, but facts on the ground also imply that Taiwan is not part of the PRC's version of China.
No. I don't understand how you came to this conclusion. Both governments claim legitimacy and only one has actual sovereignty.
Taiwan is an independent country.
Taiwan is an island. It is still China. It is impossible to both give deference to the ROC and say otherwise.
That isn’t what the facts on the ground are though. The ROC no more has sovereign jurisdiction over the mainland than the PRC does over Taiwan. Which is to say that at this point they are functionally separate sovereign nations independent of each other, regardless of the claims by either the PRC or the ROC. Or put another way, the way I did the first fucking time: Taiwan is an independent nation.
I sincerely wonder if the people who live there agree. I sure as hell wouldn't put up much fight if china tried to invade my country; just the opposite. If anything I wonder if voluntary unification is on the table in today's climate
One of the benefits of a free democratic society is that you can ask; and people vote according to their preferences. A recent study suggests ~13% of the public support unification with China: https://www.tpof.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/20250214-TPO... . Taiwan's politics are dominated by the KMT and DPP parties, both of which oppose unification.
> I sure as hell wouldn't put up much fight if china tried to invade my country
Perhaps you have an unusual opinion?
I live in the US. I think it's pretty obvious the PRC is more competent in every way than our own government is.
And from what I've seen of the ROC parliament, it is also an embarrassment to their own people
Yes, and you wouldn't be able to express your political opinion (like you do here on HN or anywhere else) if you were living in China. People living in the US tend to overlook that minute detail.
Being able to express our opinion doesn't mean much if nothing ever changes or improves
> the PRC is more competent in every way
I guess it depends what you mean by competent. Dictatorships can be frightfully competent at certain things, but that doesn't make them a good place to be. We're talking about a country that is genociding its own Uyghur ethnic group, represses Tibetan culture, disappears its own elite athletes, and has a horrific LGBTI record. The US is far from perfect, but has nothing on China in terms of nastiness.
That's not even touching the biggest problem of dictatorship, which is what happens when Dear Leader takes a fall. I doubt Xi has much more than a decade of leadership in him, and I worry for the Chinese populace when he goes.
I think you have this reversed, friend. Our culture is based on violence and death. Theirs is based on stability and prosperity.
> That's not even touching the biggest problem of dictatorship, which is what happens when Dear Leader takes a fall. I doubt Xi has much more than a decade of leadership in him, and I worry for the Chinese populace when he goes.
I pray he liberates us before he passes. I agree it's not likely but.... one must maintain hope in this world
That or a remarkably flexible sense of morality, coupled with a supine nature and a total lack of balls.
But even if the state is parasitical, in the case of an invasion it's usually moral to support it.
Are you seriously suggesting it wasn't moral for the French to fight the Nazis or the people of Afghanistan to fight off the Soviets and Americans?
>You should support yourself and bide whatever state imposes itself on you.
Pathetic. Might as well go back to feudalism with that attitude.
It is not nationalism to want a sovereign nation that you have influence over, that's democracy.
> It is not nationalism to want a sovereign nation that you have influence over, that's democracy.
So what's our excuse? Do we not have a democracy, or are we simply a contemptible people?
The fact that you wouldn't fight being occupied and forced to be a slave doesn't speak highly of you, but I must admit it's an honest statement, and it's true that a lot of people might feel the same way. A majority of people everywhere are cowards, collaborators and sycophants. But they're along for the ride.
Now, if your country is Burma, I don't blame you.
Surely rights to more substantial things like healthcare make this quite an easy decision. Freedom to criticize a government doesn't matter if you can't force the government to actually give a shit about anything
> According to the Numbeo Health Care Index in 2025, Taiwan has the best healthcare system in the world, scoring 86.5 out of 100,[6] a slight increase from 86 the previous year.[7] This marked the seventh consecutive year that Taiwan has ranked first in the Numbeo Health Care Index.[8]
I don't know how much the Taiwanese would be willing to fight and die in a military invasion though.
Realy? What is your country and why would you prefer to live under a dictatorship?
I’d be careful what you wish, you might just get it.
Premodern States simply couldn't afford the level of oppression and exploitation that is possible today. They usually just replaced the upper layers of the old hierarchy, put some small garrisons in a few places and left most local elites in charge, often with their local armies. If there was an organized rebellion, there would usually be a a few skirmishes and then a re-negotiation of the terms.
Today even Morocco could afford to turn Western Sahara into a territory with total surveillance, checkpoints everywhere and an impenetrable wall in the desert while slowly ethnically cleansing the native population.
I like how this can be interpreted two ways, depending on whether you place loved ones above governance, or vice versa.
because Taiwan intends to violently and militarily resist if it comes to that
Have you been to Hong Kong?
For the China part: Yes, the "by force" part certainly exists as a position, in competition to the peaceful unification approach. It's important to keep in mind, though, that the confrontative position of the first Trump administration and afterwards the Biden administration significantly helped the "by force" faction. There was an interesting piece in Foreign Policy about that, a social scientist from the US was questioning Chinese students at an elite university on this very topic and thus had the chance to do a time series observing the attitude change following US actions.
Secondly, in Taiwanese politics, Unification is actually a big topic and even has its own party, the New Party, advocating for it (plus the fringe CUPP). Not popular right now, but certainly existing - and evidently falsifying the notion that the all of "Taiwan doesn't want to be part of Beijing's China".
The existance of a faction within Taiwan that wants Taiwan to reunify with Beijing's China isn't materially relevant if they don't have any path forward to accomplish their goal.
This is the argument that you hit your wife because someone on the telephone made you angry.
Even within the framework of (structural) realism so popular in contemporary US politics there's this well-known problem that the buildup of defense capabilities of party A looks like aggression to party B - and vice versa. See the seminal work Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Or the relations of Britain and Germany before WW1 and WW2.
The FP article I mentioned, "Trump’s Trade War May Make Elite Young Chinese More Nationalistic" [1], illustrates the argument. You have actual empirical data, changing over time, after exposure to the "treatment". So at least a hint of causality.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/05/21/trump-tariffs-china-tra...
Declaring "I am a friend of democracies threatened by totalitarian countries" before every economic utterance looks as performative and ultimately counterproductive to me as all the "land acknowledgments" that infected the US academia. (Not coincidentally, those don't help actual Amerindians at all.)
Yeah, Central Europe in the 1930s was politically unstable, no way around it. And it wasn't just question of Czechoslovakia vs. Germany either. Most countries had irredentist movements and/or land demands on their neighbours.
[edit] I also spent about a year living in Prague and I love your country, Czechs are the best, and their sense of freedom is an immense relief from let's say other countries in the EU, so, I think it's amazing that you have maintained your independence from the enormous forces surrounding you and pulling in all directions. I think part of this is something I observed, that Czechs act like they are part of one small family.
BTW "Declaring your neighbor "politically unstable" and presenting yourself as its savior was the clearest way in the 20th Century to declare war without any casus belli" is not really true, sometimes this happened, but wars have been declared for all sorts of putative reasons, like "our particular minority is being oppressed" or "the neighbouring government plotted against the life of our sovereign" or "they are infidels, go get them".
Anyway I don't really see what you propose. Binning expressions because someone someday used them in bad faith, in the belief that this will stop future invasions from happening?
This seems to be somewhat futile to me. Invasions aren't fundamentally caused by words. Words only work as a cloak and one cloak can be easily substituted by another, and it will, depending on the current state of politics in the invader and invadee country.
Note that the Russians explained their invasion into Ukraine by calling them "fascists". Should the Western civilization drop the word forever because of that?
Yes, there have been other spoken reasons for invading a peaceful sovereign country. This does not change the fact that Russia is the belligerent party against Ukraine, or that China is the belligerent against a completely harmless and peaceful Taiwan.
Taiwan's situation right now is very similar to Czechoslovakia's in 1938. There is no international treaty with teeth to protect it. There is every reason for China to create a rationale for invading it. The people there have a decent life and don't want to live under occupation. And the reasons for invasion look similar; taking over industrial capacity under the guise of saving people from their confused political state.
Needed? Probably not. There is just no reason not to use that cloak of words.
If a HW/SW engineer speaks about "political instability", they simply acknowledge that there is no way to tell what will happen in context of their own jobs.
FWIW, my friend, I'm a Jew and I spent 5 years in France, Spain and Germany before coming to Prague. Czechia was the one place I felt welcome and safe in the EU. The noble history of the Czechs played a big role in that, but you could feel it every day in the way people treated each other. There is something incredible there about the people, the family, the place and the intelligence of Czechia. It is about keeping a small land for your family and people. I would say it's similar in many ways to Israel.
Now someone will come and shoot me, heheh.
But - there was a point. This is also why I defend Taiwan and I think everyone should. People should be free to get together to decide that they want to be part of something, not swallowed up by neighbors who despise their way of life.
We should indeed defend Taiwan, but we (as "the entire EU") seem to be lukewarm even about defending Ukraine which is much closer to us and in a hot war. Some people just prefer sticking their head in the sand.
Maybe the Jewish people are better at discerning building-up danger, because of their long history of persecution.
I can't speak for all Jewish people, but yes we are raised reading history to understand the way that threats can build up over time, and the multiple masks that threats can wear. For me, personally, I see this as an affinity to all small, powerless but free people... Kurds, Taiwanese, Ukrainians, Tibetans, Yazidis... particularly those who don't evangelize but simply want to be left alone to prosper and live in peace with their own people. Czechs are similar to that as the most "western-facing Slavic people" and I grew up in America enthralled by Vaclav Havel as a beacon for individuals and every small nation wanting freedom.
You are of course right that this history of persecution raises one's antennae and evokes horror at anything that seems to favor totalitarian modes of thinking. But the Czechs level of paranoia made me laugh sometimes, maybe because it was so similar.
I can almost hear him. That is basically the essence of Czechdom :)
It is interesting how some aspects of culture are essentially the same and others diverge wildly once you cross the border. When it comes to Bier and Schnitzel and snowy Christmas, Czechs are almost indistinguishable from Bavarians. But in other aspects it is just as you saw it, two worlds apart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_China
The rest of the world notes from afar that Hawaii became a US state in 1959, whilst Tibet entered the PRC way back in 1951.
In 1993, the US congress apologised for this - they didn't give it back :)
China just has a history of denying what they're doing as they're doing it.
There are so many examples online. My favourite is of a Chinese warship ramming into its own coast guard vessel as they fail to intimidate the Philippines Coast Guard.
China built a road and villages and military outposts in Bhutan, over China-Bhutan border.
Taiwan’s democracy is absolutely threatened with destruction by a totalitarian superpower, that wasn’t in any way incorrect or misleading, and that’s how the GP post phrased it. Its state is threatened with destruction. That’s entirely accurate.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
You want it to be a state but your own country says it’s not one most likely. Stop embarrassing yourself.
[edit] I think I’ve used the wrong term here but I think I get the idea across. There are diplomatic lies maintained in many situations where everyone largely operates like it’s not true, and the situation with Taiwan is so quintessentially one of these that’s it’s a common first example to illustrate the point. In my defense it’s been a loooong time since my last international relations class.
The standard authoritarian playbook would require moving to step two, which we saw in action a few years ago on the other side of Eurasia:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/stark-b...
Hokkaido is significantly safer compared to Honshu. It does still experience quakes, but it is at least not directly on major fault lines.