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US health chief to make highest-level visit to Taiwan in decades, angering China
Source:
https://scmp.com/comment/letters/article/3096204/us-targets-chinas-huawei-perfect-storm-brewing-over-taiwan Letters
As US targets China’s Huawei, a perfect storm is brewing over Taiwan
- The US chip embargo includes Taiwan’s TSMC, which supplies almost all of Huawei’s chips, and could well push Beijing towards forcefully reclaiming the island
President Xi Jinping speaks after reviewing the People’s Liberation Army Navy fleet in the South China Sea in April 2018. China sees Taiwan reunification as the goal, and Xi in 2019 named the self-ruled island among challenges to the Communist Party. Photo: Xinhua via AP
The new rule by the US Department of Commerce, introduced on May 15, to block global shipments of advanced semiconductors to Huawei included those made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s biggest contract chip maker that supplied over 90 per cent of Huawei’s smartphone chips.
This could potentially realise what has been at the core of the Trump administration’s tech war against China – to “kill Huawei”, according to an unnamed former employee of the US National Security Council cited in a magazine report by Professor Graham Allison of the Harvard Kennedy School.
However, the impact of this chip ban may not be confined to the technology industry and could permeate the realm of national security. Allison wondered if this ban could be the “twenty-first-century equivalent of the oil embargo the United States imposed on Japan in August 1941”, which precipitated Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour four months later.
I would argue that the situation is indeed serious, and perhaps even more dire than the scenario Allison described.
This is not only because of the potential wider impact of this ban, but also because of the waning influence of one of the most powerful constraints preventing China from invading Taiwan – the idea that the “Chinese don’t fight Chinese”. This idea is weakening with the steady rise and gradual consolidation of Taiwanese identity on the island, and with Taiwanese people’s growing inclination to favour independence over the maintenance of status quo and unification with the mainland.
All these factors may increasingly steel China’s determination to forcefully reunify what it regards as a renegade province. It would not only allow China to seize TSMC factories and laboratories, buying Huawei critical time to advance its own initiatives, but also achieve what China considers a “must” for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Chin Hsueh, student in International Relations, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany