It would be “impossible” to move 40% of Taiwan’s semiconductor capacity to the U.S., the island’s top tariff negotiator said, pushing back against recent comments by American officials who called for a major production shift.
In an interview with Taiwanese television channel CTS that was broadcast late on Sunday, Taiwan Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun said she had made it clear to Washington that Taiwan’s semiconductor ecosystem, built up over decades, could not be relocated.
“I have made it very clear to the United States that this is impossible,” she said, referring to the 40% goal the U.S. has floated.
That ecosystem will continue to grow in Taiwan, Cheng said, adding that the semiconductor industry would keep investing at home.
Wasn’t logistics the US’s superpower? I’d expect someone to explain their chief that factories aren’t monolitic objects that can be picked up and delivered to a new location and go right into production?
The logistics accolade that you mention here is wartime logistics. That is ability to get the bullets and bandages to the places and people that need them all in a timely manner. The US is good at this because we have bases and transport logistics everywhere.
Military supply chain logistics(multiple sources for stuff, supposedly US companies…) is absolutely a consideration as well but this concept has been hallowed out over time. What used to be locally sourced materials and manufacturing by American companies is now much more dependent on overseas labor/materials. These ‘American’ companies might have corporate offices here and the c-levels, marketing/sales teams live here but all of the actual product is sourced/made in Mexico, Canada, China, India, Vietnam, etc. There are definitely specific industries like aerospace that still make a lot of stuff here but that is a small fraction of the larger whole.
Why does it seem tRump’s answer for everything is, “Let’s just steal it”?
The US invading Taiwan would be a hell of a reverse uno on the Chinese.
Oh my god.
That really would be the cherry on top of this goddamned clownworld timeline.
How to unite china in 1 step
And potentially also SK, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, etc.
It really would be like the dumbest possible thing the US could do.
He backed off Greenland. Taiwan would be an order of magnitude worse. The US could occupy any country on earth (maybe not China, without some Roman level war crimes) But it would be the end of us.
The US could occupy any country on earth (maybe not China, without some Roman level war crimes)
Hahaha, no.
The US could invade maybe two countries with a GDP around 1/4 ours, and actually persistently occupy them for maybe a few years.
Our economy is crashing extremely rapidly, we’ve functionally lost the ability to build new warships or aircraft in anything approaching a timely or affordable manner… and, because we have decided to tariff and threaten or militarily attack basically everyone everyone…
All of our supply chains for a great deal of our fancy schmancy military tech doesn’t work any more.
You cant build complex guided missiles and computer chips and sensors that aim them or night vision goggles without access to a wide array or rare earth minerals, most of which China basically has a near total monopoly of.
We don’t have the native industrial base to build anywhere near everything we would need to, to actually autarkicly sustain our own war machine.
… we can’t even feed or house our population at a reasonable cost anymore, our internal infrastructure is physically falling apart, and our cybersecurity is beyond laughably comprimised.
There is no way this country would ‘win’ trying to occupy Taiwan.
China + Japan + SK + all of goddamned SEA + potentially even Australia vs US = we fucking lose hard.
We may be able to get away with some neo-Monroe Doctrine bullshit for a while.
And keep funding genocides in the ME, and doing random airstrikes and spec ops shennanigans in poorer countries.
Thats about it.
I meant we could occupy them like we occupied Iraq. We would win the military confrontation. The occupation would break us.
We could do it once, maybe twice or three times if the countries are small and weak, but it would break us. The rest of the world would adjust. We would all be poorer but the US would be fucked. Trump doesn’t understand that we built a military too expensive to actually use. It made sense if we wanted to avoid conflict, and casualties, while still being top dog and getting our way, but actually going in and occupying territory is medieval thinking.
Xi: (surprised Pikachu face)
To be fair, this all started under the Biden administration with the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.
The US is increasingly concerned that, if China invades Taiwan, it will completely lock them out from semiconductor manufacturing and crater the US economy. Rather than flex their soft power and exercise a little diplomacy like the US used to do in decades past, they’ve apparently decided that the invasion of Taiwan is inevitable and the only course of action is to bolster semiconductor manufacturing at home.
Trump, of course, has all the subtlety of a torpedo and his rhetoric here has been needlessly antagonistic… but yeah, this whole thing started under Biden and now Trump is pretending it was always his idea. So really the thing he stole was the policy.
While the CHIPS act was started under Biden, it was completely different from what is being done now. It was about developing a domestic source of semiconductors as a hedge against Taiwan being invaded and was done cooperatively with the Taiwanese with mutual benefits. The Taiwanese still owned the manufacturing here, so they would still benefit if the Chinese came invaded. Biden was doing what was smart to do and also had benefits for other countries, including EU allies, since everyone knows those plants in Taiwan are rigged to blow at the first hint of invasion…
Trump has removed the benefits and added tariffs and threats. He didn’t steal the policy. He inherited it and then changed it to be something evil.
So like in summary:
Biden Strategy: Bring taiwan companies to US as a redundancy and supply chain contingency.
Trump Strategy: Demand shit from Taiwan and threaten them when they fail to meet goals.
Like the trump strategy only incentivizes Taiwan to pursue a diplomatic solution with China.
Rapist mind.
Yeah what really struck me about the whole thing is it’s not that he wants more investment in US manufacturing, it’s that he seems to want them to literally take their equipment (but presumably not the people because eww immigrants) and transport the whole lot to the US.
With 40% semiconductor capacity loved to the US, the US will have no more reason to defend Taiwan, it would be suicide
Also, when trump gets his grubby hands on ASML systems you can count on it that he’ll sell it to the Chinese for a few millions right after
I dont think you can explain to an importing country that tried to start a tariff war
And it would be a tactical blunder to give the US any access to their current generation of chips. Even more so while Trump is in office. Taiwan should look into ending relationships with the US and getting closer to the EU, South/Central America, and Africa.
Don’t move any of it there. Move some to Japan though.
The real impossibility is the work force, as far as my knowledge is knowledged from a while back.
Also if they did move 40% of production to the US, I can’t personally see that meaning the US would drop taiwan and let china take it. If you think about that for 1 second longer, you think they’d surrender 60% to china? If I had the best chips, I wouldn’t let anyone else get anywhere near them, lest they steal the secret recipe. (Just my thoughts on the matter).
(p.s. im not smart so maybe im wrong?)
Everyone seems to have thought that is was a great idea to let pretty much every core manufacturing competency die in the US over the last 30 years or so. How’s that working out for us now?
The blame is at least as old as Reagan, really accelerated with Clinton (NAFTA, China entering the WTO) and only got worse from there.
As much as I hate to admit it, tariffs are the answer. I also think that it’s important to understand that Trump’s tariffs exist only for extortion and bribes that benefit him personally. Tariffs can be used to encourage domestic production of goods and services that are clearly not something that we want to depend on other countries for merely for the sake of enriching the same circle of already rich assholes in perpetuity. Rich assholes would just have to keep resorting to pumping up immigration to suppress wages for these domestic goods, like they have always done for hundreds of years at this point.
Tariffs are not the answer, they are part of a reasonable answer. By themselves they’re not going to being back the tech manufacturing industry. You also need incentives on multiple levels, government funding into relevant education, etc.
You also need time. All the money in the world won’t cause a world-class industry to spring up overnight; you need sustained investment over years, if not decades.
We’ve already been providing direct subsidies and tax subsidies for all of these companies for decades. Nothing comes from it and as a member of the tax bracket that actually pays taxes I am not willing to keep doing it. If we need to nationalize truly mission critical companies I would rather just do that instead of continuing to privatize profits and socialize costs.
Those investments should definitely come with strings attached. But there’s a lot you need to invest into.
- Fabs cost a shitload of money and are slow to build. If you want to be able to be independent from Taiwan in ten years you should invest a couple dozen billion bucks in fabs right now. If you want a company to invest that money for you, you need to guarantee that they’ll see a good ROI, which means you probably sign a contract to buy tons of hardware that won’t be made for another decade.
- Fabs need a lot of land. If you want to start building ASAP you need to expedite assessments and acquire land quickly (and though eminent domain, if necessary). That ain’t cheap.
- If you want a qualified workforce available you need to not only invest in making training available but also in making it appealing enough that they’ll start training before the jobs are even there. Advertisement like that costs money, as do stipends.
- In fact, add research grants to the pool because you’ll want both basic research to be done in the field and skilled researchers to be available for cross-hiring by your companies.
You’ll need to keep (some amount of) the money flowing at least until the industry can be independently competitive on the world stage. Mishandling your burgeoning industry can mean that all that investment money and a large number of jobs suddenly go up in smoke.
Note: All of this assumes that you’ll buy your manufacturing equipment from established, potentially foreign companies like ASML and Zeiss. If you want to make that stuff domestically as well you can probably add another hundred billion bucks and a decade or two of very dedicated catch-up to the bill.
Except we can’t just insource production of cutting edge computer chips. We literally don’t have enough people to build smart phones. Those require a global supply chain to be remotely affordable. Having a global economy gives us access to technology we would simply have to go without if we try to do everything ourselves.
Tariffs are not going to encourage local producers. They’re just going to make the products more expensive for the consumers. If you want to encourage the industries to be built here, then subsudize their development.
Guess we’ll just fall behind
I guarantee if they really wanted to, they could pack up a fab and they could move the entire building on a boat.
