Is the chipmaker — once a master of giving clients what they want — giving away too much?
Illustration by Sam Ward
On a drizzly December morning in Taipei, the most pressing issue in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan was not the dozens of Chinese military aircraft and vessels that had stalked through the Taiwan Strait the previous weekend, but a new semiconductor factory that was under construction an ocean away.
Inside one of the Yuan’s austere meeting rooms, opposition politician Chiu Chen-yuan grilled foreign minister Joseph Wu about the latest unstoppable expansion of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Was the company under pressure to export its most sophisticated technology to its new plant in Phoenix, Arizona, Chiu wanted to know. Had the government inked a “secret deal” with the Americans to disadvantage Taiwan?
In the weeks before, conspiracy-tinged comments on Facebook, YouTube, the social networking app LINE and the Chinese microblogging site Weibo had snowballed, with Chinese state-affiliated media playing up the theme that Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progre
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