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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When Ken Wilcox, a former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, moved to Shanghai in 2011, he was optimistic and eager to start up the bank's new joint venture in China. A decade later, however, he is extremely cynical about U.S. business interests in China. While analysts will, rightly, be debating SVB's missteps in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, Wilcox insists the bank's challenges in China should not be overlooked.
The former secretary of state talks about how the Trump administration changed U.S.-China relations; why he accused Beijing of genocide in Xinjiang; and why U.S. politicians should visit Taiwan.
