Morris Chang founded TSMC, the most valuable company in Asia
This is probably the most commonly repeated myth about a potential westpac war, that the PRC wants to get TSMC and the US wants to preserve access to it, and that&#x27;s why there&#x27;s an incentive for war and why there&#x27;s this constant escalation between the US and China. I don&#x27;t know why it&#x27;s so popular among people who don&#x27;t know the subject matter, but it is.<p>If westpac goes spicy, TSMC as it exists today is toast. The US will bomb the shit out of it if they can&#x27;t keep it, and probably target any personnel they can&#x27;t extract from the island; there was recently a big kerfuffle in TW domestic politics over someone in the US saying so publicly. The PRC wants chip independence, but everyone involved in that discussion understands that if the PRC waved a magic wand and gained complete control of TSMC, it doesn&#x27;t give them ASML, it doesn&#x27;t give them Zeiss, and a lot of that technology and process won&#x27;t necessarily be usable until there are domestic equivalents to those technologies, by which time it would probably be out of date. Reverse engineering manufacturing methods from a seized sample is incredibly, unbelievably difficult in the best of times, let alone for atomic precision mirrors and high-throughput miniature factories operated under high vacuum. More importantly, the PRC just isn&#x27;t willing to go to war over chip independence; their bar for war is a lot higher than that.<p>The reason the PRC wants actual control of Taiwan in 2023 and could credibly go to war to achieve it is the same reason they wanted actual control of the island from the years 1949-2023 inclusive, the same reason that the Taiwan government wanted actual control of the PRC mainland from the years 1949-1990: because they view the territory as rightfully theirs, taken from them by people who they hated, and perceived that there was a decent chance they could get it by force. PRC control over Taiwan would be the final chapter in the civil war that quite literally birthed the PRC - it has immense political and national significance and has been essentially a major goal and organising principle of the PLA and the PRC as a nation ever since the KMT retreated to Taiwan. It is not about trying to get access to new GPUs.