TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months
The founder of SMIC on the mainland is actually Taiwanese and a former TSMC executive. Loyalties cut across the strait both ways, westerners overemphasis attachment to values and ideology over bloodlines and ancestry. It&#x27;s true for some but not for others. There are quite a lot of foreign engineers working on the mainland, especially Taiwanese engineers. If you are a industry vet or got some kind of special talent you can easily 3x your salary by moving to the mainland from Taiwan.<p>For example, Justin Yifu Lin, the former World Bank chief economist was a Taiwanese defector who to swam to Mainland China. Before he defected in the (early 90&#x27;s I believe) he was a rising star within the establishment in Taiwan.<p>Short term definitively bad for Huawei, but the long term it should help the development of the indigenous semiconductor industry on the mainland. Necessity is the mother of invention and nowhere else is there the capital, political will and now sheer necessity as there is on the Mainland.<p>A lot of &quot;huaqiao&quot; i.e. overseas Chinese that go back to the mainland (I include Taiwanese people here) despite the repressive political atmosphere and bad environmental quality, food safety are motivated by this. In the West you can only go so far, back there, especially if you have specialized technical knowledge, you have a chance to make an impact at scale that would never be possible in the West.<p>I am not sure what the U.S. can really do about this without adopting essentially the same repression as in China. I.E. control the flow of personal. On the mainland if you are a leading expert in this field or that, or belong to specific establishments (such as public security or state security) you cannot exit the country without permission from higher up the food chain.<p>Anyways, my point at the end, is the central point of competitive advantage or a company or nation is human talent. You can restrict technology or natural resources but it&#x27;s human beings that make a company or a nation competitive. So unless the U.S. finds a way to prevent talent from flowing to the mainland, either from the U.S. and&#x2F;or other parts of the world it is very hard to prevent another country, especially such a big one from doing what you don&#x27;t want. And when they eventually do get to that point they will be twice as bitter at you for having tried to stop them.