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My March 30th post (Taiwan’s Historic Split Screen) was written as President Tsai Ing-wen arrived in New York in transit on her diplomatic visit to Central America. That piece promised a follow-up on the occasion of her return transit to Los Angeles — and meeting with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy — en route back to Taiwan. The Tsai-McCarthy meeting took place 6 days ago on April 5th but I delayed following up until today because my interview with Forbes on this topic was in the works.
That Forbes interview was published yesterday and can be found here (including 12 minute audio version). I am also reproducing that interview below to capture it in the Assessing China blog. It begins with several scene-setting paragraphs by Forbes Editor at Large Russell Flannery. The interview itself begins below the photograph of Micron headquarters in Shanghai.
(Begin article)
Micron Probe May Hurt China’s Efforts To Attract Foreign Investment
Beijing today wound down its latest large-scale military exercises in the waters around Taiwan but overall tension between the U.S. and China remains high. China’s moves followed a high-profile meeting last week between U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in Los Angeles criticized by mainland leaders who claim sovereignty over self-governing Taiwan.
On the commercial front, the semiconductor industry remains an elevated point of stress. Beijing earlier this month announced a cybersecurity review of U.S. chipmaker Micron aimed, it said, at protecting the country’s information infrastructure and national security. The probe comes at a time when China has been seeking to boost foreign investment to accelerate its economic recovery from “zero-Covid” policies that slowed growth.
What’s next for U.S.-China ties and also for the CHIPS Act, the U.S. law enacted last year aimed at reversing the declining American share of global semiconductor production?
To learn more, I spoke on Saturday in the Philadelphia area with Terry Cooke, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank focused on U.S. national security and foreign policy. Cooke, a former career U.S. senior foreign commercial service officer with postings in Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo and Berlin, currently leads ReGen250, a non-profit that focuses on U.S.-China green energy collaboration as well as environmental regeneration initiatives in the tri-state Greater Philadelphia region.
Cooke believes China’s move against Micron will have “a chilling effect for potential foreign investors — definitely on the U.S. business community” at a time when China is trying to win new foreign investments following the end of “zero-Covid” policies at the end of last year that had harmed economic growth. Beijing high-profile efforts to pressure Taiwan militarily may also be counterproductive if Taipei successful builds itself up as “an important force” in a larger, more influential network of democracies. Edited excerpts follow.
© 2023 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP
Flannery: What do you make of the military exercises around Taiwan this month?
Cooke: There are two ways of looking it. One is that going into the Tsai-McCarthy meeting, the decision had already been made (in Beijing) that this is the new normal, that whenever there is an uncomfortably high-level contact between the U.S. government and the Taiwanese government, we (the Chinese government) are just going to keep demonstrating our ability to militarily squeeze Taiwan through maneuvers of this sort.
There is, however, another way of thinking about it: the way the McCarthy-Tsai meeting was conducted may, in fact, have been the determinant of the maneuvers. Beijing may have been in a wait-and-see mode. They of course issued their standard and predictable verbal denunciations in advance of Tsai’s transit stops.
I think they were waiting to see how low-key the meeting in L.A. with McCarthy would prove to be. The entry through New York was very low-key. The State Department utterances for most of the trip also kept things low-key. And there was ample precedent for this given Tsai’s previous six transit visits to the U.S. so the State Department position was that there was no reason for Beijing to make an issue out of it.
But the optics of McCarthy meeting – with all the diplomatic trappings of a government-to-government meeting save for flags set up on the table – made it look very much like an official meeting. And I don’t think that went over well in Beijing. That could have triggered the decision to trot out the military.
Flannery: So what’s next?
Cooke: Just as the U.S. is maybe on its back foot with the new realities in the Middle East, I think China may be on its back foot in terms of the game of diplomatic recognition when it comes to Taiwan. Yes, Taiwan just lost Honduras on the eve of Tsai’s U.S. trip. Now, Taiwan is down from 14 to 13 countries that it has diplomatic recognition with.
But I think there’s really a more important game in town now than adding up the number of formal diplomatic allies. This new game in town probably started around February 2021 with the Biden administration moving into the White House. To many people’s and particularly Beijing’s surprise, Biden kept Trump’s tough China policy. He also introduced into his speeches and policies a clear and consistent autocracy-vs-democracy contrast.
Within the context of this U.S.-led “reframing” of the global picture, Taiwan now has the opportunity to reposition itself within the team democracy global network of supporters in a way that it’s not strictly about formal recognition and UN membership. It’s about being recognized, and in some ways, held up as an important force in this network of democracies.
Flannery: How will Taiwan’s presidential elections next year affect these three-way ties?
Cooke: From the U.S. governmental standpoint, the outcome – whether it is a victory for Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party or the opposition KMT party – will change hardly at all. This is because the U.S. government’s official position – whether it involves the outcome of an election in Taiwan or changes to the cross-strait status quo initiated by China – is that what the 24 million people of Taiwan choose for themselves is what the U.S. government will support. I don’t think our basic diplomatic posture and our support for Taiwan would change unless there was some evidence — which I would not expect at all — of some malfeasance happening with the election.
Flannery: What do you make of China’s probe into Micron?
Cooke: We can dissect it into several elements. One is a desire for reciprocity and being seen on an equal plane. And so with Biden’s CHIPS Act, and the singling out of TikTok and a lot of different Chinese companies in U.S. security investigations, it’s to be expected that there is going to be some reciprocal action that China is going to want to take to be seen as a peer power demanding reciprocity.
That diplomatic posturing is understandable but it does have a chilling effect for potential foreign investors — definitely on the U.S. business community. Close allies in Europe and elsewhere notice it, and it doesn’t help China’s post-pandemic effort to show a welcoming face to foreign investment.
I think there is also a third element of it that is interesting: perhaps as another data-point showing a lack of coordination in Chinese policy and messaging that we see from time to time. And we’re living in a world where nobody is a paragon and the U.S. has its own challenges with coordinating its message. But in China, as we saw recently with ‘wolf-diplomacy’ and the balloon incident, people lower in the governmental hierarchy vie to please their superiors, and end up getting out in front of the intended policy and in front of what would be an optimal coordinated policy for China. And I’m wondering personally whether Micron might be an instance of that.
Flannery: Speaking about both semiconductors and Taiwan, does the U.S. rely on Taiwan too much for chips?
Cooke: It’s actually in almost everyone’s interest at this point to have a greater degree of global diversification. It’s outright dangerous to have close to 90% of production of the world’s most advanced semiconductors taking place only 90 miles away from the Chinese mainland.
Flannery: Does the CHIPS Act go far enough in striking a new balance?
Cooke: Before the CHIPS Act, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was already taking steps (to diversify from Taiwan). There are currently moves afoot in Germany for automotive chip production — not the most advanced chips in the world — but also with Japan for consumer electronics and with Arizona for an advanced generation of chips. (See related post here.) For the foreseeable future, production of ultra-advanced chips will stay in Taiwan. But I think a lot of production capacity for quite advanced chips is being pushed out of Taiwan to these other global nodes.
The CHIPS Act is to my mind pretty fascinating. As a response to China’s Made-In-China-2025 ambitions and its military upgrading, it’s a bulls-eye in my view. But, as a policy undertaking in the U.S. domestic context, it is something of a potential third rail in the sense that, as a country, we’ve never been comfortable or particularly skilled at industrial policy. And it is clearly industrial policy.
Interestingly, I think there is enough bipartisan support right now that the industrial policy-political debate on Capitol Hill is not the traditional debate of “no industrial policy” versus, let’s say, the Clinton era’s “auto industrial policy for Japan.” Nobody at this point seems to be openly challenging the need for an industrial policy response to China’s advanced technology challenge.
So the debate currently is one about “clean” industrial policy versus industrial policy with social agenda items folded into it, like childcare support for workers. (Either way) it is important as a signal to the market about U.S. government resolve.
Flannery: Is it enough? And if it’s not enough, what’s the next step?
Cooke: If, in version one, the sum had been significantly higher than $52 billion, it would have been almost setting itself up for failure, because there are so many things that can go wrong in operationalizing and implementing something like this.
By analogy in the military sphere, we have put in a very robust sanctions regime against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. But it was kind of uncharted territory. There’s been a lot of analysis about what’s been working and what hasn’t been working. We’re groping our way forward and want to keep some powder dry.
The CHIPS Act is similar in the commercial sphere — kind of uncharted territory. One of the things it has going for is that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is an astute leader of the process. In the current political environment, any sign of dropping the ball would be pounced on. What is actually more important than the amount of money is the fact that it has happened in an initial iteration. There can be subsequent iterations, but it’s important to operationalize the first iteration as well as possible and to learn from that process to inform a potential second iteration.
Flannery: There is controversy about social goals being attached to it.
Cooke: The Act was passed by Congress last year, and it went into a kind of holding period where no one knew what the process was going to be for a company to apply. When the guidelines were only recently announced, it became clear that there was quite a lot of conditionality put on the ability of a company to apply. One set of conditions has to do with an applicant limiting its China business for a 10-year period. Another quite different set has to do with an awarded company providing childcare for its employees.
I think the criticism about these conditions is a fairly predictable output from the Washington DC political meat grinder. Because these are tax-payer dollars, the back-and-forth is highly political. Placing limitations on future China business for awardees makes sense to the average American voter. However, those limitations raise serious concerns for the CEO of a sizable company that doesn’t want to decouple from the China market but does want to access CHIPS Act support. On the separate issue of childcare, this requirement is meant as an incentive to help overcome the problem of a shortage of chip production workers in the U.S but it obviously becomes a red meat talking point for politicians who position themselves as anti-woke in U.S. culture wars skirmishing.
This goes back to what we were talking about before with Micron. China is currently unable to respond in a meaningfully reciprocal way when the U.S. does things like put Chinese billionaires onto an entities list. They just don’t have a global finance tool that is anywhere near as sharp and strong as is found in the U.S. Treasury toolkit. For the U.S., putting companies on an entities list works— it catches the attention of targeted individuals and there is an important and broad public messaging dimension to it as well. Of course, to make sanctions really bite, there’s a lot of operationalization that needs to happen but doesn’t always happen.
What I personally believe is: China’s main effort now is to try to knock the dollar off its post-World War II throne. Others have tried and failed and it will be a hard thing for China to pull off. But I believe that’s this the main thrust of their effort and the primary aim of a long-term, patient strategy.
See related posts:
U.S. Businesses Look To De-Risk, Not Decouple, Their China Ties
U.S.-China Collaboration Could Cut Development Time, Cost For New Cancer Treatments
TSMC Will Triple Arizona Investment To $40 Billion, Among Largest Foreign Outlays
Taiwan’s Biggest Silicon Wafer Maker Eyes U.S. Solar Industry Investment
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I join Russell in inviting you to leave your thoughts or questions in the Comment section below. (Because of netizen ire in China, I have not always kept the Comments section open in Assessing China but it is open for this post. I would love to hear from you).
As reported in the Wall Street Journal today (and also widely in other publications), the Biden administration is now demanding that, due to security concerns, the owner of TikTok, Beijing-headquartered Bytedance, either sell their stakes in the video-sharing app or face a U.S. ban. The question of sanctions or a ban against Bytedance have been rumbling in the background since August 2020, when Trump elevated the issue in the lead-up to the November election. Since that time, the Biden Administration has generally kept in place tough-line Trump-era policies vis-a-vis China, but has replaced Trump’s go-it-alone, chaotic style with a coherent approach well coordinated with U.S. traditional allies. From the outside looking in, the Bytedance issue was neither shelved nor resolved by the Biden Administration. It was in limbo. However, yesterday’s report suggests that the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — charged with making determinations about the admissability of (usually prospective) investments into the U.S. — has now come to a fully-vetted, interagency-coordinated determination. Bytedance either needs to fish (sell their stake in Tiktok) or cut bait (lose access to the U.S. market).
It’s a complicated and convoluted path that brought us to this point. What are the eight key facts to know to make sense of where we are and where this likely leads:
- IT AIN’T OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER: Yesterday’s report is reliable but neither CFIUS nor the Biden Administration have released any specifics officially. Even were that to happen today, the outcome is still subject to a process whereby Bytedance and its lawyers will have an opportunity to respond to the official demand.
- THE TOP-LEVEL SECURITY CONCERN: Data, data, data. Specifically, data about the 66 million Tiktok users in the U.S. which could fall into the hands of an adversarial government. To take a single example, think of facial recognition. Because privacy protections for individual citizens in China are de minimus and, more to the point, because the PRC government runs a globally-unrivalled surveillance apparatus to control its citizenry, facial-recognition technology is more advanced in China than in the U.S. or elsewhere. Combining China’s facial-recognition technologies with Bytedance’s trove of images of U.S. citizens could open a Pandora’s box of risk, both known and unknown.
- THE BEDROCK SECURITY CONCERN: Chinese hacking into the personnel records of 4 million current and former U.S. government workers in 2015 shows clearly that the PRC values, and will run risks to procure, data on U.S. citizens. The bedrock security concern in the U.S. is that as long as Beijing-headquartered Bytedance owns the video-sharing Tiktok app, the Chinese government can force Bytedance to turn over that data at any time. Unlike the U.S. or most other markets, there would be no meaningful legal mechanisms to protect Bytedance against a demand of this sort. And, as Xi and the CCP showed last year with its treatment of Alibaba, there is scant concern for damage inflicted on a technology-innovating market giant if it is deemed to serve the greater good (as defined by Xi Jinping).
- HURRY UP AND WAIT: It’s important to note that the first burst of attention to Tiktok came in the lead-up to the 2020 election and this apparent new burst of attention is happening as we approach primary season for the 2024 election. While there is broad and bipartisan support in governmental circles for the tough line on China which has been taking shape over the last five years, the Tiktok issue has recently been showing signs of developing a red vs blue fissure. Specifically, governors have been banning Tiktok on the devices of employees in their respective states. As of last month, 27 states had instituted such bans, including Florida and Texas. With a few notable exceptions such as Maryland and New Hampshire, the other states tend to be ruby-red. The Biden Administration was at risk of having its superb CHIPS Act front-line against China outflanked by a Republican rear-guard using Tiktok as a political cudgel.
- BETWEEN THE HAMMER AND THE ANVIL: Bytedance and Tiktok have tried various maneuvers to extricate their video-sharing app from its unenviable position caught between Beijing and Washington. For starters, Bytedance has tried to make itself invisible in the U.S. debate because of its obvious proximity to Zhongnanhai. Secondly, Bytedance and Tiktok have pushed Tiktok’s CEO, Singaporean Show Zi Chew, as the public face for Tiktok and pointed to its globally-distributed headquarters (in Singapore, in California and Texas-based offices in the U.S., and in Paris and Berlin and elsewhere) as reason not to fear the PRC’s control. And as recently as last week, Tiktok has publicly committed $1.3 billion to expand its Project Texas datacenters initiative in the U.S. and Europe to provide greater public transparency (into its data collection, algorithms, etc.) and to allow Oracle to scrutinize its internal data collection processes. These are all impressive dance moves but are not enough to stop the curtain being brought down on Tiktok’s U.S. show.
- THE NEAR UNSTOPPABLE DRIVER: Politics, politics, politics. Tencent’s WeChat has been proven to be a more nefarious platform for siphoning data from U.S. citizens and delivering it to PRC security minders. However, WeChat (and its Chinese language Weixin) is not widely-used in the U.S. among non-Chinese speakers. It’s therefor mostly invisible to U.S. government politicians and regulators. Tiktok, on the other hand, is virtually ubiquitous among young users, the generation which includes the children of those politicians and regulators. As attitudes toward China continue to darken in response to the last five-plus years of Xi Jinping’s overreach, the “Tiktok threat” has become the simplest and most potent storyline to channel fear of China.
- THE BOTTOM LINE: Plaintively but quite accurately, Tiktok’s official spokesperson, Brooke Oberwetter, responded to news of the Biden Administration demand yesterday by saying, “If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn’t solve the problem: a change in ownershiop would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access.” In fact, much of the data which U.S. government officials and regulators are seeking to protect through this policy toward Tiktok could be procured — albeit very laboriously and expensively for Chinese spy agencies — through commercial transactions on the darkweb. The ultimate solution to guard against the risks associated with Tiktok and other Chinese social media platforms is for the U.S. to institute stronger consumer privacy protections across the board affecting all social media platforms — Chinese, U.S. and other. Obviously, U.S. Big Tech doesn’t want to see this and, equally obviously, this is a bridge too far for the U.S. Congress to consider as we head to the 2024 electoral primary season.
- THE FINAL OUTCOME: Those with reason to know the final outcome won’t be talking and those who are talking don’t likely know. I am squarely in the second camp but I will hazard a guess. The threat to force Bytedance/Tiktok to sell off its U.S. Tiktok holding was made earlier in the Trump Administration. Characteristically, it was delivered mostly as top-of-his head muttering by Trump himself and didn’t carry the institutional heft of the Biden Administration’s lengthy CIFIUS review. But then, just as now, the demand does not bring about an immediate outcome. It initiates what is effectively a high-stakes business and legal negotiation between the U.S. Government and Bytedance/Tiktok leadership. While unlikely at this point, the either/or could even morph into some third-way which would take time for both sides to explore thoroughly. It’s now a more coherent and higher-stakes ultimatum, but it’s the same ultimatum Bytedance/Tiktok was given two and a half years ago. Biden now has his political flank reasonably well protected from Republican China-bashers. I expect the final resolution of all this to take some time. But the clock is ticking. Tick tock …
I received an email yesterday from a college friend who is bright, informed and engaged with world events. She is not a China specialist but over the last few years we have had an on-going exchange of views about China, both privately and in a public forum.
Her message from yesterday read,”Terry: Yikes. Do you have access to Le Monde? I can’t read the rest of the article, but the first half is alarming. R.” The article she hyperlinked is from Le Monde and that article in turn hyperlinks to a strategy document which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has just released in conjunction with the visit by Wang Yi, Xi Jinping’s principal foreign policy advisor, to Munich for the 59th Munich Security Conference with NATO member countries and then on to Russia for meetings with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and yesterday with Putin himself. The document is titled “American hegemony and its dangers.” As headlined — accurately, I might add — in the Le Monde article, the focus of Xi’s Foreign Ministry is now on “‘direct confrontation with the United States.”
Today’s brief post is both my response to her and a way of brushing off the cobwebs after a long holiday vacation — lasting from Thanksgiving through Chinese New Year — I have taken from Assessing China.
To keep it simple, there are two main reasons that this newly overt stance of direct confrontation with the U.S. comes as no surprise from Xi’s PRC in 2023.
The first goes back as far as 1921 with the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai. Inspired by the Bolsheviks’ gains in the October Revolution, Chen Duxiu and other founding leaders of the CCP made Leninist ideology (soon to become Leninist-Stalinist ideology after Stalin’s rise to power in 1924) the central tent-pole of the party. According to that ideology, the bases of CCP power were the Three P’s — the Party, the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) and propaganda. Since seizing the mainland and ousting Chiang Kaishek’s rival Kuomintang Party in 1949, the centrality of this ideology has only been tested twice. The first was the slow-boil Sino-Soviet split which began in 1956 and culminated in 1972 when China turned its back on its Big Brother in Communist ideology and welcomed Richard Nixon. The second came with the introduction of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms which started experimentally in 1978 and were formally adopted in 1982.
The effect of these reforms was monumental. For the first time since 1921, decision-making within the CCP was to be based on a predictable economic logic and not on malleable political ideology. It ushered in a 30-year period of economic growth which according to the World Bank has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. Western observers, myself included, tended to assume that this three decade burst of wealth creation under the post-WWII Pax Americana would be enough to make PRC leadership want to become a permanent “stakeholder” in this global order. In hindsight, we underestimated the strength of the CCP’s ideological ‘muscle memory,’ of its basic political motivation and of China’s civilizational pride (and resentments). What is a seventy-five year Post-WWII order measured against a four thousand year civilizational record in which the Peoples’ Republic of China is, in cultural terms, its latest dynasty. And, as Orville Schell has masterfully made the case in Wealth and Power, not even Deng Xiaoping probably ever saw wealth-creation for China in a Washington-led world order as an end in itself, but rather as a step toward global power that would enable China to challenge that world order in due course. For Xi Jinping, a true ideologue inspired by his father’s revolutionary experience, that time is now.
Secondly, the path that China has been taking to overt confrontation with the West has been revealing itself in planned and increasingly obvious stages ever since 2008. 2008 was the year of the Global Financial Crisis, which China weathered with less turmoil and damage than the advanced economies in the West and Asia. That is the year that CCP leadership started taking stock of what it had gained in capital accumulation and talent acquisition and began thinking about striking out on its own different path. There was still a need to access Western consumer and financial markets and to promote inflow of management expertise along with inbound investment but the critical need was technology. In 2008, China was in no position to compete with the West and Western-aligned countries like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea in advanced technology. For that reason, over the next fifteen years, CCP ambitions were always partially cloaked but increasingly revealed with each Five Year Plan cycle. (See Xi’s Ascension to the CCP Pantheon for a more detailed mapping of that 15-year course). In 2012, the CCP selected Xi Jinping as the horse they would ride on this epochal journey. He would break the mold which Deng Xiaoping had set limiting Chinese leaders to two five-year terms. And he would use his longer leash to bring Hong Kong and Taiwan to heel before stepping down. To usher in the next Five Year cycle of the Politburo in 2017, Xi gave a triumphalist speech telling the world what to expect in the years ahead. Now, fresh from securing an unprecedented third term of formal power last year, Xi is moving to make those stated intentions a reality. The pandemic and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Biden’s CHIPS Act were not part of the plan. But Xi and the CCP are ‘unswerving’ in pushing forward with this plan. It has been fifteen years in the making and, for much of it, the U.S. and its allies have been distracted in the Middle East and Ukraine. With its population now in decline, Xi knows the window is closing for him to reshape the global order to his and the CCP’s liking.
With ‘ideology in command’ and riding fifteen years of planning momentum, China’s direction under Xi is now clear for all to see. Xi’s strategic accommodation with junior partner (and client-state energy supplier) Russia last February was simply another way-station on its path. The path to open confrontation with the leaders of the post-WWII order, and the scramble for influence with less tightly aligned global players like Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, South Africa, India and Indonesia, is afoot.
Autocracy vs Democracy. Game on.
As Bob Marley said, “If you know your history, then you would know where you’re coming from.”
Wednesday’s post — My Proprietary Chipset — included hyperlinks to specific publications and websites from the 2000s. Some of these are more easily accessed than others. For instance, the link to my testimony before the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission in the 109th Session of Congress (2005) takes you directly to that testimony. However, the links to my testimony at the 108th (2003) and 107th (2001) sessions takes you to the full text of the Commission’s work covering the full session and it takes some perseverance to find one’s way to my testimony. In the spirit of presenting my work on these issues from the 2000s in one, easily accessed location, I will add here to the blog a few archive posts to fill in behind Wednesday’s My Proprietary Chipset post providing readier access to those harder-to-navigate publications.
2003 Testimony, 108th Session of Congress
SUMMARY:
In the information technology sector, Taiwan semiconductor and electronics manufacturing firms are major global actors, and their
expansion into China continues, but without noticeable erosion of Taiwan equity control. In testimony before the Commission, Merritt Cooke, former senior commercial officer at the American Institute in Taiwan, attributed this to the relative stability of ‘‘highly differentiated, high-value supply chains’’ as opposed to the ‘‘instability of far simpler manufacturer-retailer networks characteristic of commodity products.’’ Cooke believes this distinction helps explain the historical pattern of Taiwan investment into the mainland. While many light industry sectors that Taiwan moved to the mainland in the 1980s and 1990s ‘‘have been swallowed up by mainland competitors,’’ highly differentiated, relatively high-value consumer products such as brand-name athletic shoes and high-performance bicycles have remained largely in Taiwan equity hands. ‘‘If these product sectors, with their relatively lower levels of technology and slower product cycles, could stay in Taiwan control for decades, there is every reason to believe that the various IT [information technology] hardware sectors will stay even more firmly in Taiwan’s grip in years ahead,’’ Cooke said. Despite the large and growing Taiwan business presence in the mainland and burgeoning indirect cross-Strait trade and investment, there is a sense in the Taipei business community that Taiwan itself—as a venue for investment, manufacturing, logistics, or finance—is in danger of becoming marginalized within Asia. Kaohsiung’s container port—once the fourth busiest in the world— now ranks sixth, with the Chinese ports of Shenzhen and Shanghai jumping ahead. The American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan reports that a number of U.S. corporations’ regional headquarters in Taiwan have been eliminated or downgraded to local offices.
2001 Testimony, 107th Session of Congress
TESTIMONY:
STATEMENT OF MERRITT TODD COOKE, JR., CHIEF, COMMERCIAL SECTION, AMERICAN INSTITUTE IN TAIWAN
Mr. COOKE. Mr. Chairman, thank you. I hope the Commission will feel free to overlook the confusion that my parents introduced
with my legal name and call me by the name that I most often respond to, Terry. [Laughter.]
I will also request that, with the consent of the Commission, some paragraphs that I delete in the interest of brevity do be entered into the record. I will spare the Commission a recap of Taiwan’s ten-year structural transformation in the 1990s.
It is an honor to be asked to testify in front of this distinguished panel of Commissioners. In the following brief statement, I will bring to bear my perspective as current Chief of the Commercial Section at the American Institute in Taiwan to address the issues
identified by the Commission in its July 24 invitation letter, specifically the growing interdependence of the U.S., Taiwan, and Chinese high-tech economies.
The strategic interdependence of the U.S. and Taiwan economies has grown steadily throughout the 1990s as Taiwan’s economy has shifted from its traditional structure as a labor-intensive export-oriented economy towards a more service-oriented investment and technology-intensive economy. While Taiwan’s industrial sector has shrunk in relative terms over this period, capital and technology-intensive industries have expanded dramatically. These industries accounted for approximately 75 percent of total manufacturing in 2000, compared to 48 percent in 1986.
Taiwan now supplies 60 percent of the world’s motherboards and is the world’s leading supplier of notebook computers, monitors,
mice, keyboards, video cards, sound cards, on/off switches, LAN cards, graphic cards, scanners, and laser disk drives. Through the
strength of its foundry model, Taiwan has emerged as a preeminent semiconductor supplier to the world.
This transition from the production of labor-intensive goods to high-tech goods has to date proceeded relatively smoothly, even
against the background turbulence of the Asian financial crisis in 1997–98 and a major earthquake occurring on September 21, 1999.
Against the broad backdrop of its structural transformation, two major dynamics have emerged: First, the growing regional partnership and global interdependence of the U.S. and Taiwan high-tech industries, and secondly, the accelerating shift of the lower end of Taiwan’s high-tech production offshore, particularly to mainland China.
One clear indicator of the degree of evolving interdependence with the U.S. was the fact that following the 9/21 earthquake in
Taiwan, the tech markets in New York dropped more in percentage terms than in Taipei.
The scale of this interdependence is likewise highlighted in other ways. For example, four of the top U.S. suppliers of PCs alone procured $20 billion of components from Taiwan to support their 1999 global sales. Additionally, Taiwan will soon have more state-of-the-art 300-millimeter chip wafer fabs in operation than the U.S., Germany, Japan, or any other world market.
The accelerating shift of high-tech production from Taiwan to mainland China has been equally pronounced over this period. The
Taiwan government’s Office of Budget, Accounting, and Statistics reported in February that government approved Taiwan investments in China for 2000 more than doubled from the 1999 levels.
The Taipei Computer Association reported in the same month that 30 percent of Taiwan’s 411 high-technology companies had established major investments in mainland China and that fully 90 percent of those 411 companies planned to be invested in China by the end of 2001.
Lastly, China edged out Taiwan in 2000 for the first time for the number three slot in world IT production value. China came in behind the U.S. and Japan, with $25.5 billion of production value, against Taiwan in fourth place with $23 billion. The key point to
note, however, is that Taiwanese companies generated fully 70 percent of that $25.5 production value in mainland China.
The impending accessions of China and Taiwan to the WTO will likely further accelerate this process of growing cross-straits commercial interdependence in high-tech, with consequent implications for the already highly interdependent U.S. and Taiwan high-tech economies. Although Taiwan’s relatively late liberalization and privatization of its fixed-line monopoly regime will limit somewhat the impact of this development in the telecom sector, the likely effect will be continued fast accelerating cross-straits interdependence in sectors such as PC and notebook assembly, motherboard and other PC component manufacture, production of chip sets for mobile telephony and other applications, scanner and computer peripheral production, and lower end IC production.
A number of important trends will reinforce WTO financial linkages and commercial disciplines and tend to produce this outcome.
First, the network of business relationships which Taiwan firms have established in China represents largely an extension into
China of preexisting product and service supply chain relationships originally established in Taiwan. This greater Taiwan phenomenon in China, localized in growth centers such as Donguan in Guangdong, Xianen in Fujian, and increasingly in the greater Shanghai area, has now reached a critical mass sufficient for greater efficiency in the global supply chain.
Second, the commoditization of IT production worldwide is increasingly pressuring production costs, forcing manufacturers to
distribute a growing number of lower end steps in their production processes to the world’s lowest-cost production centers. Under more than a decade of the KMT or Guangdong’s ‘‘Go South’’ policy, Taiwan manufacturers have quite fully exploited the advantages of relatively low-cost production centers in the Philippines, Thailand, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the one exception to that probably being an expected spurt of Taiwan investment in Vietnam following the ratification and implementation of the U.S.-Vietnam bilateral trade agreement.
At the same time, the KMTs, and now the new administration, the DPP’s ‘‘go slow’’ policy vis-a-vis investment in the mainland has tended to limit the degree to which Taiwan firms could take advantage of the even lower costs of production in China. However, since cost pressure started mounting sharply in March 2000, Taiwan high-tech firms have found themselves no longer able to maintain global competitiveness without relocating a greater share of their production to China, the lowest cost major production center in the Asian production platform.
A third trend really represents a number of technology trends that underlie an emerging division of labor in high-tech production
between Taiwan and the PRC. Without trying to go into any of these, I would just note the increasing specialization of national
economies in the globalized IT industry segments. For instance, fully half of Finland’s GDP is dedicated to wireless telephony.
Secondly, the migration of value away from hardware assembly and towards embedded software technologies in scanners, in peripherals, in Internet appliances, and so on.
And a third technology trend being the steep rise in investment costs and shorter product cycles in the IC semiconductor sector.
A fourth and final trend, the Taiwan and China markets are
largely complementary, creating unique opportunities for commercial cooperation between these political rivals. For instance, Taiwan firms have generally failed to establish global brand and to capture the higher valuations that accrue to brand-name products. However, the large size of the China market, the skill and cultural familiarity of Taiwan business managers, and the high regard which China’s consumers have for Taiwan’s products are now giving Taiwan firms a chance to establish brand names on a large-scale regional basis as opposed to global basis.
Each one of these trends holds important implications for U.S. interests. The establishment of Taiwan regional brands might, for
instance, tend to weaken the existing cooperative bonds between U.S. and Taiwan alliance partners and foster more direct competition in the region. Conversely, the combination of U.S. innovation, Taiwan regional management skill, and the largely untapped potential of the developing China market is already creating a set of
opportunities for enhanced commercial cooperation among traditional U.S. and Taiwan partners.
The rapid proliferation of commercial ties between Taiwan and China is of major importance to U.S. interests. There are the narrower set of commercial implications for the U.S. competitive posture in regional and global markets, to which I have just alluded. Also, as Rupert Hammond Chambers, President of the U.S. ROC Business Council suggested in his June 14 testimony to this Commission, there are equally important implications which fast-growing commercial interdependence between Taiwan and China have for traditional U.S. military and security interests in the Straits of Taiwan.
I commend the Commission for focusing attention on the extent to which commercial dynamics in the computer electronics and telecommunications sectors are affecting these interests. It is my personal observation that these market and technology-driven dynamics are not always fully captured in the dialogue regarding our key
interests in this potential flash point region of the world. Thank you very much.
[The statement follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF MERRITT TODD COOKE, JR.
It is an honor to be asked to testify in front of this distinguished panel of Commissioners. It is also, personally, a distinct pleasure to see again a number of former Departmental and Embassy colleagues as well as others with whom I have had the
past pleasure of working on various overseas and stateside activities. In the following brief statement, I will bring to bear my perspective as current Chief of the Commercial Section at the American Institute in Taiwan to address the issues identified by the Commission in its July 24th invitation letter.
The strategic interdependence of the U.S. and Taiwan economies has grown steadily throughout the 1990s as Taiwan’s economy has shifted from its traditional structure as a labor-intensive, export-oriented economy towards a more services-oriented,
investment- and technology-intensive economy. While Taiwan’s industrial sector has
shrunk in relative terms over this period, capital- and technology-intensive industries have expanded dramatically. These industries accounted for approximately 75 percent of total manufacturing in 2000, compared to 48 percent in 1986. During this
structural transition, labor-intensive industries, such as toys, footwear, umbrellas,
and garments, relocated offshore. Their place was taken by petrochemicals, metal products, machinery, and ‘‘most dramatically during the 1990s’’ by technology-oriented industries, such as electronic, electric, and information products.
By 2000, more than half of the top ten manufacturing firms in Taiwan were electronic and computer manufacturing firms, compared with only two in 1993. More than half of the top ten manufactured products were in the areas of integrated circuits (ICs), personal computers, and computer peripherals, whereas in 1993, only ICs had been among the top ten. Taiwan now supplies 60% of the world’s motherboards and is the world’s leading supplier of notebook computers, monitors, mice, keyboards, video cards, sound cards, on-off switches, LAN cards, graphics cards, scanners, and laser disk drives. Through the strength of its foundry model, Taiwan has emerged as a preeminent semiconductor supplier to the world. This transition from the production of labor-intensive goods to high-tech goods has, to date, proceeded relatively smoothly, even against the background turbulence of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997–98 and a major earthquake occurring on September 21, 1999.
Against the broad backdrop of this structural transformation, two major dynamics have emerged: (1) the growing regional partnership and global interdependence of the U.S. and Taiwan high-tech industries and (2) the accelerating shift of the lowerend of Taiwan’s high-tech production offshore, particularly to mainland China. One clear indicator of the degree of evolving interdependence with the U.S. was the fact that, following the 9–21(–99) earthquake in Taiwan, the tech markets in New York
dropped more in percentage terms than in Taipei. The scale of this interdependence is likewise highlighted in other ways. For example, four of the top U.S. suppliers of PCs alone procured $20 billion (USD) of components from Taiwan to support their
1999 global sales. Additionally, Taiwan will soon have more state-of-the-art 300mm chip-wafer fabs in operation than the U.S., Germany, Japan or any other world market.
The accelerating shift of high-tech production from Taiwan to mainland China has been equally pronounced over this period. The Taiwan Government’s Office of Budget, Accounting, and Statistics reported in February that government-approved Taiwan investments in China for 2000 more than doubled from the 1999 levels. The Taipei Computer Association reported in the same month that 30 percent of Taiwan’s 411 high technology companies had established major investments in mainland China and that fully 90 percent of those 411 companies planned to be invested in China by the end of 2001. Lastly, China edged out Taiwan in 2000 for the first time for the number three slot in world IT production value. China came in behindthe U.S. and Japan with $25.5 billion of production value against Taiwan in fourth place with $23 billion. The key point to note, however, is that Taiwanese companies generated fully 70% of that $25.5 production value in Mainland China.
The impending accessions of China and Taiwan to the WTO will likely further accelerate this process of growing cross-straits commercial interdependence in hightech, with consequent implications for the already highly interdependent U.S. and Taiwan high-tech economies. Although Taiwan’s relatively late liberalization and privatization of its fixed-line monopoly regime will limit somewhat the impact of this development in the telecoms sector, the likely effect will be continued fast-accelerating cross-straits interdependence in sectors such as PC and notebook assembly, motherboard and other PC component manufacture, production of chipsets for mobile telephony and other applications, scanner and computer peripheral production, and lower-end IC production. A number of important trends will reinforce WTO financial linkages and commercial disciplines and tend to produce this outcome:
—First, the network of business relationships which Taiwan firms have established in China represents largely an extension into China of pre-existing product and service supply-chain relationships originally established in Taiwan. This ‘‘Greater Taiwan’’ phenomenon in China, localized in growth centers such as Dongguan (Guangdong), Xiamen (Fujian) and, increasingly, the Greater
Shanghai area, has now reached a critical mass sufficient for greater efficiency in the global supply chain;
—Second, the commoditization of IT production worldwide is increasingly pressuring production costs, forcing manufacturers to distribute a growing number of lower-end steps in their production processes to the world’s lowest-cost production centers. Under more than a decade of the KMT’s ‘‘Go South’’ policy, Taiwan manufacturers have quite fully exploited the advantages of relatively low-cost production centers in the Philippines, Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. (The exception to this being an expected spurt of Taiwan investment in Vietnam following the ratification and implementation of the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement). At the same time, the KMT’s (and now the DPP’s) ‘‘Go Slow’’ policy vis-a`-vis investment in the mainland tended to limit the degree to which Taiwan firms could take advantage of the even lower costs-of-production in China. However, since cost pressures started mounting sharply in March 2000, Taiwan high-tech firms have found themselves no longer able to maintain
global competitiveness without relocating a greater share of their production to China, the lowest-cost major production center in the Asian production platform;
—Third, a number of technology trends underlie an emerging division of labor in high-tech production between Taiwan and the PRC. Among these, are (a) the increasing specialization of national economies in globalized IT industry-segments (e.g., fully half of Finland’s GDP is now generated from wireless related technologies); (b) the migration of value away from hardware assembly and towards imbedded software (e.g., scanners and other peripherals, Internet Appliances, etc.); and (c) the steep rise in investment cost and shorter product cycles in the IC/semiconductor sector; and
—Fourth, the Taiwan and China markets are largely complementary, creating
unique opportunities for commercial cooperation between these political rivals. For instance, Taiwan firms have generally failed to establish global brands and to capture the higher market valuations that accrue to brand-name products. However, the large size of the China market, the skill and cultural familiarity of Taiwan business managers with that market, and the high regard which Chinese consumers have for Taiwan products, are now giving Taiwan firms the chance to establish brand-names on a large-scale regional basis. Further, Taiwan’s proven skills in development and service-oriented management of global IT technologies, coupled with the breadth and potential of China’s basic research capabilities, create distinct opportunities for partnership in regional innovation.
Each one of these trends holds important implications for U.S. interests. The establishment of Taiwan regional brands might, for instance, tend to weaken the existing cooperative bonds between U.S. and Taiwan alliance partners and foster more direct competition in the region. Conversely, the combination of U.S. innovation, Taiwan regional management skill, and the largely-untapped potential of the developing China market is already creating a set of opportunities for enhanced commercial cooperation among traditional U.S. and Taiwan partners.
The rapid proliferation of commercial ties between Taiwan and China is of major importance to U.S. interests. There are the narrower set of commercial implications for the U.S. competitive posture in regional and global markets, to which I have just
alluded. Also, as Rupert Hammond-Chambers, President of the U.S.-R.O.C. (Taiwan) Business Council, suggested in his June 14 testimony to this Commission, there are equally important implications which fast-growing commercial interdependence between Taiwan and China have for traditional U.S. military and security interests in the Straits of Taiwan. I commend the Commission for focusing attention on the extent to which commercial dynamics in the computer electronics and telecommunications sectors are affecting these interests. It is my personal observation that these market- and technology-driven dynamics are not always fully captured in the dialogue regarding our key interests in this potential flashpoint region of the world.
Since leaving the Foreign Service in 2002, my work with Greater China is most often associated with U.S.-China clean energy cooperation. That makes sense — that was the focus of the non-profit I founded in 2011, the book I published through the Wilson Center in 2012 and the BE Better program for low-carbon industrial park built environments which the China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (CPGP) team and I developed through 2021.
However, the prior decade of work which I had done previously through the GC3 Strategy consultancy had a very different focus –on Taiwan as the world’s leader in advanced chip manufacturing and on the vulnerability of global supply chains due to Taiwan’s proximity to China. That earlier work became less active and visible as CPGP’s U.S.-China clean energy cooperation work earned support from Mayor Nutter (2012) and was subsequently competitively selected by the U.S. Departments of State and Energy for one of a very limited number of official U.S.-China EcoPartner awards (2014-21) in partnership with the TEDA EcoCenter in Philadelphia’s Sister City, Tianjin. But my Wikipedia profile gives equal prominence to both sets of work and noted “Cooke is known for his work on U.S.-China-Taiwan commercial interactions. As early as 2002, he was drawing attention to the issue of advanced semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan and the vulnerability of global information and communication technology (ICT) supply chains.”
In 2022, my old chip chops have acquired some new relevance in light of China’s no-holds-barred bid for technology supremacy and the passage of the Biden Administration’s CHIPS Act. Here is a dusting off of some of the accomplishments from that earlier set of work:
- Three-time Invited Congressional Commission Expert Witness at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s Public Hearings on Global Supply Chains and Cross-Straits Security Issues (109th, 108th, and 107th Sessions of the U.S. Congress)
- Director and Head of Partnership Development, Asia at the World Economic Forum (with strategic focus on ICT, Energy, Transportation, Finance industries)
- Author of The Politics of Greater China’s Integration into the Global Info Tech Supply Chain in The Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 40; and of Taiwan’s FTA Prospects from the Global IT Supply Chain Perspective in Economic Integration, Democratization and National Security in East Asia, edited by Peter C.Y. Chow
- Green Team Leader on Cross-Straits Economics, U.S. Dept. of Defense/Defense Intelligence Agency Strategic Coercion Wargame convened by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
- Invited Non-Governmental Expert Participant, Asian Scenario Seminar Game at the Army War College, Carlisle, PA
- Co-organizer of The Role of Taiwan in the Post-WTO Global Supply Chain Workshop at the 19th Modern Engineering & Technology Seminar
- Official Host (“Ambassador”) for the Taiwan Delegation at World Congress on Information Technology XV in Austin TX
- Featured Speaker & Seminar Consultant – RAND Corporation, MITRE Corporation
- Keynote/Plenary Speaker at large scale media (Forbes, BusinessWeek, Reuters, The Economist Conference Group) and investor (Berkshire-Hathaway-themed 3rd Annual Global Investment Conference, China’s Financial Markets Conference, New York Cleantech Investors Forum, National Association of Business Economists/NABE) conferences
- Moderator at Fabless Semiconductor Association and Wharton China Business Forum annual conference events
- Advisor on Global Business Outreach, The Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania
- Invited Think-tank Speaker: CSIS, AEI, Heritage, Brookings, etc
Since the termination of the U.S-China EcoPartnership program in 2021 and, in particular, since China’s unilateral breaking off of all bi-national coooperation for climate change mitigation following Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, I have returned exclusively to the issues of Taiwan, microchips and vulnerable ICT supply chains in my commercial work with Greater China. Currently, I am pursuing that primarily through consultancy engagements with private companies and through introductions provided by GLG, CapVision and other expert networks.
I hope that this retrospective review will help readers keep pace with the sharp break I am taking from the past decade-plus of China-centric work supporting U.S.-China clean energy programs at the bi-national level and stepping back to Taiwan-centric advanced technology markets. This change in my personal focus entails a change in posture towards China — from cooperation to reduce green house gas emissions through a bi-national program to stark competition to help the U.S. and its allies maintain leadership in 21st c. technologies vital to national security. (More prosaically, this change also entails a change in business platforms — from the CPGP non-profit to the GC3 Strategy consultancy S-corp.). This change in focus will become increasingly apparent here in the Assessing China/TEA Collaboration blog over the months and years ahead.
A shift in gears but I hope you’ll continue to enjoy the ride.
After a puzzling on-again, off-again trade action against China’s information and communications technology (ICT) giant ZTE in 2018, the Trump Administration began sanctioning China’s number #1 ICT player Huawei in May 2019. The sanctioning action involved putting Huawei on a Commerce Department “entity list” and thereby restricting U.S. suppliers from selling their goods and technology to Huawei.
As with all of Trump’s trade actions against China, impulse outweighed well thought-out execution in the Huawei crackdown. Initially, some sales were allowed and others denied without clear criteria being communicated to U.S. industry. Later, without preparatory signaling, the Huawei campaign was intensified by expanding U.S. government authority to require licenses for sales of semiconductors made abroad with American technology.
The fitfulness of this policy can be measured by (1) the number of licenses (and dollar value of affected goods and technology) pending but held up in the inter-agency process and (2) the number of licenses (and dollar value of affected goods and technology) which had been applied for by U.S. companies but not processed towards the end of the Trump Administration. (As things stood at the time of the November 3rd election, the expectation was that products in both categories which had clear 5G application would likely be rejected while non-5G products would likely be processed on case-by-case basis.)
Meanwhile, in the international sphere, the Trump Administration pursued a parallel campaign to try to persuade traditional allies to disallow Huawei technology from 5G infrastructural build-out in their respective markets on the grounds that – despite price and performance competitiveness — Huawei’s products represent a national security threat. The results of this international campaign were mixed at best, not least because many of these traditional allies had themselves been targets of different tariff sanctions under Trump’s America First trade policy. Without delving into the changing fortunes of this campaign at different times in different parts of the world, a summary headline on November 3rd might have read “Trump’s 5G Campaign Against Huawei: Embraced in India, Accommodated in the UK, Begrudged in Germany and Repudiated in Thailand and Elsewhere.”
The Biden Administration, while making a quick and clean break from Trump Administration trade policy in the area of climate change mitigation and clean energy technology, has largely kept the Trump Administration domestic policy of restrictive licensing for sales of advanced ICT goods in place. At least, it has made clear that no substantive change should be expected until after the completion of a whole-of-government review of China trade policy and a parallel review of strategic global supply chains which includes semiconductors. In the international arena, it has relaxed the narrowly-focused pressure campaign against Huawei adoption in favor of a more broadly-conceived alliance strategy to rally traditional allies and other democracies to rise to the 21st century challenge posed by China’s autocratic model.
So where do things stand today? The restriction of supplies of U.S. advanced semiconductors to Huawei under both the Trump and Biden Administrations has taken the biggest toll on Huawei. Less impactful but still a headwind for Huawei has been the doubt sown internationally as the U.S. and China edge closer towards global confrontation and supply chain de-coupling. The result? Huawei reported last Friday its third straight quarterly decline in revenues, falling a significant 38% against 2021Q1 results.
Huawei is likely to remain at the center of a highly-fraught tug-of-war between the U.S. and China over 5G. On one side, China has ability to leverage the world’s largest installed base of advanced mobile phone users in the world. On the other, the U.S. dominates the global market for the advanced microchip designs on which advanced telecom markets depend. And the U.S. maintains close partnerships with the world’s leading microchip fabricators in Taiwan and the makers of the world’s leading fabrication equipment in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
Expect more tremors and seismic activity on this fault-line for the foreseeable future. Just last week, the PRC government issued retaliatory actions against Huawei’s main Western rivals – Sweden’s Ericsson AB and Finland’s Nokia, among others. And, as fall-out from the recent spread of the SARS-COV-2 Delta-variant in China, it was announced over the weekend that the World 5G Conference – scheduled for August 6-8 in Beijing – would be postponed indefinitely. Pressure continues to mount while chances to release that pent-up pressure close off.
Last week, ReGen 250 — the 501c3 non-profit with which the TEA Collaborative is associated — celebrated its 10th Anniversary. To mark the occasion, it’s timely to cast an eye back and quickly survey the road traveled to fix where the TEA Collaborative stands today.
We’ll cover the tech perspective, the energy & environment perspective and the PRC planning ambitions perspective in separate T-series, E-series and A-series posts this week.
My focus on technology issues, especially supply chain issues for advanced ICT (information and communications technology) products involving the U.S.-China-Taiwan triangle, was most intense prior to the founding of ReGen250 in 2011. Some highlights include:
- Three-time Invited Congressional Commission Expert Witness at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s Public Hearings on Global Supply Chains and Cross-Straits Security Issues (109th, 108th, and 107th Sessions of the U.S. Congress)
- Director and Head of Partnership Development, Asia at the World Economic Forum (with strategic focus on ICT, Energy, Transportation, Finance industries)
- Author of The Politics of Greater China’s Integration into the Global Info Tech Supply Chain in The Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 40; and of Taiwan’s FTA Prospects from the Global IT Supply Chain Perspective in Economic Integration, Democratization and National Security in East Asia, edited by Peter C.Y. Chow
- Green Team Leader on Cross-Straits Economics, U.S. Dept. of Defense/Defense Intelligence Agency Strategic Coercion Wargame convened by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
- Invited Non-Governmental Expert Participant, Asian Scenario Seminar Game at the Army War College, Carlisle, PA
- Co-organizer of The Role of Taiwan in the Post-WTO Global Supply Chain Workshop at the 19th Modern Engineering & Technology Seminar
- Official Host (“Ambassador”) for the Taiwan Delegation at World Congress on Information Technology XV in Austin TX
- Featured Speaker & Seminar Consultant – RAND Corporation, MITRE Corporation
- Keynote/Plenary Speaker at large scale media (Forbes, BusinessWeek, Reuters, The Economist Conference Group) and investor (Berkshire-Hathaway-themed 3rd Annual Global Investment Conference, China’s Financial Markets Conference, New York Cleantech Investors Forum, National Association of Business Economists/NABE) conferences
- Moderator at Fabless Semiconductor Association and Wharton China Business Forum annual conference events
- Advisor on Global Business Outreach, The Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania
- Invited Think-tank Speaker: CSIS, AEI, Heritage, Brookings, etc
For the TEA Collaborative, this perspective has been brought to bear in a number of recent posts:
- Timing Matters — situates Taiwan’s role in the global supply chain for microchips and other advanced ICT products
- U.S./China Tech De-Coupling: 4 Levels of Risk — assesses the Trump Administration’s fitful tech policy toward China
- Fiddling Around with U.S.-China Tech – brings perspectives from the boardroom, the cultural sidelines and from history in reviewing Trump Administration tech policy toward China
- TikTok Endgame Against the Timeclock – surveys tensions between the U.S. and China as relates to social media companies in general and TikTok in particular
- Taiwan Straddles U.S.-China Microchip Supply Chain Fault-line – takes a sounding of Taiwan’s position as supplier of 40% of the world’s chips and 80% of the world’s most advanced chips
- 21st C. Tech Tug-of-War between China and the U.S. – takes a look at what it will take for the U.S. to compete more effectively against China to retain tech preeminence in the 21st century
This are representative of the most consequential questions and challenges underlying U.S.-China relations at the present moment. They are at the core of the whole-of-government policy review towards China now being coordinated by Kurt Campbell and the National Security Council. Ironically, these issues were dismissed by the American Enterprise Institute when Ambassador Jim Lilley introduced me to AEI for a day-long series of interviews preparatory to a possible appointment back in 2002. AEI’s conclusion at the end of the day as their senior leadership explained their decision not to make an offer? These were all questions which the free market would sort out and there’s no role for AEI or policy makers to play. Ideologically consistent perhaps but hardly prescient.
“We are in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” Biden said on April 28th. “We are at a great inflection point in history. We have to do more than just build back better. … We have to compete more strenuously.”
The question we are examining today is what does “compete more strenuously mean.” I’ll be identifying four distinct fields in which heightened competition is likely to come to the fore but first some context and disclaimers.
The first point to note is that, in President Biden’s own words, some partial answers are already clear. Biden has made clear that he sees this 21st century competition as one between the US and its democratic allies on the one side versus Xi, Putin and other autocratic leaders on the other side. in other words, the heart of the competition is democracy versus autocracy. What Biden has also made clear involves timing, that the competition will not be joined in earnest until the U.S. has emerged from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and largely revitalized the performance of the U.S. domestic economy.
Two caveats are also in order. The analysis provided below is strictly my own. The Biden administration – under Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant to the President and coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the National Security Council — is currently directing an assessment under which cabinet-level departments and some agencies are re-viewing their policies and procedures as they relate to China. These departments and agencies will be reporting their findings to the White House later this year at which point Kurt Campell, his senior director for China Laura Rosenberger, and their staff will be synthesizing these inputs and articulating an updated “whole of government” policy towards China. (This process is consistent with the ‘get our house in order now’ before focusing on generational competition with China, as referenced above.) Clear answers to the question we’re examining today likely won’t be rolled out by the Administration until that process is complete.
In the meantime, the single best open-source for a quasi-authoritative readout of Biden’s thinking on what heightened US- China technology competition will look like may be the Penn Biden Center. While I am affiliated with Fox Leadership International under the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn, I want to make clear that this blog post does not draw on any information from that source. This is my analysis and I bear sole responsibility for any deficiencies.
So, on to the substance …
At the broadest level, the U.S. needs to up its game in four areas of traditional strength to respond more effectively to the 21st century tech challenge from China:
Field 1: Industry Sector Focus
NASA’s manned mission to the moon and DARPA’s role in the creation of the internet are the most storied examples of U.S. Government success in mid-wiving new high technology industries. What has changed since those early post-war successes is the subsequently accelerated pace of technology innovation and development in the Fourth Industrial Age. In fields as diverse as semiconductor design and fabrication, 5G telecommunications, artificial intelligence and robotics, quantum computing, EV batteries and biotechnology, U.S. government policy is currently nowhere near as focused in positioning its support role as is China. What is called for is not a return to 20th century “industrial policy” (and its poor record of picking company-level winners and losers) but a new, 21st century approach to policy support to better prepare eco-system support for the emergence of entire new industries.
Field 2: Funding for Innovation & Regulation of Foreign Acquisitions
Despite the recent trend-line of falling investment in basic research in the U.S. and increasing levels of basic research investment in China, the fact remains that China is still no match for the U.S. in terms of the breadth, depth and quality of its basic research or of the commercial potential of the developments it spins off. This is readily apparent in cutting-edge fields like advanced semiconductor design and gene therapy. In these fields, China can’t put a home-grown team onto the field but instead tries to snap up foreign talent and fledgling foreign companies in hit-or-miss hopes of leveraging that into a domestic breakthrough. Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) and other related government entities need more focus on the dynamics underpinning tomorrow’s industries and less on yesterday’s. Likewise, less silo-ing between basic research and commercial development is urgently needed.
Level 3: Rule of Law
Perhaps no societal field offers greater contrast between the U.S. and China than the field of law and legal practice. The U.S. system of case law based on precedent stretches back to the time of the Saxon Kings of England (with very occasional admixtures from the Roman system of law more common to Continental Europe). As enshrined in the U.S. constitution, ours is the rule of law, not the rule of men (or women). While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has borrowed legal ‘parts’ from a wide variety of sources since 1949, the legal system it has assembled from those parts is principally designed to serve the interests of the governing party rather than to protect inherent rights of its citizens or its private companies. It is rule by law, rather than rule of law, as was vividly demonstrated with the imposition of the new security law in Hong Kong in the summer of 2020. Despite the slowness and costs associated with it, the U.S. legal system provides a level of predictability and protection for investors and businesspeople which can’t be matched in China. We can expect to see the Biden Administration act to shore up the foundations of this legal system following the strains put on it by the previous administration.
Level 4: Wellsprings of Economic Vitality
Two of the deepest sources of support and revitalization for technology innovation in the U.S. are immigration and our capital markets. Immigration brings a steady stream not only of young and eager workers but also on occasion transformational business talent such as Sergey Brin and Elon Musk. Our capital markets spread risk over a broad pool of investors and investment vehicles, incentivize iconoclastic thinking and efficiently channel capital to the points of likely greatest return. While China has through its tax policy been impressively building an investment-led structure for its markets, the efficiency and speed of execution of the U.S. capital markets can’t be matched in China. In broad view, China currently tries to leverage its centralized leadership and ‘command economy’ model to try to neutralize this U.S. advantage as well as hoping to ride the momentum from its high-growth domestic macro-development over the last four decades (and the internationalization of that development model over the last ten years). How China fares in field of competition in the years ahead as it emerges from its fast-growth phase of development and collides with a dire demographic imbalance will be one of the more consequential questions of the early 21st century.
Editorial Note: Upcoming posts in the TEA Collaboratives T-series on technology topics will pick up and expand on some of the topics identified above. Our focus in this Technology Competition sub-series will mostly fall under the industry and innovation topics identified above but we will also have occasional invited guest experts to delve more deeplly the legal and capital markets topics. Also, it’s important to note explicitly that the viewpoint expressed in this post and other future posts in the series are obviously a perspective from the U.S.-side. We will present the ‘emic’ view (as seen through the eyes of Chinese government planners and officials) separately through our A-series (Ambitions) posts which appear on Fridays.
As a final note, the Technology Competition sub-series posts introduced in today’s post will alternate on Mondays with our TECH-tonics sub-series posts (which focuses exclusively on issues associated with the micro-electronic supply chain fault-line between the U.S. and China passing through Taiwan). In any given month, we’ll be producing in alternating fashion two posts in the TECHtonics and and two poss in the Tech Competition sub-series.
On June 8th, the Biden Administration announced immediate actions it was taking to address near-term vulnerabilities in four critical supply chains as identified by a 100-day America’s Supply Chains assessment initiated in late February. The four critical supply chains included in this announcement are: semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging; large capacity batteries, like those for electric vehicles; critical minerals and materials (so-called “rare earths”) used in smart phones, electric vehicles, wind turbines and other advanced technologies; and pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used in vaccines and other applications.
Today’s post takes an initial high-level view of the critical supply chain for semiconductor manufacturing and examines the shifting fault-line of vulnerability. Subsequent posts in the Global TECHtonics series will take a much closer look at these and related issues.
Photo: barks/Adobe Stock
What is the Fault-line?
The semiconductor supply chain fault-line runs directly under Taiwan, whose chip foundries produce 92% of the world’s most advanced microchips (which have transistors less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair). The small island is caught between the tectonic forces of the China market (which accounts for 53% of global semiconductor consumption and the U.S. market (which accounts for the vast majority of the advanced designs on which Taiwan chip production is based). In addition to these market forces, political dynamics add to the stresses along this fault-line. While China claims Taiwan as an inalienable part of its territory, the U.S. has been serving as the guarantor of Taiwan’s de facto independence since 1949. In more recent years, the Trump Administration’s “Tariff War” against China has given impetus to a process of technology “de-coupling” which is forcing Taiwan companies – especially its preeminent foundry manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – to choose between the fast-growing China market (34% revenue growth since 2014) and its slower growing (4% growth) but highly strategic U.S. customers, including the U.S. military. The fact, for instance, that 14 of TSMC’s 17 foundries worldwide (and all of its foundries capable of higher-end production above the 16 nanometer level) are located in Taiwan at a distance of just 90 miles from the PRC mainland adds to the tectonic friction.
What is the Trend-line?
Subsequent posts in the Global TECHtonic series (approximately two per month) will examine a broad range of dynamics in detail to include the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global microchip supply chains, specific dynamics within microchip subproduct categories (logic chips, analog chips, memory chips, etc), TSMC’s strategic response to the increasing global pressure and detailed analysis of trends within the U.S. semiconductor industry. Today’s post will limit itself to two broad brush-strokes to suggest the general trend-line: (1) the twenty-year trend-line since 2001 and (2) the one-year trend-line since 2020.
- The accession of China and Taiwan to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 led to hopes that Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) supply chain tensions might start easing but, from 2008 at least, the opposite has proved true. Following the Global Financial Crisis, market forces and competitive tensions increased pressures on ICT supply chains markedly and these pressures further accelerated starting in 2012 following the 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress in 2012. (Readers interested in a deeper understanding of the ICT supply chain dynamics covering the period 2001-2008 can refer to Congressional Commission testimony I provided during the 107th, 108th and 109th Sessions of Congress as well as to my article in the edited volume Economic Integration, Democratization and National Security in East Asia (Peter Chow, Elgar Publishing) and my article in The Journal of Contemporary China (Volume 13, Number 40, 2006).
- The past year has shown some notable shifts along this fault-line. In Taiwan, policies instituted by President Tsai Ing-wen have led to a small shift in Taiwan’s trading dependence on China and to larger shifts in the pattern of outbound and inbound investment involving China. Specifically, the Tsai Administration’s New Southbound Policy has shifted a small portion of Taiwan’s trade in consumer electronics away from China in favor of Southeast Asian markets. More notably, the “Invest Taiwan” program has exceeded its targets and much of the reinvestment in Taiwan comes as a result of production being repatriated from the mainland. As for outbound investment from Taiwan in ICT sectors, recent trends favor the U.S. as a destination rather than China. In March 2020, TSMC announced that it would be building a $12 billion microchip production plant in Arizona. Meanwhile, tighter regulations by Taiwan’s Investment Commission has led to a 60% drop in outbound investment to the mainland since 2018.
It is for these and other reasons that the New York Times recently proclaimed “pound for pound, Taiwan is the most important place in the world.” The Strait of Hormuz may have been the world’s most dangerous fault-line in the 20th century oil economy. In the 21st century, the tectonic pressures of the global economy now converge on the Strait of Taiwan.
On May 27th speaking at the annual Stanford University Oksenberg Conference, Kurt Campbell, Biden’s National Security Council Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs, delineated the new ‘continental divide’ in U.S.-China Relations.
The period in U.S. policy toward China that was broadly described as ‘engagement’ has come to an end, said Dr. Kurt M. Campbell, deputy assistant to the President and coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs at the National Security Council, speaking at Shorenstein APARC’s 2021 Oksenberg Conference. “The dominant paradigm is going to be competition. Our goal is to make that a stable, peaceful competition that brings out the best of us,” he added.
This low-key pronouncement is attention-grabbing for several fundamental reasons: (1) it marks the end of a 39-year bipartisan effort to encourage China to become, through a concerted program of cooperative outreach, a “responsible stakeholder” in the post-WWII liberal democratic world order and (2) the epitapth was delivered by one of the principal architects of that cooperative program.
To back up this somewhat sweeping statement on my part, I’ll be spending the weeks ahead examining what this sea-change portends from three perspectives:
Aspirationally …
On Mondays, we’ll be looking at various aspects of what heightened competition with China will look like for the Biden Administration in the tech sphere. This will include high-level perspectives of competition in artificial intelligence and robotics; sourcing of rare earths needed for smart phones, electric vehicles and other high-tech products; 5G build-out in domestic and international markets; quantum computing competition; the Great Firewall of China as an export product to Belt & Road partners countries; and social media platforms and data privacy issues. But most saliently, we’ll be looking in-depth at global supply chains in microelectronics and the fraught issue that 40% of the world’s microchip production — and 80% of its high-performance products — are produced in Taiwan at a distance of only 90 miles from the PRC mainland.
On Wednesdays, we’ll be examining the fields of energy and environment where cooperation still rules the day under Cabinet-level John Kerry’s aegis but where cooperation is shifting from a government-to-government level to a more market-based model of comparative advantage cooperation.
On Fridays, we’ll be examining what these changes look like from the Chinese perspective. Our sources for this perspective — what cultural anthropologists call the emic (in-group) view as opposed to the etic (outside observer) view — will include macro-perspectives such as the Five Year Plans, primary-source research findings provided by my UPenn masters-level students, and also micro-perspectives such as interviews and insights gleaned from business people operating on the ground in China.
My heart-felt thanks go out to the many subscribers who have been with me on the journey to date. I look forward to welcoming hopefully many others choosing to subscribe to the blog for this next leg of the journey.
______Assessing China / The TEA Collaborative______ 
