《TAIPEI TIMES》Taiwan is important US chip partner: academics

By Liu Tzu-hsuan / Staff reporter

Taiwan is a crucial partner to the US in the semiconductor industry, US academics said in an article published on Monday in US magazine Foreign Affairs.

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Hoover Institution fellows Larry Diamond and Jim Ellis, and Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, discussed in the article how to strengthen the semiconductor supply chain without endangering Taiwan.

The US needs reliable international partners to enhance its chances of prevailing in the economic, technological and strategic competition with China, the authors said.

“No partner is more important in this effort than Taiwan,” with whom the US can work to reconfigure and strengthen its semiconductor supply chain, they wrote.

The US needs to forge a cooperative strategy to pursue two objectives simultaneously without undermining each other — safeguarding the security of global supply chains for semiconductors and ensuring Taiwan’s security, they wrote.

The US and Taiwan can both benefit from the bilateral partnership on this front, as the US needs investment from Taiwan to expand semiconductor manufacturing on its soil while Taiwan needs the security assistance of the US to protect both its semiconductor industry and its democracy, they wrote.

A treaty precluding double taxation and a free-trade agreement would further help to enhance economic and technological ties between the US and Taiwan, they added.

The authors also reiterated the importance for the US to deliver effective weaponry to Taiwan, “especially the kind of mobile weaponry that can help turn Taiwan into a ‘porcupine’ that the People’s Liberation Army would be unable to swallow.”

In related news, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday reaffirmed the nation’s close economic and trade relations with the US after former US president Donald Trump accused Taiwan of taking chip business away from the US.

In an interview on Fox News that was aired on Sunday, Trump was asked if the US should help defend Taiwan if it means going to war with China.

“If I answered that question, it’ll put me in a very bad negotiating position,” Trump said. “Taiwan [is] smart, brilliant, they took our business away. We should have stopped them. We should have taxed them. We should have tariffed them.”

In Taipei, ministry spokesman Jeff Liu （劉永健） told a news conference yesterday that “Taiwan cooperates and exchanges closely with the US, and the economic, trade and industrial structures of the two sides are complementary and mutually beneficial.”

Asked by reporters at the Legislative Yuan about the issue yesterday, Premier Chen Chien-jen （陳建仁） said that Taiwan has good relations with the US executive branch, as well as the two major parties in the US Congress.

Additional reporting by CNA

新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES