For several months, Taiwan has become the new hot spot of global geopolitics. Coveted by an increasingly threatening China, the island is the subject of a documentary broadcast on Sunday on France 5.
“Attacking Taiwan would create a global economic crisis arguably far more serious than that created by the war in Ukraine.” The warning is clear. It is signed Joseph Wu, Taiwanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a documentary broadcast Sunday, May 7 on France 5 *. And this while tensions between this archipelago of nearly 24 million inhabitants and China are dangerously escalating, raising the possibility of a serious conflict. Taiwan, forbidden nation, carried out by Wandrille Lanos, retraces the painful history of this island, details the pressure that the Chinese State exerts on Taiwan in order to annex it and reveals how this State tries to use the excellence of its technology as a bulwark against its reunification with the middle Empire.
For months, an incessant ballet of Chinese warplanes and warships has been circling dangerously around Taiwan, in order to intimidate this island which clings fiercely to its independence, while China has coveted it since 1949. At the time, the Communists led by Mao Zedong overthrow the government of the nationalist Kuomintang party, seize power in Beijing and proclaim the People’s Republic of China. The executive, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, Mao’s great rival, went into exile on the island of Taiwan and set up the Republic of China there, with the support of the United States. The break with Beijing is consummated.
More than seventy years later, the The desire for reunification is expressed loud and clear by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has never made it a secret that annexing this Pacific island was fundamental for him in order to restore China’s full sovereignty and territorial integrity. But this ambition for hegemonic power has come up against Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen since 2016, who is very close to the United States, which is why Chinese military maneuvers are intensifying around the archipelago.
A supremacy born in the early 1980s
The independence that the Taiwanese hope to maintain is based on a powerful weapon: their monopoly in the manufacture of electronic chips that make the hearts of computers, telephones, cars, weapons, planes, trains, microwave… “Taiwan plays a very important role in the global economy. We produce 60% of the chips for computers around the world. And in the case of the latest generation semiconductors, we produce 90%,” says Joseph Wu.
A rather recent supremacy in this field since it was only at the beginning of the 1980s that the archipelago launched into the manufacture of microprocessors. “Fifty years ago, we didn’t make them in Taiwan, confides in the documentary Wu Chih-i, vice president of research for industrial technology in Taipei. So we needed the support of foreign countries. We looked for partners to transfer technology and that was the start of this industry. After that, we were able to develop our own technology, recruit engineers and research teams, locally here in Taiwan.”
An economically unmissable island
The government of the time then had a park built, a few kilometers from the Taiwanese capital, on the model of the American Silicon Valley and, in a few years, the island became the world leader in the manufacture of semiconductors. A value that has become strategic to exist on the international scene. The shortage of these materials at the time of the Covid-19 epidemic had weakened industries around the world and pushed certain countries, aware of their too much dependence on Taiwan, to launch their own production. But the expertise of the Taiwanese in this field is so sharp that it remains predominant compared to other nations. If China were to invade Taiwan by force, it would inevitably affect the production of these electronic chips, on which the Celestial Empire is also dependent, and would destabilize the world economy in the long term.
* The documentary Taiwan, forbidden nation, carried out by Wandrille Lanos, is broadcast on Sunday May 7 on France 5 at 8:55 p.m. and on france.tv.