![]() And, like an asteroid, it could hit anytime and destroy everything. So as not to mention either country by name-or are they one?-Taiwanese newspapers often euphemize Beijing’s bellicosity toward the island as “cross-strait tensions.” The language spoken on both sides of the strait-an internal waterway? international waters?-is known only as “Mandarin.” The longer the threat is unnamed, the more it comes to seem like an asteroid, irrational and insensate. The threat from across the 110-mile-wide strait to the west of the foundries menaces Taiwan every second of every day. Of course, now that I’m on the bullet train to Hsinchu, I realize that the precise hazard against which the Sacred Mountain offers protection is not to be uttered. The company also has the world’s biggest logic chip manufacturing capacity and produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world’s most avant-garde chips-the ones inside the nuclear weapons, planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles on which the international balance of hard power is predicated. In 2020 it quietly joined the world’s 10 most valuable companies. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.īy revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. ![]() The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan-and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. I arrive in Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |