[alephnerd]

Taiwan added similar ToT clauses when they backed TSMC, UMC, PSMC, and others back in the 1980s-2000s.

Intel is absolutely lobbying for this to hamper TSMC, but Taiwan's industrial policy ain't a saint either. At least this spurs some amount of Capex spending in the US.

[fritzo]

Agreed. I learned much from Joe Studwell's book "How Asia Works" (2013), where he argues that among countries in the Asian region, those whose economies flourished were those with protectionist trade policies and export discipline, leading to the creation and honing of domestic industry.

[alephnerd]

It's more prosaic than that. It's just helping local donors and closely aligned businesses.

A lot of the "ministerial advice" story (the uber powerful ITRI, METI, etc) is to a certain extent a rewriting of history. A major reason why these bureaucratic orgs were so successful in Asian countries was explicitly because of the revolving door - after your 20 year stint at ITRI or METI, you'd join as an advisor for one of the affected companies or start your own consultancy.

This isn't to say that they made bad choices (they didn't), but it absolutely was done due to collusion between regulators and businesses.

The Trump-era "politician aligned businessman" model is the norm across Asia - it's a major reason why Morris Chang lobbied against the CHIPS act, Hyundai lobbied against easing automotive tariffs, Tata lobbied for 5% sales tax on EVs but 25% sales tax on Hybrids and 50% on ICE, etc.

The Asian Model of Development is predicated on "Access Money" to use Yuen Yuen Ang's typography of corruption.

[gessha]

> it's a major reason why Morris Chang lobbied against the CHIPS act, Hyundai lobbied against easing automotive tariffs, Tata lobbied for 5% sales tax on EVs but 25% sales tax on Hybrids and 50% on ICE, etc.

Could you provide citations for some of the above? I’m interested in reading more about them.

[alephnerd]

> Could you provide citations for some of the above? I’m interested in reading more about them

Sure. These are some off the top of my head, but I can get some more substantive stuff later

Morris Chang - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/14/taiwan-tech-king-pe...

The development of Korea's Automotive Industry - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1984/10/07/s...

Tata's lobbying - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tata-m...

[SecretDreams]

Yeah. TSMC is the best right now. But they achieved that for a variety of reasons, including a very supportive Taiwanese government. The other major reason was Apple really saved their ass when they moved over from Samsung. The third reason is Intel really did fuck up under the Brian years.