Another view...
... Former US President Donald Trump raised eyebrows last week when he accused Taiwan of snatching America's crown in the $500 billion business of making computer chips.
In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, the Republican presidential nominee repeated his assertion, first made last year, that the island democracy and US ally had taken "almost 100%" of the industry from the United States. "We should have never let that happen," he added.
Except, it didn't. Industry experts tell CNN that, far from stealing, Taiwan grew its own semiconductor industry organically through a combination of foresight, hard work and investment.
School children on the island know that the father of its world-beating chips sector is Morris Chang, a 93-year-old Chinese-born American, who started Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) in 1987 at age 55 after a long career working with semiconductors in the US.
At the time, the industry leaders were Intel (INTC), Motorola (MSI) and Texas Instruments (TXN), where Chang had previously worked. But in starting TSMC (TSM), Chang had an entirely different business model in mind, which was completely revolutionary at the time.
"We had no strength in research and development, or very little anyway. We had no strength in circuit design," he recalled in a 2007 oral history project recorded for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
"We had little strength in sales and marketing, and we had almost no strength in intellectual property. The only possible strength that Taiwan had, and even that was a potential one, not an obvious one, was semiconductor manufacturing," he said. ...