Ambassador Alexander Yui appeared on NewsNation’s political program CUOMO on the evening of May 21 for an interview with renowned host Chris Cuomo. During the interview, Ambassador Yui emphasized that the so-called “Taiwan problem” is not caused by Taiwan, but by China’s attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. President Lai Ching-te has also recently reaffirmed that Taiwan remains firmly committed to maintaining the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and has no intention of changing it. Meanwhile, China is undertaking the largest peacetime military buildup in history, and although facing no imminent threats, they nevertheless have the second largest armed forces and the largest navy in the world. It is plain that its strategic ambitions extend far beyond Taiwan.
On the other hand, as the U.S. addresses efforts to promote reindustrialization, Ambassador Yui stated that Taiwan is not the problem, but the solution. Taiwan is the world’s main source of advance semiconductor manufacturing, and U.S. companies such as AMD, NVIDIA, Apple, Qualcomm are TSMC’s main clients, and they're certainly not buying “stolen” chips, but ones that were technologically transferred to Taiwan! Over the past 12 years, Taiwan’s investment in China as a share of its overall outbound investment has fallen from approximately 85% to about 3%. In contrast, the United States has become Taiwan’s largest overseas investment destination, accounting for more than 40% of Taiwan’s outbound investment. Ambassador Yui stressed that Taiwan's increased investment to the U.S. is not a zero-sum game, as it won’t hollow out Taiwan’s manufacturing, but is rather a process of diversification and deeper cooperation aimed at strengthening the stability and resilience of global technology supply chains.
Ambassador Yui further used the McDonald’s franchise model as an analogy, explaining that a franchise system does not weaken the core business; instead, it helps expand and strengthen the industry as a whole. Particularly with the rapid growth of the AI sector, global demand for advanced semiconductors continues to outpace supply.
