Taiwan rejects Trump's claim it 'stole' U.S. chip industry

Taipei, May 21 (CNA) The Cabinet on Thursday said that Taiwan's semiconductor industry is "the result of long and painstaking independent development by local companies," rejecting claims of theft by U.S. President Donald Trump.

"They stole our chip industry ... We lost our chip industry," Trump said again in an interview with Fox News during his visit to Beijing last week.

He also blamed the decline of the U.S. semiconductor industry on his predecessors' failure to impose tariffs of as much as 200 percent on semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan.

Executive Yuan spokesperson Michelle Lee (李慧芝) rejected Trump's comments at a weekly news conference, saying "Taiwan supplies semiconductors to countries around the world."

"It would not have achieved this level of competitiveness if it had relied on illegitimate means," she said.

Lee added that Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) explained to the U.S. negotiators during tariff talks that Taiwan's semiconductor industry was the product of decades of development.

Separately on Thursday, Executive Yuan Secretary-General Xavier Chang (張惇涵) said "Taiwan did not steal chips from the world. It supplies them to the world," when questioned by Kuomintang Legislator Hung Mong-kai (洪孟楷) in the Legislature.

Chang said the technologies developed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) were the result of three decades of refinement following a technology transfer agreement between Taiwan and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

The remarks by the Cabinet officials came a day after Taiwanese tech mogul Robert Tsao (曹興誠), founder of United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), urged Taiwan's government to respond to Trump's claims.

Tsao said Trump's accusations could have serious implications because they constituted a diplomatically hostile gesture and were being used by Trump to justify efforts to pressure Taiwanese chipmakers to establish production facilities in the United States.

He urged the Executive Yuan, ITRI and TSMC to hold a press conference detailing the origins of Taiwan's semiconductor technology and the decades of investment and R&D that had gone into building the industry to "set the record straight."

In a social media post, Tsao noted Taiwan's chipmaking expertise originated from a US$3.5 million technology transfer agreement with RCA in 1976, under which the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) acquired 7-micrometer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) manufacturing technology.