Biden says US would respond ‘militarily’ if China attacked Taiwan, but White House insists there’s no policy change

The White House quickly downplayed the comments, saying they don’t reflect a change in US policy. It’s the third time in recent months – including during a CNN town hall in October – that Biden has said the US would protect Taiwan from a Chinese attack, only to have the White House walk back those remarks.

@StephaneLagarde
Pékin désormais en tête pour les nouveaux cas de contamination en #Chine. 83 personnes positives sont rapportées pour la journée de dimanche. #Covid19
 

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company said Thursday it was planning to invest $100 billion over the next three years to meet soaring demand as a global shortage of chips hits the auto and other industries.

The announcement came after US chip titan Intel unveiled plans last week to spend $20 billion building two new plants in Arizona as part of a plan to boost production at home and in Europe.

Summary
TSMC's overall capacity is 2.3 times greater than Samsung, and it holds a 2.5 times advantage in revenue.
At the 7nm node, TSMC's capacity is 3.5 times greater and 4 times greater at the 5nm node than Samsung.
While Samsung won't close the capacity gap despite large capex increases, it's using advanced logic architectures to close the technology gap.
Samsung sports fewer customers due to the fact that 60% of its capacity goes to production of ICs for its smartphones, primarily its Exynos processor.

Table 1 shows total capacity for all nodes for TSMC and Samsung's foundry sector. On the positive side, that ratio of TSMC’s capacity has dropped to 2.3X 2021 from 3.3X in 2016.Data in Table 1 show that TSMC is far ahead of Samsung in terms of capacity, but the spread is slightly decreasing

Table 3 shows capacity node for 7nm and lower nodes for TSMC and Samsung. Capacity for TSMC was about 5-6 times greater at the 7nm node in 2019 and 2020 and 3.5 times greater forecasted for 2021. At the 5nm node, TSMC’s capacity is about four times greater.

Samsung is one generation behind TSMC, which is expected to maintain that lead at 5nm and 3nm.

An EUV system gap was the catalyst for TSMC’s generational lead over Samsung. Through 2020, Samsung Electronics purchased a total of 25 EUV lithography systems and TSMC about 50.

In the near term, there are several mitigating factors that will maintain this gap:

ASML is production limited at about 50 EUV systems per year

Hu said his son was traumatized from the event, first learning of his father's arrest from his classmates. Hu said not only was he investigated, but agents targeted his 19-year-old son as well.

"[Even] now, [my oldest son] still doesn't want to talk about my case, he doesn't want to listen to my case, because he gets so scared," said Hu. "Not only him, my second son also got impacted mentally very seriously and badly."

"Some children will not sign their last names on their homework," said Pei. "Some of the things they will not talk to their parents about, it's hard to open up... We're trying to get the children of the families [going through similar situations] to talk to each other."

"If you're prosecuted, the legal fees typically go over $1 million," said Pei, citing a recent case in Arkansas of Simon Saw-Teong Ang, where the professor, initially charged with 59 counts, "could not stand it anymore" even though the lawyer "felt strongly" that he could get all the charges dropped. The scientist pleaded guilty to a single count.

"The count is making false statements to federal agents, which is a very common fallback by the government," Pei added.

Cliff Li, a community leader in Florida who knew several professors that were prosecuted, said that the U.S. government started investigating professors of Chinese descent because it sees scientific academic exchanges as "unbalanced," and that China may "benefit more than us."

"They're trying to round up these scientists to scare them," said Li. "They're trying to say, 'You better not work with Chinese universities, even if it's legal.'"

Le sosie chinois d’Elon Musk banni des réseaux sociaux

C’est ainsi que trois jours après que Twitter a accepté l’offre de rachat d’Elon Musk, Yilong Ma s’est empressé de réagir à la nouvelle. Sur une vidéo disponible sur son compte TikTok, on le voit debout près d’une voiture dans un champ. Il tient un logo de Twitter imprimé sur du papier sur lequel on peut lire “Mon oiseau”. La légende complète le message, “C’est un oiseau libre. Je l’aime bien et je vais aller le voir tout de suite. Parce qu’Elon Musk est mon frère”.
 
Mais aujourd’hui, les autorités ont interdit les comptes du sosie d’Elon Musk sur les médias sociaux chinois. De même, ses messages sur Weibo ont tous été supprimés, sauf trois. “L’utilisateur est actuellement exclu pour avoir violé la convention de la communauté” affirme Weibo. Enfin, son compte Douyin, la version chinoise de TikTok a également disparu, sans explication.

Ces échanges entre les deux hommes n’ont pas fait rire Pékin. C’est ainsi que les comptes de Yilan Ma sur les versions chinoises de TikTok et Twitter, ont été suspendus. Selon les explications, il s’agit d’une réponse à une “violation des politiques de la plateforme”.

Thousands of photographs from the heart of China’s highly secretive system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang, as well as a shoot-to-kill policy for those who try to escape, are among a huge cache of data hacked from police computer servers in the region.  
 
The Xinjiang Police Files, as they’re being called, were passed to the BBC earlier this year. After a months-long effort to investigate and authenticate them, they can be shown to offer significant new insights into the internment of the region’s Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.

The cache reveals, in unprecedented detail, China’s use of “re-education” camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs - and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both.

The documents provide some of the strongest evidence to date for a policy targeting almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic faith - and of a chain of command running all the way up to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
 
The hacked files contain more than 5,000 police photographs of Uyghurs taken between January and July 2018.
 
Using other accompanying data, at least 2,884 of them can be shown to have been detained.
 
And for those listed as being in a re-education camp, there are signs that they are not the willing “students” China has long-claimed them to be.

Documents describe her son as having “strong religious leanings” because he doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke. As a result, he was jailed for 10 years on terrorism charges.

The Xinjiang Police Files - the title being used for the cache by a consortium of international journalists of which the BBC is part - contain tens of thousands of images and documents.
 
They include classified speeches by senior officials; internal police manuals and personnel information; the internment details for more than 20,000 Uyghurs; and photographs from highly sensitive locations.

Dr Zenz has written a peer-reviewed paper on the Xinjiang Police Files for the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies and he has placed the full set of detainee images and some of the other evidence online.
 
“The material is unredacted, it's raw, it's unmitigated, it's diverse. We have everything,” he told the BBC.  
 
“We have confidential documents. We have speech transcripts where leaders freely talk about what they really think. We have spreadsheets. We have images. It's completely unprecedented and it blows apart the Chinese propaganda veneer.”