The Daily Populous Friday August 30th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by focustaiwan.tw and submitted by riambel

To activate the text-to-speech service, please first agree to the privacy policy below.

Taipei, Aug. 29 (CNA) The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Thursday warned that China was stepping up its efforts to poach Taiwan's high-tech talent and steal its core technologies, as evidenced by a recent increase in the number of such cases.

Taiwan's development is based on technology, which means it is extremely important that the country maintains its technological strength and edge, MAC deputy head and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a press conference.

"The poaching of our high-tech talent has always been a major concern for us," Liang said, adding that three cases related to such actions were prosecuted last week in Taiwan.

The incidence of three such cases in one week is an indication that the efforts by Chinese enterprises to poach Taiwan's high-tech talent are growing, he said.

Liang's remarks followed a press statement by MAC on Wednesday, which said that China may ramp up its efforts to poach talent from Taiwan and steal its core technologies, amid increasingly strained economic and trade relations between China and Western countries.

"Taiwan should avoid becoming a weak link in the democratic camp's technology and talent outflow," the statement read.

On Thursday, LUXSHARE-ICT Co., Ltd., which has a Chinese parent company, was cited by Liang as one of the Taiwanese companies involved in those three prosecuted cases last week.

The charges against the company included conspiring with two former employees of TDK TAIWAN Corp., a Taiwan subsidiary of a Japanese electronics enterprise, to carry out actions in violation of Taiwan's Trade Secrets Act, according to the Taoyuan District Prosecutors Office.

The two former TDK TAIWAN employees, surnamed Wu (吳) and Huang (黃), had been working in research and development and they illegally reproduced and leaked the company's core technologies to LUXSHARE-ICT's Chinese parent company around the time they were leaving their jobs in 2020, the prosecutors' office said in a press statement.

Wu and Huang breached their confidentiality obligations to TDK TAIWAN in pursuit of higher salaries at LUXSHARE-ICT after being recruited by the chairman of LUXSHARE-ICT's Chinese parent company to establish a research and development team in Taiwan, the release said.

Their acts of industrial espionage resulted in economic losses of at least NT$12.3 billion (US$385 million) for TDK TAIWAN, the prosecutors' office said, calling for heavy sentences against them.

normasueandbettytoo on August 30th, 2024 at 12:52 UTC »

Don't literally all countries try to do this? I can't think of a single country that does not offer incentives to highly talented immigrants.

vhu9644 on August 30th, 2024 at 05:41 UTC »

China has been doing this for ages because... guess what, it's easy to entice people who speak the same language, have largely the same culture, and may have familial ties in your country. From my experience (from family in both countries) the largest concern isn't democracy vs autocracy, it's standard of living, supporting their family, and making sure their descendants can live a good life - not at all unlike those of us in the west. Banging people on the head about "CCP Autocracy" only works to an extent, because most people have concrete worries that superseded their abstract ones.

They've already done this with TSMC before. China isn't lacking in talent, it's lacking in infrastructure. In the U.S., we can iterate on designs way faster than China can wrt to the things we are ahead in. China knows this, the people doing research know this.

Research is a lottery. You get smart people trying a lot of things that don't work. To win you need either more tries or better tries. China and the U.S. already produce top level talent (so their tries are almost as good as it gets). So what do you do? You make sure your people get more tries.

randCN on August 30th, 2024 at 05:35 UTC »

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/taiwan-bans-recruiters-from-posting-jobs-in-china-as-it-tries-to-stop-semiconductor-staff-departures/

Has been for ages. It's just too easy for an engineer to pick up a job in China where they're paid somewhere closer to what they're worth. Essentially no language or cultural barriers to excel across the strait.

https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/sulof6/tsmc_employees_to_receive_an_average_of_nt1249/

This has always baffled me about the whole situation - the engineers of TSMC are some of the most valuable people in the world. So why the hell are they paid so little?

I think for a start, TSMC should pay their engineers more. That'd probably help.